Wednesday, August 03, 2016

Today In Both Sides Do It: The Usual Suspects



Take a deep breath and remind yourself that every one of these yahoos has a steady job doing "journalism" and is a frequent and respected guest on America's most widely watched political/public interest teevee programs.








Honestly, I would happily accept the extinction of both political parties as long as I was guaranteed that the blast wave would also take out the Beltway media, root and branch.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Speaking of both-siderist claptrap, did you see THIS in The Atlantic earlier today?
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/the-democrats-who-cried-wolf/493928/

The Democrats Who Cried Wolf
Did liberals botch their chance to take down Trump by hyperbolically attacking past Republican nominees? Probably, though the GOP is no more innocent.

"On Tuesday, President Obama amplified the attack during remarks with the prime minister of Singapore, saying Trump is “woefully unprepared to do this job” of being president.
“What does this say about your party that this is your standard bearer?” he asked Republicans. “This isn't a situation where you have an episodic gaffe. There has to be a point in which you say, ‘This is not somebody I can support for president of the United States.’”
To which some American conservatives wearily reply: Oh, you don’t say? Jaundiced after hearing past GOP candidates described in similarly extreme terms, some conservatives feel that Democrats and liberal pundits have cried wolf, describing past Republicans with such elevated levels of alarm that warnings about Trump don’t elicit the same urgency.
Dangerously ignorant about policy and incurious about the world? That was the line on George W. Bush 16 years ago. Radical, unacceptable views about women? Said of any number of Republicans. Overrated business career? Just ask Mitt Romney about that one. (Not only was Romney’s success credited to his father’s connection, The New York Times reported,“Mr. Romney, though, never ran a corner store or a traditional business. Instead, he excelled as a deal maker,” which sounds eerily familiar.) A temperament unsuited for the Oval Office? Some said the same thing about John McCain. Fascism? MoveOn likened Bush to Adolph Hitler in 2004. Extreme positions? “He’s the most conservative nominee that they’ve had going back to Goldwater,” top Obama aide David Plouffe said of Romney in 2012.
Once you’ve already used all of these insults once before, they start to lose their sting."

Fark David Graham. Every thing said about all of those candidates was and is true. We've not been crying wolf - we've been screaming, warning that every candidate that the Republican party has put up since Dwight Eisenhower is dangerously deficient in any number of ways, and history has borne that out. Drumpf is merely the latest and happens to be the worst of all of them. What the fark is wrong with these nudniks? Driftglass, you and many others have been calling it out for years now [myself included] - the only people the Republican party has been capable of putting up for any major office have been reactionary loons and anti-intellectual morons. It's what their masters want and it's what they cravenly sell to their base.
And again, fark people like David Graham who accuse us of crying wolf when we're telling the truth for free that they're amply paid NOT to tell.

dinthebeast said...

I don't think that this is an extinction event. The fucking civil war was an extinction event, and even it failed. If things going off script disrupt your world that much, you might want to reexamine your script.

-Doug in Oakland

Jimbo said...

Feature not bug. The modern GOP is adamant that the Federal Government is THE problem. So, of course they will nominate and elect incompetents, idiots, grifters and bigots so that they can continue to undermine the ability of the government to do anything at all. That's the whole point. As for the duopoly bullshit. Yes, we can blow up the Democratic and Republican parties but Politics, like Nature, abhors a vacuum and so two new parties - let's call them the Liberal and the Conservative parties, just like they do in Europe - would be instantly formed overnight. Our system is majoritarian with three separate branches of government so you can't have a (successful) multiparty system of government. How is that these lazy dumbasses don't understand that?

RUKidding said...

Vis the Atlantic article quoted by Anonymous:

There's some vestiges of truthiness in that, as is usually the case with Both Siderist arguments. I can't be bothered to read the whole thing, but what's missing is any sort of take-down of similar slings, arrows & brickbats tossed at D-party candidates by the R-Team. And there's been plenty of that.

Recall Flip-Flopping John Kerry who was swiftboated by the same political operative (forget name) who said noted VN War Vet & multiple amputee Max Cleland "supported Osama bin Laden." I can still recall my rightwing fundie family members seething about Kerry's purple heart and demanding that he give it back.

Of course, at the RNC convention we had Ghouliani, Trump and others demanding that Clinton be jailed or even executed - with no trial of course.

The list is endless of the dirty politics played by the GOP, their handlers, enablers & paymasters. If the article mentions some these dirty tricks, then I could be somewhat mollified. But most of the time what happens is a lot blaming, shaming and finger pointing at the Ds for how they're not "playing fair," or they've overplayed their hand, or whatever other crap is ladled out.

I don't own a tv, listen to radio sparingly, and read local nooz papers selectively, so I grant I may be missing something. But while I thought the DNC convention - speaking only for myself - was a typical over the top spectacle, the slings and arrows I heard tossed at Trump were based on factual reality.

I, myself, have had some qualms about Obama - a sitting President - speaking out so plainly about Trump. But quite honestly, Trump's behavior is bizarre. My overseas friends are freaked out by how INSANE this is. I believe that Obama has been contacted by other world leaders begging Obama to DO SOMETHING.

For me, articles like the one quoted from the Atlantic are really irresponsible. Totally. But the billionaires here, I guess, find this whole shit show nothing short of hilarious, so why not stir the pot some more. Our dumbed down populace accepts that the D party is always wrong, and that somehow, no mattter what they do or how they behave, the Rs are always correct - IOKIYAR.

I'll get off my soap box now.