-- he bobs right back to the surface like some unflushable 2016 turd. H/T to Alert Reader @VijayKSaraswat for pointing this in my direction. I had to get the embed code through various devious means because Mr. Fournier blocked me years ago for, well, writing stuff like this.
A clip from me in January of 2019, with vintage Chuck Todd included for no extra charge!
...How much of a gift is Howard Schultz to cable news? So much that the were able to haul discredit farce of nature Ron Fournier out of mothballs and put him in front of a camera to recite the only poem he knows: The Road Not Taken Because The K'rupt Duopoly Ruined Everything!
When I was coming up, I was taught (at the wee schoolhouse shanty I walked to five miles both ways uphill and up to my knees in snow) that the five basic forms of literary conflict were: Human versus Human, Human versus Nature, Human versus Society, Human versus God and Human versus Themselves. Which, as basic Lit 101 lists go, isn't terrible, although it does omit legitimate variations like Human versus Technology/Science.
However given the absolute mindlessness with which corporations pursue their own ends often to the detriment of humanity, it really is long past time to add Human versus Corporation to the canon of recognized forms of literary conflict. As writers from C.M Kornbluth and Fred Pohl to William Gibson have shown, corporations -- which are not quite nature, and not quite society, and not quite human but are composed of humans -- can make splendidly relentless and aggressive antagonists and should be officially blessed as such by whoever bestows such blessings.
Point being, Ron Fournier may be a clown and an embarrassment to his former profession, but he isn't the main villain here.
The main villains here are media corporations which will grant priceless air time and column inches to virtually any talentless clown who will help advance their bold agenda of not paying taxes by poisoning healthy public discourse with Both Siderist bullshit.
* UPDATE: Because he has stopped cashing checks by shouting "Both Sides Do It" under the cover of journalism and started cashing checks by shouting "But Both Do It" for a PR shop, I have pretty much stopped giving a damn what America's Sad Clown of Centrism does with his time.
Ron Fournier Is President Of A ‘Bipartisan’ PR Firm, But His Clients Are Republicans
... “The firm remains committed to its bipartisan roots,” [Michigan-based public relations firm] Truscott Rossman said in a recent press release announcing that it would open a new D.C. office. In a phone interview with TPM Wednesday, Fournier said the new office would “get me up to Washington at least once a month,” presumably to bring his Democratic perspective to the capital. But, as it turns out, none of Fournier’s known clients at the firm are Democrats; in fact, TPM couldn’t find an example of a Democratic client at the largely Republican-leaning firm at all...
And this, boys and girls, is why bloggers have archives.
GOP leaders who cast a covid policy dispute with @GovWhitmer as an an anti-freedom, anti-American “power grab” own what happens when weak, pliable cowards take their words seriously and literally https://t.co/tPpdQLz6zq
You might remember Ron Fournier as one of the many professional Havers-of-Opinions who spent the entire 2016 presidential election perched on one stool or another in one cable teevee studio or another endlessly repeating the Beltway mantra that there was no difference between Americas two political parties. None. They were both equally broken, equally corrupt and equally contemptuous of the democracy in which they operated.
His watchwords were "Disrupt the System!" and "Destroy the Corrupt Duopoly!"
I wrote about it quite extensively at the time and all it got me was slandered and then blocked.
Funny old world.
For more on this moron, see "Ron Fournier and the Rule of Mules"here.
If the mainstream media could socially and electronically distance itself from the worst carriers for at least a couple of months (or, preferably, years...or decades...or forever) I believe we could blunt to most damaging effects of Both Siderism.
But they just refuse to do it.
Case in point MSNBC, which for some reason continues to be congenitally incapable of not giving Ron Fournier a big, public platform from which to spread his bullshit gospel (h/t Blue Gal/Crooks & Liars for the video and the transcript.)
Congresswoman Debbie Dingell sets the scene from Michigan yesterday... Republican swarming the state capitol. Republicans blocking ambulances. Republicans proudly flying the flags of traitors and fascists. Republicans trying to spread the plague to children...
