From The Brookings Institute, April 27, 2012:
Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans are the Problem
[by] Thomas E. Mann and Norman Ornstein
...We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition...
The Washington Post, yesterday:
Forget ‘polarization.’ It’s the GOP’s radicalization.
By Jennifer Rubin
The notion that the United States is “polarized” into two conflicting, equally stubborn and extreme camps infects much of the mainstream news coverage and everyday chatter about politics. Washington is “broken.” “Gridlock” is a problem. “No one goes out to dinner with someone on the other side.” Such mealy-mouthed language masks a stark dichotomy: Democrats have to move to the center to get bipartisan support; Republicans have become radicalized and unmovable.
This is not “polarization.” It is the authoritarian capture of much of the GOP by a right-wing movement bent on sowing chaos...
And this completes that particular circle.
Powerful and completely accurate @JRubinBlogger . Should be read by all journalists, especially editors, and reporters at the Post, the Times, AP and CNN. And points out how devious and pernicious is No Labels. https://t.co/yMOLXYnhRO
— Norman Ornstein (@NormOrnstein) March 10, 2024
Good to see Rubin catching up to where Norm was 12 years ago, and where the Left was decades ago, back when even whispering such thoughts was the darkest heresy. However, ultimately none of this will matter very much.
There just aren't any minds left to be persuaded on the Right. And Centrists are just as pot-committed to their poisonous cult of Both Sides Do It as the Right are pot-committed to their Orange Rapist Fascist Daddy. It's just that, in the case of pathological Centrists, virtually the entire mainstream news media are members of that cult, so they use their their position occupying the commanding heights of the normie media to camouflaged their weirdo fetish as "objective" and "normal".
See also The New York Times every fucking day.
3 comments:
I find myself quoting John McClane's "WELCOME TO
THE PARTY, PAL!" a lot on these sorts of things. But because Jenny Rubin is part of the DC Insiders' Club, it's considered "more important" coming from her.
I appreciate the help, but it's also annoying that us back in flyover country can be so easily ignored on it.
G'd morning DG and BG!
Much as I understand and wholeheartedly sympathize with the wrathful, exhausted cynicism which pervades the last two paragraphs and the lone final sentence of your article, I'd like to offer a (perhaps naively) hopeful counterpoint.
I think something genuinely is changing in the media space. It's agonizingly slow and infuriatingly (DECADES) overdue, but I think the change is happening.
You noted in your Quiet Part Loud podcast that media heads are beginning to preface their BothSiderism with, "Now, I'm not making a false equivalence here..." or "I'm not playing the Both Sides card here..." right before they, of course, do exactly that. How is that change, one might ask? It is change, because it represents a slowly-dawning acknowledgement that their root BSDI framing is losing social cache and believability. It's NOT BothSides Do It, and that fact is long past unignorable.
Notice I said acknowledgement, not awareness. The media heads (and owners) have known for a long time that it's not fucking BothSides. But BothSides has been profitable and (conveniently) offers them a professed absolution for refusing to call out the actual issue/culprits. But even the fact that the pundits are trying to preemptively shield themselves from BothSiderism complaints means they know the BSDI card isn't getting them out of jail free any more.
Are we actually going to see BothSiderism consigned to history's dustbin while we're still on this side of the veil? Brotherman, I got no fuckin' idea. I could point you to a long rambling post I made in response to a NoMo column yesterday, but I'll just use a line from near the end:
>>> This has always been a generational struggle, and almost certainly will still be long after anyone reading this is dead.
I know there's cold comfort in that, at best. But I'll take incremental progress over no progress, or worse.
Thanks for all you do. (You got a mention in that NoMo reply, BTW!)
IMHO, Norm is not too far up the scale from Matthew Dowd et al. He was at AEI since the 80's contriving through Comaneci-esque contortions to always arrive at the conclusion that tax cuts and deregulation were the solution to whatever problem was presented. It's a matter of degree, but a not long jump to birtherism and election denial.
Not quite the resume one wants from a paragon of intellectual integrity, again, IMHO.
Does he have the standing to question (e.g.) Donald Trump's commitment to fiduciary responsibility at THCR?
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