Sunday Morning Party Line

And when Chuck Todd saw the breadth of his failure he wept for there no more equivalences to falsify.

Well, not quite.

As a cardinal in the High and Holy Church of Both Siderism, it is Mr. Todd's most sacred duty to light the altar candles and speak the liturgy to Fake Centrism regardless of how patently ludicrous those rituals have become or how empty the cathedral may be.  Because Mr. Todd is not in the business of speaking truth to the masses; he is in the business of speaking fairy tales to hie fellow cardinals.  And so, this Sunday...

CHUCK TODD:  ...an issue I've been spending quite a bit of time on: how the misuse of big data is destroying the American political system. Campaigns traditionally aim to win the middle, and if you won the middle, you won the election. Now campaigns are using or abusing big data to identify and mobilize like-minded voters, rather than using it to make arguments that change minds. So how bad has this polarization gotten in the last twenty years?

According to Pew, in 1994 there was a good deal of ideological overlap between the two parties. Thirty six percent of Republican voters were more liberal than the typical Democrat, and thirty percent of Democrats were more conservative than the typical Republican.

Today, no longer the case. In 2014, just eight percent of Republicans, six percent of Democrats, were more liberal or conservative than the members of the opposite party. And guess what? We've seen the same shift among our elected officials. Based on a National Journal analysis of voting records, in 2002 there were 137 House members who fell in the ideological middle ground. With voting records somewhere between the most conservative Democrat and the most liberal Republican. In 2013 that number was down to four. Let's go to the Senate. 2002 there were seven members in that middle ground. 2013? Zero...

Wow.

Notice how Chuckles very gingerly skips right on over the terribly inconvenient fact that, in 1994, the GOP very openly and publicly turned the keys to the Party of Lincoln over to Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich.  Skips right on past the fact that the template for all future Republican treachery and disaster -- government shutdowns, lockstep opposition and sabotage, using Congress to conduct openly partisan witch-hunts to cripple a Democratic president, the mainstreaming of language and tactics Hate Radio crackpots and openly seditious conspiracy theories -- was all laid down during the "bipartisan" 1990s for which Chuckles now pines.

Republicans Get a Pep Talk From Rush Limbaugh

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE,

Published: December 12, 1994

BALTIMORE, Dec. 10— To all the advice for the new Republicans coming to Congress, add this from Rush Limbaugh: A hostile press corps lurks inside the Beltway.

"You will never ever be their friends," the talk-show host warned most of the 73 Republican freshmen at a dinner here tonight. "They don't want to be your friends. Some female reporter will come up to one of you and start batting her eyes and ask you to go to lunch. And you'll think, 'Wow! I'm only a freshman. Cokie Roberts wants to take me to lunch. I've really made it!' " The audience laughed.

"Seriously," he added. "Don't fall for this. This is not the time to get moderate. This is not the time to start trying to be liked."

The freshman class, which included not a single "femi-Nazi," one of Mr. Limbaugh's favorite epithets for supporters of women's rights, whooped and applauded, proving itself one big fan club of the man it believes was primarily responsible for the Republican avalanche in November.

Mr. Limbaugh was made an honorary member of the class as its members tonight finished a three-day orientation here sponsored by the Heritage Foundation and Empower America, two conservative Washington research organizations.

Barbara Cubin, an incoming freshman from Wyoming, told Mr. Limbaugh that because 74 percent of the nation's newspapers had endorsed Democrats, "talk radio, with you in the lead, is what turned the tide." On behalf of the women in the class, she gave him a plaque that said, "Rush Was Right." He also received a pin like the ones the freshmen wore, saying, "Majority Maker."

"Rush is as responsible for what happened here as much as anyone," said Vin Weber, a former Representative from Minnesota, now of Empower America. Citing a poll taken after the election by Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, Mr. Weber said that people who listened to 10 hours or more a week of talk radio voted Republican by a 3-to-1 margin. "Those are the people who elected the new Congress," he said...

Then, in a feat of longer jumpery not seen since the glory days of Bob Beamon, Schuck Todd literally oer'leaps the entire fucking Failed Bush Administration, and lands squarely in the middle of 2010, where Democrats are poised to screw up Schuck Todd's happy clappy bipartisan cocktail party by using "microtargeting" to ruin Murrica!  And now Republicans are doing exactly the same thing because Both Sides! (emphasis added)

CHUCK TODD:  ...So as you can see, in the last fifteen years we've seen a complete hollowing out of the political center. And this coincided with the advent of microtargeting in 2004, then advanced by team Obama, and now, of course, everybody uses it. Look, the electorate and politicians alike used to be conditioned to know that the middle mattered. That's why big deals in Washington were bipartisan. Tax reform in the eighties, welfare reform in the nineties. Flash-forward to 2010, Democrats pass health care without a single Republican vote, and right now Republicans appear poised to try to do it the same way.

But look, there is good news in this. Big data can be used to fix the very problems it helped create, as long as there is a political will to do it. The incentive structure has to change where we persuade the middle again, because then elected officials who win by persuasion suddenly want to make deals.

When we come back, how far are Democrats willing to go in opposition to President Trump? Are they ready to become the new party of no?

Of course the myth that Republicans were cruelly shut out of negotiations on the Affordable Care Act (because something something "microtargeting" apparently?) is just one more filthy Republican lie.  

You know it's a lie, I know it's a like and, yes, even Chuck Todd knows it's a lie.

But unlike you and me, Beltway creatures like Chuck Todd don't care that it's a lie.  Their sole concern is propping up their crumbling High and Holy Church of Both Siderism, and they will glom onto any Republican lie that serves that prime directive.