Today In Both Sides Do It: The Parasite-Cult

If I believed in silver bullets, the silver bullet that would finally take down the Big Lie of Both Sides Do It would look a lot like this:

Democrats:
37% support Trump's Syria strikes
38% supported Obama doing it

GOP:
86% supported Trump doing it
22% supported Obama doing pic.twitter.com/2tsaYA1SZZ

— andrew kaczynski 🤔 (@KFILE) April 11, 2017

But I do not believe in silver bullets.  Because, along with you I have watched the media Big Lie of Both Sides Do It shredded over and over again by a belt-fed, 1,200-rounds-per-minute hail of such silver bullets for the last 20 years.  More than enough by an overkill factor of a million by any objective standard to put paid to that filthy little lie once and for all.

And along with you, I have watched the media Big Lie of Both Siderism rise from the dead every time.  Shrug off wars and lost cities and economic collapses.  Shrug off ginned up political witch-hunts, and torture and Fox News.  Shrug off birtherism, death panels and the nuclear option.  Shrug it all off and accept a Pulitzer Prize for Advanced Shruggery.

Because the Big Lie of Both Sides Do It it isn't merely  a filthy little lie.  It is a massive, sprawling, multi-tentacled, inconceivably lucrative lie.  A planet-smothering, corporate vision statement of a lie.

This is why the Big Lie of Both Siderism cannot be defeated by shaming even it's most ludicrous Conservative practitioners (from CNN, with emphasis added):

Adam Schiff should recuse himself too

By Mike Rogers

Updated 7:45 AM ET, Mon April 10, 2017

Editor's Note: Mike Rogers is a CNN national security commentator, the host of CNN's "Declassified" TV series and the past chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The views expressed are his own.

Representative Devin Nunes' decision to recuse himself from the probe of Russian operations should be applauded. It won't be in today's environment and in the court of public opinion, but it should be applauded nonetheless. The attention was on him, his role and his actions, and not that of the committee or the issues it handles.

Equally, Representative Adam Schiff should consider recusing himself from the probe. For his part, Schiff suggested to the media that he had seen information on Russia-Trump campaign ties that was "the kind of evidence" that would be presented to a grand jury, adding that he had seen additional evidence, but not elaborating further.

Both Nunes and Schiff are equally to blame for the Committee's loss of focus...

Because it the only political bludgeon the Party of Trump has left, and members of the Party of Trump are no longer biologically capable of feeling shame.

Nor can the Big Lie of Both Siderism be defeated with mere facts and logic because for hundreds of America's most overpaid Beltway media urinal cakes, it is literally all they know how to do (from The New Republic):

#Bothsides is the most failed, destructive, opportunistic, and falsifiable analytical conceit in American politics.

...

You can draw any number of inferences from this observation, but the most inarguable, in my opinion, is how devastating it is to the conceit that U.S. political dysfunction—embodied most recently in the GOP theft of a Supreme Court seat—should be attributed to both parties in equal measure. Reflexive even-handedness the analytical foundation of countless news stories, and nearly all punditry, but it wasn’t derived from dispassionate observation of political reality.

Rather, it was contrived to burnish the mainstream media claim to political neutrality, and the neutrality of parent companies. But its effect was to leave implacable conservative critics of mainstream culture totally dissatisfied, and has failed every other consumer in the market for accurate, unskewed news and on-the-level commentary. It should have been put to rest long ago, and can’t die soon enough.

I have been writing exhaustively (and to the point of exhaustion) about this particular subject since my first week blogging 12 years ago, and believe me I was thinking about it and bitching about it long before that.  And for all of that time -- through three presidential administrations -- two facts have been perfectly clear.

First, the lazy and cowardly legions of the High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It are the Right's truest ally and the Left's most treacherous opponent.  As I wrote just last week, Both Siderism is a...

...parasite-cult that empowers the Right by deflecting and diffusing its opponents. and without which the demise of the Right would be greatly accelerated.

And second, because it is a parasite-cult, as the chasm it tries to straddle between the relatively venial sins of the Left and the outright, raving racism and lunacy of the Right becomes exponentially wider, the more brittle and indefensibly ridiculous Both Siderism becomes.

Both Siderism is to politics in 2017 what the Siegfried Line was to warfare in 1944: an empty shell, overgrown and crawling with cows.

Give us the right tools, and we on the Left could punch through it in two days.