Today In Both Sides Do It: Creaky Like a Rose

Long ago, long before cable, I used to watch Charlie Rose semi-regularly.  He had on Alice Walker and Quentin Tarantino, which was fine.  He fawned over Tom Friedman and David Brooks, which made my gorge buoyant.  And once the Age of Bush began in earnest, his Beltway Establishmentarian After Dark schtick went dead stale fast and he has been slowly doddering towards moldering, Halperinesque irrelevance since.

Here is an excellent example of why (from, god help me, the Daily Caller):

Charlie Rose Takes Hillary Clinton To Task For ‘Attacking’ Republicans

CBS’s Charlie Rose took Hillary Clinton to task for “attacking” Republicans when she blamed them for the gridlock in Washington.

Tuesday on “CBS This Morning,” Rose said, “A lot of people think the biggest problem for America is Washington. That’s the problem. That’s partly reflected in some of the politics that we see.”

Clinton insisted, “Well, yes that’s true but look at the way our founders set it up. They set up this separation of powers and they made it really difficult to get things done. And some years it’s really hard. And we’re in one of these periods where we have a minority within the other party that doesn’t believe in compromise, doesn’t believe in reaching consensus, they truly…”

Rose interrupted the Democratic presidential candidate, “But there you go attacking them. That’s not the way to do it.”

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Once it became bad form to speak the simple, observable truth about the GOP and once it was considered beyond the pale for a Democratic candidate for president to find fault with the GOP by pointing out this simple, observable truth during an election year, the profession of journalism was well and truly dead.