Reader chautauqua notes that it's weird that no one has come up with a better phrase than "Both Siderism" yet.
OK.
How about ... The Gregorian Chant:
Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. (But Liberals Are Actually Worse.) Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides. Both Sides.
Congratulations.
You have now experienced the entire Sunday Morning public interest offering of every major teevee network in America in all its untrammeled glory.
For greater specificity, check out the Bobblespeak Translations and Dean Baker. Also, by sometime tomorrow I'm sure Charlie Pierce will have posted something very much like what I would've written if I'd decide to write something other than this.
Lost in the hurricane of feculence that is the Failed Trump Administration is the story of the battering and beleaguering of the Beltway's most beloved institutions -- the High and Holy Church of Both Siderism.
As you know, the High and Holy Church of Both Siderism was founded by Mr. David Brooks of The New York Timesand a handful of other elite and protected Beltway insiders as refuge for their fellow Bush regime dead-enders and media enablers to hide out and regroup once the Bush Administration turned to shit and everything they had written or spoken on the subject of the Greatness of George Bush and the disloyalty and idiocy of the Left turned to ashes in their mouths.
Obviously admitting the simple and obvious truth they had all been wrong -- horribly, horribly wrong -- about everything and that the disloyal, idiot Left had been right about the Right all along was not an acceptable solution for many reasons, most of which involved protecting their wildly-overpaid jobs and privileges. Instead, they conspired to turn the enormous resources of American corporate media to the task of establishing the High and Holy Church of Both Siderism, which rests upon two, bedrock principles.
First, the past never happened and members in good standing of the High and Holy Church of Both Siderism will never have to worry about being held responsible for anything they say or do by other members of the Church. Members of the Church exist forever in an eternal, accountability-free state of "Now" in which whatever any of them wrote or said yesterday simply does not count today, and whatever they write or say today will not count tomorrow. This is also known as The Beltway Iron Rule of David Brooks.
Second, however badly and publicly Republicans may fuck up everything they touch, and however wild and unhinged their lies may become, nothing is ever exclusively their fault. Everything is always the fault of Both Sides. Or to mix it up a little. sometimes it's the Extremes on Both Sides. Or, frequently The American People are collectively responsible -- everyone, everywhere, equally.
Overnight, the Church became wildly popular, and it is easy to understand why. After all, down in the sanctuary, pudding-soft Centrist quislings could listen to endless homilies about how their cowardice was actually the loftiest form of "journalism" and their and cravenness was really the noblest kind of patriotism...
...while up in the bell tower, Republicans could pour as much rage and racism and paranoia and disaster on the world below as they liked, secure in the knowledge that the Church would forgive them because, really, wasn't the Left somehow equally to blame for all of that wanton destruction?
Of course while this was all happening, every Liberal in American was sounding every alarm that we could lay our hands on, warning anyone who would listen that creating an entire secular media cult dedicated to letting the same mob of unhinged Republican political arsonists off the hook for setting bigger and bigger fires over and over and over was going to lead very quickly to some very bad consequences.
But, of course, no one listened.
And, of course, since the High and Holy Church of Both Siderism was founded on the principle of never acknowledging the consequences of anything its member say or do, they never saw Trump coming.
Well now Trump is here. And the sheer tonnage of the toxic stupid and fascistic crazy that comes belching out of the White House every single fucking day coupled with the sheer, unalloyed, amoral gutlessness of the Republican Party in the leering face of the unhinged lunatic it elected is putting a terrible strain on the rafters and load bearing walls of the the High and Holy Church of Both Siderism. Huddled inside, terrified that their long-postponed Day of Judgement may finally be outside, huffing and puffing and getting ready to blow their Church down, the paid-in-full members of the faithful demand that someone step up and do, well, something.
After all...
And into that breach steps...
...the usual suspects.
Exhibit A: Chuck Todd, host of NBC's Meet the Press...
NEERA TANDEN:...might add the further aspect of the lunacy which is you have senator after senator after senator -- Republican senators -- saying they don't want skinny BCRA. They don't want it to become law, but they're going to vote for it. i mean, just think about that. we are at the end of this process. they have voted down multiple options, and now their way of getting to a bill is to vote for a bill which they've just said they know will increase premiums for millions of people. 20% increase in premiums. It's like..
