Deflecto Patronus!

(Chuck Todd shown here trying to conjuring his Patronus)

Both Siderism really is the Beltway's one, true Patronus Charm.  It's all-purpose, all-powerful protective magic.

And it is killing us.

Paul Krugman described how in The New York Times yesterday in a column which I would humbly describe as exactly what it would look like if I had a byline in a metropolitan daily.

Minus the swears.

From The New York Times:

The Slippery Slope of Complicit

When was the last time centrist talking heads declared, “Donald Trump just became president” (because he bombed someone, or something like that)? I think it’s been more than a year. At this point, you have to be a truly fanatical practitioner of bothsidesism not to see that Trump is every bit as terrible a human being, and every bit as much a menace to the republic, as some of us warned when all the cool kids were busy snarking about Clinton’s emails.

The real news of the past few weeks isn’t that Trump is a wannabe Mussolini who can’t even make the trains run on time. It’s the absence of any meaningful pushback from Congressional Republicans. Indeed, not only are they acquiescing in Trump’s corruption, his incitements to violence, and his abuse of power, up to and including using the power of office to punish critics, they’re increasingly vocal in cheering him on....

And modern Republican politicians are, with few exceptions, apparatchiks: they are creatures of a monolithic movement that doesn’t allow dissent but protects the loyal from risk. Even if they should happen to lose a race in their gerrymandered districts, as long as they toed the line they can count on “wing nut welfare” — commentator slots on Fox News, appointments at think tanks, and so on.

Even now, I don’t think most political commentators have grasped how deep the rot goes. I don’t think they understand, or at any rate admit to themselves, that democracy really could die just a few months from now.

And if it doesn’t, if Republicans lose Congress and Trump leaves office on or before January 2021, the same people who kept declaring that Trump just became president will try to go back to pretending that Republican politicians are serious, honorable people who care about policy. But they aren’t...

And if you think this is something new, think again.

Here is Joe Scarborough from a decade ago brutally mutilating the actual history of his Republican party right in front of Paul Krugman in order to get in on that sweet, sweet Both Siderist action that instantly became the Beltway default setting once the Bush Administration collapsed

Behold, a Tip Jar!