CONGRESSWOMAN DEBBIE DINGELL: ... What happened yesterday was inexcusable. People did not have masks, gloves, did not distance themselves. They had confederate flags, swastikas, blocked an ambulance trying to get to a hospital, bringing hate and fear into a time that is already full of fear and anxiety is just unacceptable. There were people bare-handed, handing candy to children. What they did was to help spread this disease around the state more, not contribute to the mitigation and it just made me sad.
And then Fournier swing into action to allocate the blame (emphasis added):
STEPHANIE RUHLE: Ron, what in the world's going on?
RON FOURNIER: ... It's understandable, people want to oppose the governor's policies or to accuse her of rehearsing for the vice presidency but you can't distort her record, which is what's happened, and you can't encourage people to gather en masse during a pandemic, which is what is happening. It's inexcusable. It's dangerous and I just hate to see the DC brand of ugly partisan politics making its way into Michigan and into Lancing like a toxic vine, but that's what's been happening this last week.
RUHLE: Ron, why is this political? This is a public health crisis.
FOURNIER: It's political because everything is political nowadays. This shows you now dysfunctional we've become as a society, everything is red versus blue, us versus them. There was a couple weeks in the state where the Republican-controlled lawmakers were working well with the Democratic governor. That has fallen apart. So you have traditional ugly modern day politics on top of understandable fear and anxiety. ...
20 million Americans have lost their jobs in the past three weeks, but this waste of carbon not only remains gainfully employed, but continues to be give an enormous corporate media megaphone in order to pass his claptrap on to the widest number of now-home-bound Americans.
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
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
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.
Taylor's testimony is unknown to me, and to you @ron_fournier. Leaked accounts are disputed. Neither you nor I know what he testified. This is why Star Chamber has such a bad reputation and why we don't do trials in secret. Don't abandon first principles to get @realDonaldTrumphttps://t.co/mHv7rz3mRz
Like most professional media frauds, Ron Fournier -- America's Sad Clown of Centrism -- has no problem accommodating his principles to the prevailing breeze.
And, when I say prevailing breeze, I mean "What the Beltway media is paying hacks to sit on panels and say this week."
Clinton Was Wrong to Generalize About Trump's Supporters
Clinton’s remarks played into the perception among GOP and independent voters that Democratic Party leaders are hateful and smug.
RON FOURNIER
SEP 10, 2016
... First, what went wrong: The political world lost its collective mind when the Democratic presidential nominee said this at a fund-raiser last night:
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the ‘basket of deplorables’. Right?” Clinton said to applause and laughter from the crowd of supporters at an LGBT for Hillary fundraiser where Barbra Streisand performed. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it.”
“And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up,” she added.
Generalizing is almost always a mistake for leaders, and the savvy ones don’t intentionally unleash gross generalizations. Half of Trump’s supporters represents about 20 percent of the voting public, or nearly 30 million Americans. ...
Politically, it was a stupid move. Clinton played into the perception among GOP and independent voters that Democratic Party leaders are hateful and smug...
Like Mitt Romney and his “47 percent” theory, Clinton’s “Basket of deplorables” threatens to become a damning shorthand for the worst of what those voters think about her. ...Clinton needs to look inside herself and at her staff and ask why she would grossly generalize about such people.
As you may recall, during the 2016, the arc of the Beltway media went as follows: first they were 100% confident that Donald Trump could not possibly win the nomination, then they were 100% confident that Donald Trump could not possibly win the election, then they were 100% fucked.
And as I wrote last year ("The Candidate Who Has Fallen Under the Weight of Her Stone") it was precisely because the Beltway media was completely invested in the illusion that Hillary Clinton couldn't possibly lose -- because she was the unbreakable, load-bearing pillar that was going to support their cloistered, privileged little world no matter what they did to her -- they felt free to treat her as their own personal stash of career advancement rocket fuel. A limitless natural resource they could plunder forever, strip-mine forever, shit on forever...and then toddle safely off to bed knowing that however much they sliced her up during office hours, she would would still be on the job long into night, sweating over the details of the plight of the poor, the hungry, the uninsured and the unemployed.
Enter Ron Fournier, professional Both Siderist, who, working in harness with ABC News chief political analyst Matthew Dowd, spent the entire 2016 campaign season literally doing nothing but toddling from one cable news panel to the next, yawping "Both Sides Do It! Defeat The K'rupt Duopoly! Disrupt Everything!"over...
