Ron Fournier and the Rule of Mules

There's an old story about the farmer who buys a new mule, and the mule won't do a damn thing.  Won't pull a plow.  Won't carry.  Won't even go into the barn.

So the farmer hires an old mule-skinner to teach him the subtle art of mule motivation.

The mule-skinner arrives, picks up a 2x4 and wallops the mule upside the head.  This makes the mule angry.  The farmer is stunned.  The mule-skinner then smacks the mule even harder, right between the eyes knocking the mule to its knees.  Now the farmer is angry and the mule is stunned. The mule-skinner then kicks the mule in the rump.

"Stop it," the farmer yells. "I hired you to teach him, not kill him."

The mule-skinner shrugs, grabs the mule's halter and leads it calmly into the barn.

"Thing about mules is this," said the mule-skinner.  "They're smart and you can teach 'em, but the first thing you have to do is get their attention.

Longtime readers remember that during and after the 2016 election, Matthew Dowd and Ron Fournier were the ubiquitous pundit Frick and Frack of False Equivalence -- both constantly on teevee, radically lowering the bar for Donald Trump and radically raising the bar for Hillary Clinton so they could preach the Holy Beltway Media Gospel of Both Siderism and sell millions of credulous viewers on the lie that there really wasn't a dime's worth of difference between Trump and Clinton, and that the entire system needed to be overthrown (Disrupt!) because the  K'rupt Duopoly was the real problem.

Here was Ron Fournier in July of 2018:

Translation: “The newsroom refuses to bow to my ideological whims and occasionally dares to buck them.” https://t.co/NmwdsDTIhj

— Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) July 8, 2018

Running three featured stories on Dershowitz, Including a self indulgent front pager,has nothing to do with ideology. Refusing to except any accountability for a front page piece right before the election saying FBI finds no connection between Russia and campaign is not ideology. https://t.co/GTTiCVWiSK

— Norman Ornstein (@NormOrnstein) July 8, 2018

Ron, you are falling back on your old destructive lboth sides” framework that helped get us into this mess. Sad.

— Norman Ornstein (@NormOrnstein) July 8, 2018

And here is Ron Fournier today:

As a former White House reporter, I don’t say this lightly: Media should ignore the Trump follies, abandon the WH briefing room, and interview governors, doctors, nurses, victims and anybody else approaching the truth.

Stop being props.

Just stop.

— Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) April 7, 2020

Turns out, all it took was a global pandemic during the reign of a pathologically lying madman to finally get Ron Fournier's attention.

Behold, a Tip Jar!