Readers of this disreputable blog know the level of hilarious contempt in which I hold the Very Serious Beltway Pundits and Third Party Grifters who continue to pretend that truly "independent" voters exist in vast, tectonic numbers and that any minute now their going to, y'know, muscle up to the bars of their political prison and voom...
...save us all from The Extremes on Both Sides..
So today, just for you, we have a little quiz: Three headlines, each from a well-know news source, each with a little snip of the article attached, all on the same subject. Your challenge? Put them in chronological order and identify the source.
The answers are provided below the quiz, plus a more extensive citation from one of the article that's just too funny not to include.
Ready?
1. "Record number of Americans say they're politically independent"
We spend our days captivated by people with the most power and the biggest mouths. But it turns out a rising number of Americans want something else — political independence.
2. Political Independents: The Future of Politics?
They've been both relentlessly courted and politically sidelined for years. But two new books show how voters who reject both Democrats and Republicans can become a force.
3. What Independents Want.
Liberals and conservatives each have their own intellectual food chains. They have their own think tanks to provide arguments, politicians and pundits to amplify them, and news media outlets to deliver streams of prejudice-affirming stories.
Independents, who are the largest group in the electorate, don’t have any of this. They don’t have institutional affiliations. They don’t look to certain activist lobbies for guidance. There aren’t many commentators who come from an independent perspective.
Answer key:
The first quote is from Axios three days ago.
The second quote is from John Avlon in The Daily Beast 11 years ago.
The third quote is from David Brook in The New York Times 14 years ago.
And all the hacks and frauds involved in inventing and making the worship of this particular Golden Calf the state religion of the Beltway media, are all still respected and fully-employed members of the fourth estate.
And now let's bring this sicker home with more of the accidental comedy styling of CNN's Senior Political Analyst and anchor, and former editor-in-chief and managing director of The Daily Beast, Jon Avlon, from 2012:
Two timely new books—Mickey Edwards's The Parties Versus the People: How to Turn Republicans and Democrats Into Americans and Jacqueline Salit’s Independents Rising offer valuable insights into the impulses that have inspired a record number of Americans to reject the two parties and demand something different.
The two authors come to some of the same conclusions from very different perspectives. Edwards is a former Republican congressman from Oklahoma, a member of party leadership during the Reagan era and now a vice president of the Aspen Institute. Salit is a New York City–based campaign strategist, third-party founder, and political activist who was raised part of the professional left and now runs IndependentVoting.org. Their two books reflect their very different personal experiences in politics, but they identify some of the same problems and solutions...
(Some of these proposals dovetail with suggestions made in the “Making Congress Work” plan developed by No Labels, a group Edwards and I helped cofound with fellow Daily Beast columnist Mark McKinnon and Nancy Jacobson).
This is why we...
No comments:
Post a Comment