Both Sides Don't
Vs.
Both Sides Dent
It seems that anyone, no matter how clownish they may be --
-- can mount an impressive TED-Talk/New York Times/NBC career by simply repeating this Big Lie over and over and over again.
A republic cannot endure if people are reflexively unpersuadable by each other. If everyone knows what they think in advance about every issue. If horrors move nobody.— Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) February 16, 2018
These are our slow-burning calamities: We have come to love our own ideas more than other people’s children. And we have come to accept the reality that a few with money should rule over the many.— Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) February 16, 2018
While those of us who take the opposite position -- that it is self-evidently true that the Republican Party is killing this country, that they have been working on their Kill This Country project in plain sight for decades and that media Both Siderists are their enabling henchmen -- continue waging our lonely War on Pronouns as outcasts, held in Coventry by a corporate media system which would rather see the country burn than admit we have been right all along and then do something about it.
UPDATE: Reader Andrew Johnston suggests that b/c I did not include every Tweet by Mr. Giridharadas I am misrepresenting his position. Maybe so. The Morning Joe video of him was not available when I wrote this up so I used his Tweets to convey the gist of what I though he was saying.
But now the video is available. So let's all jump to the 6:00 mark and let Mr. Giridharadas speak for himself outside of the constraints of Twitter.
You're clever people so I'll leave it for you to decide for yourselves.
UPDATE: Reader Andrew Johnston suggests that b/c I did not include every Tweet by Mr. Giridharadas I am misrepresenting his position. Maybe so. The Morning Joe video of him was not available when I wrote this up so I used his Tweets to convey the gist of what I though he was saying.
But now the video is available. So let's all jump to the 6:00 mark and let Mr. Giridharadas speak for himself outside of the constraints of Twitter.
You're clever people so I'll leave it for you to decide for yourselves.
Behold, a Tip Jar!
5 comments:
A guy named Dent invoking an argument about both sides.
If not for the fact that you've used that metaphor, the Batman reference would write itself.
Did you ghost write today's column under this guy's name? I swear to God it sounds JUST LIKE YOU. (More at his NYTimes site than below but was limited in size)
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Budgets, Bad Faith and ‘Balance’
Paul Krugman
FEB. 15, 2018
Over the past couple of months Republicans have passed or proposed three big budget initiatives. First, they enacted a springtime-for-plutocrats tax cut that will shower huge benefits on the wealthy while offering a few crumbs for ordinary families — crumbs that will be snatched away after a few years, so that it ends up becoming a middle-class tax hike. Then they signed on to a what-me-worry budget deal that will blow up the budget deficit to levels never before seen except during wars or severe recessions. Finally, the Trump administration released a surpassingly vicious budget proposal that would punish not just the vulnerable but also most working families.
Looking at all of this should make you very angry; it certainly infuriates me. But my anger isn’t mostly directed at Republicans; it’s directed at their enablers, the professional centrists, both-sides pundits, and news organizations that spent years refusing to acknowledge that the modern G.O.P. is what it so clearly is.
Whatever the reasons for G.O.P. bad faith, however, its reality has been apparent for a long time.
Yet the gatekeepers of our public discourse spent years being willfully blind to this reality. Take, for example, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a think tank that, to be fair, can be a useful resource for budget analysis. Still, I can’t forget that back in 2010 the committee gave Paul Ryan — whose fraudulence was obvious from the beginning to anyone who actually read his proposals — an award for fiscal responsibility.
And even now the committee is busy pontificating about the need to reform the “budget process.” Let’s get real, O.K.? The problem isn’t the process, it’s the Republicans.
Meanwhile, many news organizations — which, by the way, gave Ryan years of adoring coverage — treat recent G.O.P. actions as if they are some kind of aberration, a departure from previous principles. They aren’t. Republicans are what they always were: They never cared about deficits; they always wanted to dismantle Medicare, not defend it. They just happen not to be who they pretended to be.
Now, there’s no mystery about why many people won’t face up to the reality of Republican bad faith. Washington is full of professional centrists, whose public personas are built around a carefully cultivated image of standing above the partisan fray, which means that they can’t admit that while there are dishonest politicians everywhere, one party basically lies about everything.
Who the fuck is Anand Giridharadas and why isn't his lying word salad a fire-able offense?!?
I need to take him to a local (anywhere U.S.A.) gun show to show him the specific people with an Russian-backed NRA funded outsized megaphone who won't change their minds over the bodies of dead children while outside this bubble 70+ percent of Americans have been SCREAMING for change since Columbine.
Drifty, I can certainly understand your disdain for Giridharadas - for fuck's sake, he's a TED Talk celebrity now writing a book about moneyed elites and their self-serving charitable interests that features an approving quote from Bill Gates, and there aren't enough words to unpack all the irony there. But I also feel like posting those particular tweets without the one in between them:
Nor can a republic endure when, on those occasions when we do persuade each other, when a clear majority comes to favor the control of particular guns, there emerge invisible masters to overrule our will.
...was not terribly honest. He's really not saying what you're suggesting he is.
The bases aren't the only masters.
What should come next is Dent answering the question.
Why do you legislate law against your base?
Explain how you enthrall your speaking with showing strong leadership
when you are slave to 30% of 40% of republicans/ Disregarding the rest of Americans.?
Never mentioning money?
Dent, is donation money smarter than large swaths of Americans?
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