Will Saletan, The Kitty Kuspidor of Op-Ed Columnists

When things get back to demi-normal and instead of masking up and sprinting through the place like Jim Brown in the last reel of The Dirty Dozen we all have time in the world to luxuriate in the choices offered in the the aisles of out local Grocerarium (that's what they were called, right?) take a moment to turn your attention to the stuff you never noticed before.

The weird stuff.  

Rutabagels!, the Pacific Rim snacking meal food treat that "all the vital young persons are talking to the other youths about".  Madame Florina's Kitty Kuspidors for the Spitty Kitty.  Stuff you know the clerks have to dust once a month because no one in their right mind has ever or will ever buy such a thing.  And yet there it sits, taking up presumably valuable real estate there other, much more saleable items could be promoted, forcing you to ask yourself unanswerable questions about what kind dark deals were struck behind closed doors to land Cap'n Funnelmuncher's Oral Hygiene Citrus Beverage on a shelf near the Pepsi and the apple juice.

Which brings me to Will Saletan, who, for me, is the op-ed columnist version of the Kitty Kuspidor.  I know he is  human person that I've been subliminally aware of, off and on, for some period of time.  I know he writes opinion pieces for Slate because Wikipedia tells me so.  And I know he occasional brings the fact that he works at Slate to a wider audience than the editors at Slate by writing something goofy or "controversial" that draw some attention from he outside world.

Such as this codswallop -- 

The Enemy Isn’t Republicans. It’s Liars.

The case for a broad, fact-based alliance against fabrications.

-- which immediately set off alarms by violating one of my most reliably battle-tested rules: when someone tells you it's not about Left or Right, tuck your money in your sock and run the other way:

 

Hey Will.  We already have a broad, fact-based alliance against fabrications.  It's called the Democratic Party and (frequently to my chagrin) anybody can join!  So thanks but no thanks, we don't need a new clubhouse with people like you working the door.

Over the years, I’ve bounced around the political spectrum. I was liberal in Texas, more conservative in college, and now I’m somewhere in the middle.

Yeah, kinda figured. And during all that bouncing apparently Mr. Saletan bonked his head and slept through [checks notes] the entire Bush Administration and the primal-scream racist freakout over the Kenyan Usurper because:

What Trump has brought to the United States is ruthless, relentless, denialist propaganda at a scale we used to see only in dictatorships. 

No, Trump is a point on a curve of the derangement trajectory of the GOP that has been accelerating for decades.  The GOP base begat Trump, not the other way around.  And anyway, we already have a broad, fact-based alliance against fabrications.  It's called the Democratic Party.  And so forth.

And now, by that big Both Siderist Clock on the wall, I see that it's time for a big helping of False Equivalence (with emphasis added):

Progressives and conservatives have always quarreled about what’s true. But to make those debates productive, and to correct our country’s mistakes—failed projects, naïve policies, bad wars—we need a common standard for judging truth. That standard can’t be the Bible or identity politics. 

Then a little false hope and bonhomie to tease you along to through next paragraph:

If you hold Trump and his party responsible for this madness, as I do, it’s tempting to write off the whole GOP. The COVID deniers and election conspiracy theorists are overwhelmingly on the right. For the next two years, Democrats will control the presidency, the House, and the Senate. Why not just tell Republicans to go to hell? 

Why not indeed?  After all we already have a broad, fact-based alliance against fabrications.  It's called the Democratic Party.  Etcetera.

But we can't just tell Republicans.  Because something something ... honestly I can't even follow the tortured reasoning that follows because this sure sounds like Mr. Saletan is arguing that precisely because the Republican Party is, top to bottom, completely fucked-in-the-head --

...propagandists thrive on polarization. They recruit and derange their followers by dismissing all criticism as partisan. 

-- we need an alliance that crosses party lines:

To break their grip on the right half of the country, we need a fact-based alliance that crosses party lines.

Or maybe, as an alternative to that -- and bear with me now, because this is going to sound crazy -- what we really need is for the tiny fraction of Republicans who are not completely fucked-in-the-head to join a broad, fact-based alliance against fabrications which already exists called the Democratic Party.  Where they can do the one thing they have never done in their entire lives: finally shut the fuck up, step to the back of the line and let the people who have not been Very Loudly Wrong about the Right all along do the talking and leading.

But that plan isn't gonna fly with Mr. Saletan.  Instead, his marching orders for us mouthy Libtards is...

...supporting Sen. Mitt Romney, Rep. Liz Cheney, and other Republicans when they speak the truth. It means seriously engaging with fact-based journalism at the Dispatch, the Bulwark, National Review, and other publications in the center and on the right. It means distinguishing the sins of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush from the pathologies of Trump and Newt Gingrich.

The Bulwark?

Hey, I've heard of them!

I wonder.  I just wonder...

Yep.

From the Bulwark podcast, 01/27//2021:

Episode 522:  "Will Saletan: We Need a Coalition for Truth"

And that's how you do it kids.

That's how Cap'n Funnelmuncher's Oral Hygiene Citrus Beverage gets itself moved from a dusty corner of the orphaned product shelf all the way to the express aisle cash register.  

 

No Half Measures