(Sorry for the sledgehammer, but sometimes when you're trying to drive a point into the fossilized remains the the American political media, a sledgehammer is the only tool for the job. Also know that this represents less than half of the posts I wrote documenting Mr. Fournier's perversity.)
(And good luck to the poor, dumb Libtard blogger who tried to warn them over and over and over again that the toxic lie they were being paid to pump into our politics could have the direst of consequences.)
So what is the thoroughly disgraced and discredited Ron Fournier up to these days?
Well, because for the Beltway media the past simply does not exist and accountability is always for other people, Fred Hiatt keeps handing him real estate on the Washington Post op-ed page where -- like most of the media trash who helped lower the bar just enough to make it possible for Trump to be elected -- Mr. Fournier now sees fit to lecture Democrats on how best they should go about cleaning up the mess that Mr. Fournier helped to make.
Will impeachment backfire on Democrats? Not if they do it right.
And of course any time Mr. Fournier pops up in the same paper that continues to syndicate Megan McArdle, Kathleen Parker, Max Boot, Marc Thiessen, Michael Gerson, George F. Will and Joe Scarborough is a good time for Joe Scarborough to give Mr. Fournier a seat at the Morning Joe table so he can read his column aloud while Joe and his flunkies nod in earnest agreement.
The last paragraph is the kicker:
Heeding the right lessons of 1998, a Trump impeachment would ensure that no future president considers him a proper precedent. While the Senate would almost certainly acquit, history would not.
If history were still an active force in American politics, then by now the thoroughly disgraced and discredited Ron Fournier would have been forced to change his name to "Fun Pornier" and spend the rest of his days eking out a marginal living selling "vintage" tee-shirts and "marital aids" at local flea markets.
Ron Fournier -- the most implacable source of bullshit Beltway Media "But Her Emails" Both Siderism during the 2016 election (and who blocked me for rudely suggesting that both sides were not equally terrible) -- ...
...is now cheering on former (and future) Republican rat-fucker Rick Wilson, who is currently making a very good living ripping off 50 year's worth of salty Liberal critique of his Republican party and passing it off as brand new epiphany...
...and being chastised by one of his Both Sides Do It zombie offspring for not being Both Siderish enough.
To quote Shalmaneser, the supercomputer in Stand on Zanzibar which ultimately came to believe it had imagined the whole world, “Christ, what an imagination I've got.“.
You know, an honest man might consider finally admitting that, in retrospect. spending the entire 2016 election cycle running in circles, screaming "Both Sides Do It! OMFG! The K'rupt Duopoly!" was both monumentally stupid and deeply dishonest. And in no small part responsible for the election of President Stupid.
Which why o'l Ron will never do it. In fact, repeatedly putting this very question to him is why ol' Ron blocked me on the Twitter.
But so what? What if the Both Siderists blocked all of us?
From every corner of the internet, hundreds, thousands would rise up to take our places.
Like this guy.
Hey, @ron_fournier, what do you think about both sides cutting the Special Olympics budget? (ps: I know it's just the GOP that's doing this, but I thought it would make me sound more serious to pretend it was both sides.)
— Trump Laughs at His Supporters (@Tweet_tracker1) March 27, 2019
Even America's Sad Clown of Centrism can’t block that fast.
It was the time to lie snug in a hole in the snow and wait for a curtain of cloud to be drawn across the face of outer space whence this cold came.
And our new furnace decided to flake on us last night, so Blue Gal and I are triple-layered bloggers this morning, huddled by a little gas fire that no melting snow from the bough above us (Spoiler Alert) will extinguish. Waiting for the furnace guy to come 'round and tap the thing in just the right spot or whatever.
This cold morning we also warm ourselves with the knowledge that, no matter how completely the administration of President Stupid has laid bare the Big Lie of Both Sides Do It, the Beltway media simply cannot stop repeating it, and hammering every story until it fits its contours. It is their default factory setting, never to be tampered with lest you void the warranty.
So when a big enough mouth with a big enough wallet decides to belly-flop into the political arena by announcing that he'll be throwing f'real money around like Mardi Gras beads to run for president on a platform of no greater depth or vision than "But Both Sidez!", it is Beltway Christmas in January! Which is why coverage of Howard "The Paler Vortex" Schultz has all but colonized cable news, and the haircuts in front of the camera are creaming themselves at the joy of being able to take a break from Republican treason and Republican corruption and Republican barbarism to squee about Democrats in Disarray and Both Sidez!