CHUCK TODD: You were at the White House when that was what the Democrats did. "Don't worry, we'll fix what you don't like in conference." and there never was a conference.
NEERA TANDEN: Oh, my god. We had a bill...
CHUCK TODD: Understand that. No, no, no, and I'm not going to compare the two. Because it's not -- you did hold hearings and all this stuff -- but you skimmed the conference too...
Exhibit B: Brian Williams, former anchor of the NBC Nightly News, and currently a bottom-rung-of-the-corporate-ladder-clinger who is so desperate to stay on teevee that he will do anything his bosses want him to do, including using the tattered scraps of his former respectability to prop up the crumbling edifice of Both Siderism no matter how obviously ridiculous it makes him look (h/t Crooks & Liars):
BRIAN WILLIAMS:Imagine that. We can all repeat the phrase "repeal replace, repeal replace" in our sleep. Heidi, one final word from you, when do the Democrats get off the bench and have to own part of this process?
Remember the old joke from Driftglass back in the Bush Administration? [ed. Yes I do. In fact, it is coming up on its 11th anniversary. Jesus, these people.]
Dick Cheney is caught tossing flaming kittens at homeless veterans. What are the first three words out of Cokie Roberts's mouth?
"But the Democrats..."
And last night as Republicans alone tried to figure out how to keep a promise to take away health insurance from between sixteen and thirty-two million American citizens, including veterans, disabled children, and cancer patients like John McCain...
Brian Williams had to make absolutely sure that "but the Democrats" was added to the mix. Because
That.
Is.
His.
Job.
And Exhibit C was provided to me just now by MSNBC's own Hugh Hewitt -- America's Most Famous Cyborg Sent From The Future To Destroy America -- when he fixed his dead-robot eyes on the camera and declared that this final, abject failure of the GOP's Repeal-And-Go_Fuck-Yourself bill was...
"...the Democrat's worst nightmare."
No kidding.
Both Siderism is not just a blight on the land and not just the crutch that keeps the Republican Party limping along from catastrophe to catastrophe. It is also corporate media policy, and as long as it remains corporate media policy, nothing will change.
And now the prosecution is plum worn out from hauling exhibit after exhibit up to the bench, so I'm gonna go have a little nosh, and then maybe have a some fun at the expense of David Brook's latest crime against journalism, and then record our 399th consecutive episode of The Professional Left Podcast.
But I do not believe in silver bullets. Because, along with you I have watched the media Big Lie of Both Sides Do It shredded over and over again by a belt-fed, 1,200-rounds-per-minute hail of such silver bullets for the last 20 years. More than enough by an overkill factor of a million by any objective standard to put paid to that filthy little lie once and for all.
And along with you, I have watched the media Big Lie of Both Siderism rise from the dead every time. Shrug off wars and lost cities and economic collapses. Shrug off ginned up political witch-hunts, and torture and Fox News. Shrug off birtherism, death panels and the nuclear option. Shrug it all off and accept a Pulitzer Prize for Advanced Shruggery.
Because the Big Lie of Both Sides Do It it isn't merely a filthy little lie. It is a massive, sprawling, multi-tentacled, inconceivably lucrative lie. A planet-smothering, corporate vision statement of a lie.
This is why the Big Lie of Both Siderism cannot be defeated by shaming even it's most ludicrous Conservative practitioners (from CNN, with emphasis added):
Adam Schiff should recuse himself too
By Mike Rogers
Updated 7:45 AM ET, Mon April 10, 2017
Editor's Note: Mike Rogers is a CNN national security commentator, the host of CNN's "Declassified" TV series and the past chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The views expressed are his own.
Representative Devin Nunes' decision to recuse himself from the probe of Russian operations should be applauded. It won't be in today's environment and in the court of public opinion, but it should be applauded nonetheless. The attention was on him, his role and his actions, and not that of the committee or the issues it handles.
Equally, Representative Adam Schiff should consider recusing himself from the probe. For his part, Schiff suggested to the media that he had seen information on Russia-Trump campaign ties that was "the kind of evidence" that would be presented to a grand jury, adding that he had seen additional evidence, but not elaborating further.
