Matthew Dowd is a Fundamentally Ridiculous Person: Halloween Edition

Yesterday, while performing normal human errands, I skipped out on a seasonal Halloween Old Timey Radio offering (a Suspense production of "The House in Cypress Canyon" starring Robert Taylor) --

  

-- and zipped over to MSNBC just to see what those scamps were up to.

I  arrived just in time to hear Nicole Wallace ending a sentence with "...Matthew", so I had a choice:  listening to a chilling tale about a seemingly locked room in a house a young couple had just bought...or listening to a chilling tale about an undead political zombie whose career is reanimated over and over again by his friends in the media who are also reanimated political zombies.

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Bravely I chose the scarier of the two, and continued listening to those crazy kids on MSNBC.

At the moment a clip is not readily at hand, but substantively Mr. Dowd's points were as follows.

1. The media needs to stop the "gamification" of politics.  It's not a game.  There are real-life consequences to elections.


2. The media has a terrible addiction to not reporting on the consequences of electing one person or party over the other, and this has got to stop, because one party is dangerous and crazy and the other isn't.


3. This all started happening "four or five years ago" or maybe it was "five or six years ago".

This was followed on Twitter by a mighty outpouring of appreciation for Mr. Dowd's fearless truthiness.   A lot of stuff like this -- 

Dowd always gets it right on. The media needs more contributors like him.

— Special Moms Network (@specialmomsnet) October 27, 2022

-- which has become pretty routine after every appearance of Mr. Dowd on Ms. Wallace's program.

Finally, someone has the guts to say these important things (on a network watched almost exclusively by people who already agree with these things.)    

Finally, someone is taking on "the media" for its cavalier attitude towards important issues. 

And so forth,

Weird, though, how Mr. Dowd was so very specific about when "the media" started behaving in this reckless, thoughtless, dangerous way, don't you think?   "Four or five years ago" or maybe it was "five or six years ago".   In fact, of you pay careful attention across the whole spectrum of the Beltway media and Never Trump media (as I do), you will immediately notice that the phrase "four or five years ago" or "five or six years ago" is now ritually repeated everywhere.  

Like a mantra.  

Like a magic spell.  

Like a Big Lie.

You see, Mr. Dowd was a member of "the media" long before "four or five years ago" or "five or six years ago".  In fact, he held the influential position of ABC News' chief political analyst for over a decade, and while in that position Mr. Dowd was on teevee in front of an audience of millions virtually every week.  Mr. Dowd was also extremely active on Twitter, penned articles for prominent news outlets, and toured the country selling his book.

And yet for all of those very active years of opinion-having you would be hard pressed to find any of Mr. Dowd's opinions on the the media treating politics as a game, or the media refusing the distinguish between political candidates and a political party that had clearly gone mad, and political candidates and a political party that have not.  That's because sometime during the summer of 2021, Mr. Dowd wiped out his entire Twitter archive.   Thousand and thousands of the presumably deeply held beliefs he had shared with the public during and after his tenure as  ABC News' chief political analyst just gone.  

Poof.  Like a fart in a forest fire. 

In fact, as near as I can tell, Mr. Dowd has wiped every single one of his Tweets prior to 07/25/21 with one, weird exception...and finding it was like finding nothing but a scorched hinge and a doorknocker where an entire Library of Alexandria of shitty takes and bad faith had once stood.

Years and years of of Mr. Dowd's ardent opinions vanished...except for that tiny fraction which now exist only as plain text relics on my blog.  Part of the many, many posts I wrote detailing Mr. Dowd's incredibly dishonest and dishonorable reign as one of the all-time kings of Both Sides Do It punditry.  A reign which ran through the first couple of years of the Trump administration, and which slowly fell apart like so.

/brief aside -- during the long, slow implosion of Mr. Dowd's righteous Both Siderism, I frequently wrote about how fucking reckless and dangerous he was acting, and he responded by calling my a liar, calling my readers stupid and so forth.  Mind you, this was ABC News' chief political analyst getting repeatedly bent out of shape over something some nobody blogger in the middle of Middle America (me) was writing/  

First, he and his running buddy Ron Fournier spent the entire 2015/16 campaign season shouting over and over again from every venue available to them that there was no difference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.  None.   Zero.  Both were equally terrible and a manifestation of the (wait for it)  K'rupt Duopoly.

Second, it was every citizen's duty to Disrupt the  K'rupt Duopoly!!.  This meant ignoring your misgivings about Trump, jettisoning the silly notion that Democrats were any better and voting third party. Only then, once the K'rupt Duopoly had been destroyed, would our democracy be safe.

Third, holy shit, Trump was actually elected.  Well...ok, so what?  I mean, how much worse could it be than if Hillary had won?  After all, GOP base voters are overwhelmingly thoughtful, decent, America-lovin' patriots and those Trump "fanatics" who are getting so much attention are just a tiny, unimportant fringe.

And it became clearer and clearer what an epic, racist clusterfuck Trump was going to be and completely lost to reason most Republican voters actually were, I kept up my regular schedule of "We fucking warned you" posts and got increasingly defensive reactions from Mr. Dowd like "let the clinton stuff go. Trump is president elect. And let's concentrate on that, and future leaders. Not the past." and "why don't you accept people for where they are in the present?" (along with the usual insults) in reply.

Fourth, boy that tiny, unimportant fringe sure is getting loud.   

This is the moment when Dowd suddenly ran out of impassioned things to say on the subject of disruption and the K'rupt Duopoly and Both Siderism.  When he got very quiet.  And then, very tentatively, Mr. Dowd started taking public notice of the fact that, just maybe, the Republican Party wasn't 100% right in the head.  

This is also the moment when Mr. Dowd started instantly blocking anyone who even lightly brushed up against his suddenly very inconvenient recent past.  

Which both completely predictable and hilarious, because like the rest his pundit species, Mr. Dowd is a coward and a fraud.  A human wind-sock that hangs onto his place at the media trough by swinging in whatever direction the prevailing Beltway wisdom is blowing.  Mr. Dowd never apologized for all the incredibly destructive lies he told, or the insults he ladled out to defend those lies long after they became indefensible.  He refused to follow the honorable path his Catholic faith instructs him to follow: confession, repentance and atonement for all the harm he had done.

Instead, like the rest his pundit species, he just...pretended it never happened!  

Wheee!  

Mr. Dowd left ABC News in 2021 and then, in fulfillment of prophecy, he re-emerged on MSNBC with his past erased and his reputation bleached and laundered by his very good friend from the George W. Bush days, Nicole Wallace:

Matthew Dowd Joins MSNBC as Contributor and Political Analyst

If you’re a consistent MSNBC viewer, you’ve likely seen a lot of Matthew Dowd as of late.

Well, the former ABC News chief political analyst and special correspondent has officially joined MSNBC as a contributor and political analyst.

Re-emerged an entirely different person: a Hero of the Resistance and the righteous scourge of Both Siderist journalists everywhere with no hint that he ever was anything else or ever believed anything else.

Which is one of the many perks of having powerful friends in the media who can use their control of the cameras to zap the mortal remains of your dead career of back to life over and over again and send it shambling zombie-like back into the world with no one questioning this unholy ritual or pushing back against it but [checks notes] some nobody blogger way out in the middle of Middle America.  

No, I Won't Be Appearing On MSNBC Anytime Soon