How much of a gift is Howard Schultz to cable news? So much that the were able to haul discredit farce of nature Ron Fournier out of mothballs and put him in front of a camera to recite the only poem he knows: The Road Not Taken Because The K'rupt Duopoly Ruined Everything!
When I was coming up, I was taught (at the wee schoolhouse shanty I walked to five miles both ways uphill and up to my knees in snow) that the five basic forms of literary conflict were: Human versus Human, Human versus Nature, Human versus Society, Human versus God and Human versus Themselves. Which, as basic Lit 101 lists go, isn't terrible, although it does omit legitimate variations like Human versus Technology/Science.
However given the absolute mindlessness with which corporations pursue their own ends often to the detriment of humanity, it really is long past time to add Human versus Corporation to the canon of recognized forms of literary conflict. As writers from C.M Kornbluth and Fred Pohl to William Gibson have shown, corporations -- which are not quite nature, and not quite society, and not quite human but are composed of humans -- can make splendidly relentless and aggressive antagonists and should be officially blessed as such by whoever bestows such blessings.
Point being, Ron Fournier may be a clown and an embarrassment to his former profession, but he isn't the main villain here.
The main villains here are media corporations which will grant priceless air time and column inches to virtually any talentless clown who will help advance their bold agenda of not paying taxes by poisoning healthy public discourse with Both Siderist bullshit.
* UPDATE: Because he has stopped cashing checks by shouting "Both Sides Do It" under the cover of journalism and started cashing checks by shouting "But Both Do It" for a PR shop, I have pretty much stopped giving a damn what America's Sad Clown of Centrism does with his time.
Ron Fournier Is President Of A ‘Bipartisan’ PR Firm, But His Clients Are Republicans
... “The firm remains committed to its bipartisan roots,” [Michigan-based public relations firm] Truscott Rossman said in a recent press release announcing that it would open a new D.C. office. In a phone interview with TPM Wednesday, Fournier said the new office would “get me up to Washington at least once a month,” presumably to bring his Democratic perspective to the capital. But, as it turns out, none of Fournier’s known clients at the firm are Democrats; in fact, TPM couldn’t find an example of a Democratic client at the largely Republican-leaning firm at all...
Because as long as Both Siderism remains the corporate media's indestructible business model -- as long as there is an ocean of stupid, desperate money sloshing around inside the Beltway to bankroll anyone who will spin Prince Prospero's courtiers the Both Siderist fairy tales they desperately wish to believe -- toxic parasites like Mr. Fournier will always rise from the wreckage that they create, dust themselves off...
...and go right back to their default setting, unperturbed.
And thus it was in yesterday's Washington Post, where Mr. Fournier first-ever bylined column in that publication --
Nov. 6 could be independents’ day
Ron Fournier, a former reporter, editor and publisher, is president of Truscott Rossman, a Michigan public relations firm. Unite America is a client.
For years as a political reporter in Washington, I wrote about the public’s disgust with the U.S. political system and predicted the rise of a third party and outsider presidential candidates. I railed against the Republican-Democratic duopoly and chased the mythical “white knight” who would put country over party — and then put the two major parties out of business.
I was hunting a unicorn when I should have been herding reindeer.
While a viable third party is as elusive as a horned horse, there exists a rare-but-real creature in American politics that can systematically dismantle the status quo: the independent. Untethered to the two major parties, growing in sums and significance, independent candidates and officeholders are the reindeer of American politics...
But, eventually and incrementally, this may be the path to radically re-center American politics.
If these creatures can be corralled into controlling coalitions in legislatures across the country, including the U.S. Senate, they could find a powerful leverage point to break the partisan fever....
-- was an 800 word advertorial for one of the clients for whom his PR firm flaks:
“The question of whether independent candidates can win elections will inevitably turn to whether independent leaders can make a difference once in office,” reads a new report by the Unite America Institute, which is affiliated with the Unite America movement that aims to level the playing field for independent candidates. I am a spokesman for the group.