Both Nunes and Schiff are equally to blame for the Committee's loss of focus...
Because it the only political bludgeon the Party of Trump has left, and members of the Party of Trump are no longer biologically capable of feeling shame.
Nor can the Big Lie of Both Siderism be defeated with mere facts and logic because for hundreds of America's most overpaid Beltway media urinal cakes, it is literally all they know how to do (from The New Republic):
#Bothsides is the most failed, destructive, opportunistic, and falsifiable analytical conceit in American politics.
...
You can draw any number of inferences from this observation, but the most inarguable, in my opinion, is how devastating it is to the conceit that U.S. political dysfunction—embodied most recently in the GOP theft of a Supreme Court seat—should be attributed to both parties in equal measure. Reflexive even-handedness the analytical foundation of countless news stories, and nearly all punditry, but it wasn’t derived from dispassionate observation of political reality.
Rather, it was contrived to burnish the mainstream media claim to political neutrality, and the neutrality of parent companies. But its effect was to leave implacable conservative critics of mainstream culture totally dissatisfied, and has failed every other consumer in the market for accurate, unskewed news and on-the-level commentary. It should have been put to rest long ago, and can’t die soon enough.
I have been writing exhaustively (and to the point of exhaustion) about this particular subject since my first week blogging 12 years ago, and believe me I was thinking about it and bitching about it long before that. And for all of that time -- through three presidential administrations -- two facts have been perfectly clear.
First, the lazy and cowardly legions of the High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It are the Right's truest ally and the Left's most treacherous opponent. As I wrote just last week, Both Siderism is a...
...parasite-cult that empowers the Right by deflecting and diffusing its opponents. and without which the demise of the Right would be greatly accelerated.
And second, because it is a parasite-cult, as the chasm it tries to straddle between the relatively venial sins of the Left and the outright, raving racism and lunacy of the Right becomes exponentially wider, the more brittle and indefensibly ridiculous Both Siderism becomes.
Both Siderism is to politics in 2017 what the Siegfried Line was to warfare in 1944: an empty shell, overgrown and crawling with cows.
Give us the right tools, and we on the Left could punch through it in two days.
Gods can do anything. They fear nothing: they are gods. But there is one rule, one Seal of Solomon that can confound a god, and to which all gods pay service, to the letter:
When belief in a god dies, the god dies.
When the last acolyte renounces his faith and turns to another deity, the god ceases to be.
They know the terrible simplicity of that truth, the mightiest and the mingiest of gods. They have seen their fellow gods go down to obscurity and banishment for lack of believers...
As the time passes for men and women, so does it pass for gods, for they are made viable and substantial only through the massed beliefs of masses of men and women. And when puny mortals no longer worship at their altars, the gods die.
With "American Gods" set to drop at the end of this month --
-- I thought it would be helpful to step out of the whipsaw torrent of minute-to-minute Republican fuckery and take look at a wider picture though a different lens.
Because we're not in a conventional political fight. We're in the middle of a Holy War.
Of course, we can still win if we choose to -- if we marshal and deploy our energies wisely and effectively -- but we will never win if we refuse to understand the basic nature of the war itself.
So consider the Right. The Conservatives. The Republicans. The "whateverthefuck they're calling themselves this week".
Ignore their talking points and their spin and focus on what they do and how they act.
Depraved. Mindless. Gibbering nonsense. Sure, a lot of money has been spent tarted their lunacy up for public consumption with pious indignation and Gish Galloped lies pitched by men and women in expensive threads, but underneath...nothing. Hollow. Anti-life.
Which means there is no defeating them in any conventional political or cultural sense because it is a mania, not a movement. It is afolie à plusieurs wedded to a blood-drunk, primeval will-to-power, not an ideology. It can't be defeated because it does not recognize the concept of "losing". And it does not recognize the concept of "losing" because it no longer recognizes the concept of "being wrong".
If an election doesn't go their way, it must have been rigged. If the consensus of every reputable scientist on Earth flies in the face of one on their idiotic dogmas, it must be a vast and sinister conspiracy. If their own history -- their very own lies from yesterday -- contradicts the lies they're trying to peddle today...well the past doesn't count. It never happened. It does not exist.