Having left Washington for my hometown of Detroit two years ago, I have been drawn back into politics by the pragmatic elegance of Unite America’s mission...
This was the signal to his fellow WaPo haver-of-stupid-opinions, Joe Scarborough, that Mr. Fournier was ready to resume his duties as a America's Sad Clown of Centrism.
Lobbyist Ron Fournier Says More Independent Voters Will Solve Everything
The infamous Ron "Both Sides" Fournier has structured his pet fetish into a superPAC called Unite America, and he was out selling it on Morning Joe today, pointing out there are more independents than either Democrats or Republicans.
Susan Page said there's "some concern on the part of some Democrats that the rise of talking about third party and independent candidacies in this midterm election could help Republicans because it could be a place for Republicans who are Republican-leaning voters who are unhappy with the Trump era, give them a place to land without voting for Democrats. Do you think there is a partisan impact? I realize there's not a partisan intent by the movement, but is there a possibility of a partisan impact from it?"
"Definitely. You and I have been covering this long enough to know, Republicans say don't vote for independents, you might help the other guy and Democrats say, don't vote for independents because you might help the other guy. 40% of Americans don't like either party, who are forced to vote for one party if they vote at all," Fournier said.
And thus it came to pass that, after the eight years of out-and-proud, fangs-bared racism, slander and sedition the Republican party displayed during the Obama Administration, and a year and a half of clear and irrefutable proof that Donald Trump and the Republicanparty are an existential threat to democracy, Both Siderist schlock peddler Ron Fornier has landed --
Why are there so few independents elected when there are so many independent voters? The single greatest barrier to change is the question of viability. People don’t want to waste their vote. With an angry electorate and more-competitive independent candidates, that may soon change.
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...
In a real and tragic sense, this was the corporate media's own Lynndie England/Abu Ghraib moment: the moment of fatal institutional cowardice when powerful and unaccountable people reached a collectively decision behind closed doors that no one of any importance to the media's business model -- not the Republican party base, not the GOP leadership, not Fox News, not Hate Radio and certainly not themselves -- would ever be held accountable for the multiple, catastrophic failures that during the Bush Administration.
This was the moment when Conservatism's long war against the "Liberal" media achieved final victory. The moment when the corporate media gave up on journalism altogether and surrendered unconditionally to the Right by making the cult of Both Siderism the Beltway's official state religion.
From this moment on, the GOP had the media's guarantee that no matter what whopping great lies they told or what acts of barbarity they might commit right out in the open, the responsibility for those lies and that barbarity would be routinely deflected onto Both Sides or All Sides or All Americans...and thus harmlessly diffused.
From this moment on, the rise of a Republican monster like Donald Trump became inevitable.
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
If you are unfamiliar with Mr. Founier's body of work, it's very simple to get you caught up. During the 2016 election he was a Respected Washington Journalist who was paid actual American money to sit on cable teevee panels and croak out phrases like "It's Both Sides" and "The K'rupt Duopoly" in the face of every act of Republican depravity.
This was -- literally and no kidding -- his only line:
The conditions necessary the create a Trump were carefully built by the Republican party -- brick by racist, paranoid, fact-averse brick -- over the past half-century. And it all happened right out in the open, where even journalists who were knee-walking drunk on Both Siderist popskull should have been able to see it.
And however much Russian help got him to third base, it was greasy little "Fight The K'rupt Duopoly" media Both Siderists like you, Ron, that waved him home.
As I have mentioned once or twice, of all the revered establishment institutions which the Reign of President Stupid has strained to the breaking point (or simply blown to flinders), nothing has the Beltway chattering classes more completely freaked out than gaping cracks which have appeared in the load bearing walls of their High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It. That mighty cathedral of false equivalence where the Sober Men of The Establishment have hidden out for decades in decadent comfort, prattling about the K'rupt Duopoly, the Culture of Washington and how awful it is that Both Sides have let things get so out of hand...
...while outside the Republican Party danced nekkid around the roaring bonfires they were making out of civility. comity and good governance.
Because Donald Trump did not, not, not spring full-formed from the head Steve Bannon 16 months ago. Donald Trump is only the latest and worst product of a Republican Monster Machine whose construction has been aided and abetted every step along the way by a Beltway media that was always only too happy to looked the other way as the GOP used to dead husk of the Party of Lincoln as an egg sac in which to incubate a genuine, out-and-proud American Fascist Party.