And if the mainstream media will not run daily, screaming headlines on those "rigged" elections, or phantom Obama wiretaps, or secret Benghaaaazi stand-down orders, or the secret Planned Parenthood baby-murdering-for-profit syndicate that your tax dollars are paying for or any of the hundreds of other, utterly batshit lies these scuttlefish take as gospel?
Well obviously the media is part of that vast and sinister conspiracy.
The GOP -- after decades of diligent effort and billions of dollars spent to build their base a detailed and immersive fake "reality" that they never have to leave -- has harnessed the collective horsepower of virtually every bigot, imbecile and lunatic in America to serve their despicable agenda and has used the scum of the Earth to elect the lying DayGlo fascist madman of their dreams.
It is not that they have well-worked-out policies for, well, anything or even a coherent governing philosophy, because they are not a governing party. They are a cult. with a head-full of crazy that has been shit into their skulls decade after decade by Fox News and Hate Radio . They are a cult that worships an entire pantheon of wild, bloodthirsty gods. Gods of Guns and Gods of Lies. A God of White Supremacy. A God of Hate. A God of Liberals are The Devil. And slipped into the mix. a God of Tax Cuts Uber Alles, because they need plutocrats to foot the bill for the maintenance and upkeep of the temple.
Which is more or less what we on the Left have been saying all along. That there is no salvation for these people. No cure for what ails them. The best we can hope for is to identify them for who and what they are and work together to contain them before they break the world beyond repair. As their numbers shrink, their fanaticism will grow, but eventually their gods will not have enough acolytes to sustain themselves and they will collapse.
But there is another, equally toxic but more presentable and profitable cult that we could actually destroy with a little effort. A parasite-cult that empowers the Right by deflecting and diffusing its opponents. and without which the demise of the Right would be greatly accelerated.
The God of The High and Holy Church of Both Siderism has ruled the American political media for most of our lives, and its deacons and cardinals and popes have made themselves wealthy and influential by spreading it doctrine everywhere. It has smothered every honest attempt at healing what is broken in our culture, and provided the Right with a permanent alibi for every atrocity they commit. Like the Matrix, it is everywhere, all around us. You can see it when you turn on your television. You can hear it on the radio and read it in the paper. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes.
It is the comforting, asphyxiating fairy tale that has been pulled over our eyes to blind us to the truth.
Unlike the Gods of the Right which demand absolute fealty to a thick catechism of warped and wicked beliefs, the God of The High and Holy Church of Both Siderism only asks its adherents to believe nothing. To render no judgement of any kind on any act of Conservative barbarism...because out there somewhere there is probably some Dirty Hippie doing something equally terrible. To affix "No Label" to anything, because the worst profanity against the God of The High and Holy Church of Both Siderism is the partisan wish to distinguish between apple juice and battery acid. Between Liberals and Conservatives.
The God of The High and Holy Church of Both Siderism demands only that its acolytes sit on the sidelines and bitch incessantly about everyone equally -- to face the Beltway and whine five times a day about how equally awful and equally partisan and equally steeped in sin Both Sides are.
It is a God of the lazy and the cowardly and meretricious, all of which suits the depraved, anti-life agenda of the Right just fine, because every single time they burn down another democratic institution, they can rely on the deacons of The High and Holy Church of Both Siderism to be first on the scene. blaming the arsonists and the fire department equally.
But unlike the pantheon of the Gods of the Right, The High and Holy Church of Both Siderism has a fatal flaw, because The High and Holy Church of Both Siderism cannot exist on it' own. It can only exist as a mathematical function -- a point midway between two extremes, one of which is wholly fictional and one of which is lethally real.
...carefully divided into Conservatives – who are wrong – and Liberals – who are somehow, mysteriously and equally wrong all the time and in equal numbers on every issue. And only Captain Obvious, frolicking across the few lonely yards of sand on his Isle of Reasonableness, can see the truth.
It does not matter how many millions of miles the Shining Path Republicans drag the “middle ground” to the Right.
It doesn’t matter that the Party of Lincoln is now infested crotch-to-crown with maggoty Segregationists.
It doesn’t matter that Nixon looks like a fucking Socialist compared to the positions now being advocated by the GOP today.
However far into the Armageddonist Abyss the wingnuts charge, Captain Obvious will dutifully pace off half that distance back towards where the Left (the band formerly know as “Rockefeller Republicans”) happen to be that day, drive his little stake into that shifting ground and declare that THIS is where the treasure of Comity and Reasonableness is buried. And that everyone on either side of his little islet is equally and oppositely wrong...
And this is the Thermal Exhaust Port in their Death Star. Because while the Gods of the Right believe simple dogmas anchored in the deranged Id of the Right itself, The High and Holy Church of Both Siderism is a parasite-cult which can only exist as long as it continues to straddle the (Imaginary) Left and the (Actual) Right. Which means that while Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity need never interact with Reality at any level, David Brooks and Matthew Dowd and Ron Fourier and the rest of the Beltway's pernicious Both Siderist peddlers must do their filthy business within sight of some recognizable version of Reality.
They do not have the luxury to pretending that the Trump Administration is not rotten to the core with traitors and mountebanks and imbeciles and demagogues. To appease their god and and keep their jobs they must instead resort to tossing out more and more ludicrously false equivalents.
Which brings us, at last, the Mr. Ron Fournier -- America's Sad Clown of Centrism -- who told a mighty lie on Twitter...
On @MSNBC, Susan Rice is asking us to believe her. That ship has sailed.
At this point I am so tired of these people and my respect for the American political media is already so bottomed-out that I can't really work up a big mad at Fournier being Fournier.
Honestly, all I see when I look at a clown like Fournier is another political eunuch, making empty, ritual sacrifices and keeping the lamps lit in the crumbling temple of a dying god.
A temple we really can knock down and a grubby little god we really can depose if we put our backs into it.
(FYI, I'm still fundraising, so if you can I'd appreciate it. Also I'm way backed up on "Thank You" notes, but they are coming. Really. Would I lie to you? :-)
Despite the brutal bombardment Both Siderism has taken every day for decades by events in the
Real World, within the impregnable mainstream media bubble the sanctity of the
High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It remains utterly untouched and slavish adherence to
its toxic dogma continues to be the truest, surest path to media success and peer-group veneration.
On today's Both Siderist menu, a Triple W Sammich. That's thick slab of
moldy, hackneyed Both Siderism from revered, Beltway media insider Bob
Woodward between two slices of
desperately-trying-to-claw-his-way-back-into-the-Beltway-media's-good-graces
Both Siderism from Joe Walsh.
The first slice of Walsh from last week:
I shall summarize:
20 minutes of yadda yadda about the sins of the GOP and wondering where it
all went wrong. Nothing that the Left hasn't been warning for the past
+30 years.
Followed by five minutes of,
But the real problem is the Extremes on Both Sides. There are
millions of Murricans in Both Parties who are furious that their parties
has been hijacked by the Extremes on Both Sides! We need an
Independent party that...blah blah blah.
All the shit you have heard 10,000 times before.
Then comes the slab of ooey-gooey Both Siderism from Woodward, who I always
find less stultifyingly boring when listened to at around 1.75x speed, but
your mileage may vary.
Then, the second slice of Walsh, also from last week:
Which I shall once again summarize:
Bork, Bork, Bork.
Borkity Bork.
Both Sides are equally to blame but Dems started it.
Because Borkity Bork.
And if you don't agree with me you're in a cult
Bork. Bork. Borkity Bork.
If you'd like to know a little more about why bringing a Bork to
a Ketanji Brown Jackson fight is so wildly inappropriate, I wrote about
it last week ("Borkity, Bork, Bork, Bork!") when A.B. Stoddard and Charlie Sykes were pulling the same shit because
it never fucking stops with these people.
In the hours after a car plowed into a group of anti-racist counter-protesters on Saturday, Trump addressed the violence in broad strokes, saying that he condemns "in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides."
Speaking slowly from his New Jersey golf club while on a 17-day working vacation, Trump added: "It's been going on for a long time in our country. Not Donald Trump. Not Barack Obama. It's been going on for a long, long time."
As longtime readers know, I havehad a "bordering on obsessive" (and occasionally crossing the border and taking up residence on the other side) focus on "Both Siderism" practically since the day this blog went live, twelve and a half years ago.