[The] rapid-fire Republican bullshit that The Bastard President has unleashed on our national politics has reached such a toxic cadence so fast that the Quislings of the Beltway High and Holy Cult of Both Siderism have had to resort to fortifying their house of worship with whatever material they can find at hand. But since there is no usable material at hand, rather than finally folding up their filthy little scam and getting out of town, they are using whatever ridiculous little scraps...they can pull out of their collective asses.
How bad is it now that they have run out of places to hide, or lies to tell that anyone in their right mind still believes?
So bad that Shuck Todd had to decant Ron Fournier out of the PR scam respectable public relations outfit he now fronts and put him on the teevee one more time just so he could -- as in the days of old -- once again speak aloud the Magic Conjure Words that make the Beltway media's toes collectively curl with nostalgic delight (to which I have added a little emphasis to draw the eye.)
FOURNIER: I think the bigger problem here is that our institutions, including the presidency and the justice department are under attack first by just the forces of change. Our country and society is changing so fast that our institutions aren't keeping up with us. And you have two parties that wage asymmetrical warfare against the institutions when it suits their needs. that's going on in a big way.
FOURNIER:The real problem is what is being done to the institutions of the presidency and the Justice Department when you have attacks coming from political parties and other institutions, don't you think?
FOURNIER: [Comey] is tied up in in knots. To my point, you had in that same election for several weeks you had the Democratic Party attacking Comey and for several weeks you had the Republican Party attacking Comey. You can't win for losing when we have this asymmetrical warfare against the institutions...
Mr. Fournier is so far gone that it never even occurs to him that the criticism from Democrats was entirely within-bounds and legitimate by any standard you care to name, and that attacks from Republicans are the hysterical reaction of a corrupt and depraved enterprise trying like mad to protect itself from exposure to the light of day.
Also I gotta say that Shuck Todd's desperate, verbal flailing were fucking adorable. I especially enjoyed his attempts to explain the existence of a terrible Partisan Trap in which he and his noble fellow Beltway pundits him now find themselves ensnared as if it were some immutable and mysterious law of physics --
TODD:It is as always tell people, I am aware it's the a trap. It doesn't matter. The trap was built around me. I didn't walk into it. it just is.
-- as opposed to a moat he and his fellow Beltway goof built around their High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It for the expressed purpose of keeping vituperative foul-mouthed Liberals like you and me the hell out.
And thus once again America's Sad Clown of Centrism proves that you can take the hack out of the Beltway, but you can never take the Beltway out of the hack.
This time, however, an entire host of our fellow travelers on Twitter are giving him shit about it. And even Ron "Light Fingers" Fournier can't block people that fast.
I was going to burn daylight explaining how Newt Gingrich whipped Matthew Dowd's ass on the teevee machine this morning. I might still, because I think it is instructive to understand how cunning hobgoblins like Gingrich beat simpering idiots like Dowd every time.
But this is so much more delightful and educational...
I weote that if she lost, the world would have her to blame. That was 100% correct.
We had Trump with a 34% chance when you wrote a column saying that Clinton *might* lose. I'm sorry you don't get how probability works. https://t.co/0Fwe9L5irn
No attempt to refute the evidence on Comey. No reporting or facts. Just [sigh]. From a former DC bureau chief turned "both sides" pundit. https://t.co/R1cdnCjgiM
And then, seeing a roiling shitpile of Beltway pundit idiocy, Chris Cillizza felt compelled to do exactly what you would expect Chris Cillizza to do.
Canonbaaaaaall!
Chris Cillizza retweeting Matthew Dowd's support of Ron Fournier's nonsensical statistics on HRC's loss is a "turducken" of bad punditry. pic.twitter.com/LgMZlb1E2r
Now both parties have failed to craft health care reform commanding broad public support. Leave me out of debate over whose failure is worse https://t.co/WCxA7VKyie
What I find hilarious and ridiculous is that my critique of Mr. Dowd and Mr. Fournier could fairly be summarized as follows: "The whole mantra of "Both Sides Do It" has done a huge disservice to pursuit of the truth and integrity of leadership. Stop it now."