This is because, even long before this blog went live, it was terribly clear to me that "Both Siderism" was not merely the single biggest Big Lie in American politics, but also the most corrupt and corrosive lie of all, because it is a Big Lie that makes all the little lies possible.
...Fourth -- and of paramount importance, so pay attentionbecause it will be on the final exam -- is the cement that holds this whole demented juggernaut together.
The Biggest of all the Big Lies.
Say it with me now...
Both Sides Do It.
"Both Sides Do It" is the Alpha and the Omega of political lies in modern America. It is the first falsehood that David Brooks has turned to to prop up virtually every one of his shitty columns since the collapse of the Bush Administration...
...and it is the final, desperate, excuse-of-last-resort that every single wingnut in Christendom turns to when they the get themselves cornered in another otherwise inescapable pit of their own bullshit. It is the fraud that launched a thousand media careers, several ridiculous political "movements" and one entire radio network. It is...
...[a] parasite-cult that empowers the Right by deflecting and diffusing its opponents. and without which the demise of the Right would be greatly accelerated...
And so, as surely as projectile vomiting follows a night of Jägerbombs and tacos, when the King of the Birthers was directly confronted with the leering, raving racist face of his party's most dog-loyal foot soldiers and asked to comment, of course he immediately and automatically lunged for the same, time-tested alibi that every Crazy Uncle Liberty and Aunty ALL CAPS in America have been taught over and over again is their secret weapon. President Stupid felt perfectly comfortable telling this particular Big Lie on Saturday because the Beltway media had long-ago given it's permission to every scumbag on the Right to deploy it as their own inexhaustible, all-occasion, all-powerful, Beltway-media-approved Patronus Charm.
Or don't you remember how just 10 months ago -- just two days before the 2016 election -- virtually every professional pundit in America was piling giddily into the "Both Sides Do It" van --
-- for what they thought was going to be four years of extremely profitable Hillary-bashing, witch-hunts, and endless yawping about the Corrupt Duopoly and the dizzying joys of "disruption"?
Well, the disruption they wanted -- they begged for -- has arrived.
Which brings us to "Meet the Press" and Mr. Rich Lowry: a man deeply embittered by the fact that The Breitbart Collective has replaced his National Review as America's leading journal of White Supremacy. You see, Mr. Lowry spent his career specializing in the kind of tasseled-loafer White Supremacy cloaked in a smirking, viperish ersatz-erudition that appeals to a small coterie of aging Republican gentry, while The Breitbart Collective -- with its blunt, front-page, in-your-face racism and conspiracy-mongering -- feeds the debased and insatiable appetites of the massive, meathead base of the party.
Well the leader of one of these cliques now sits at the right hand of President Stupid, while the other must sit on a panel with Chuck Todd while being side-eyed into a pillar of salt by Joy-Ann Reid. And so, like the cornered rat he so eerily resembles, Mr. Lowry predictable scampers for the safety of the High and Holy Church of Both Siderism -- that well-fortified and amply-provisioned pundit safe-house which so many of Mr. Lowry's colleagues have labored so assiduously to create for occasions just like this (emphasis added):
RICH LOWRY:I do think he, obviously, should've specifically denounced the white nationalists. But there are two sides to this now. This country now has a violent fringe on the right and on the left, both of whom, the white nationalists and the so-called anti-fascists who like violence, who thrill to violence, like the attention that comes with it. And this is going to get worse before it gets better.
...
RICH LOWRY: Look, you have so-called anti-fascists who dress in black, wear masks.
JOY-ANN REID:Were they beating clergy yesterday?
RICH LOWRY: There was violence on both sides.
JOY-ANN REID: There was certainly not.
RICH LOWRY:Yes, there was.
JOY-ANN REID:Were they attacking clergy?
RICH LOWRY: You didn't see the video?
JOY-ANN REID: I spoke with clergy who were being beaten with brass knuckles by neo-Nazis.
RICH LOWRY:Anti-fascists also beat people up, break things, and burn things. They both should be condemned...
As we must do every week, we shall leave the question of why the fuck hobgoblins like Lowry are given any air time anywhere for future generations who have access to Chuck Todd's terms-of-service contract at NBC and move on to the grand prize for network teeevee wingnut enabling, which this week must go to 'ol Chuckles the Clown himself.
Chuck Todd who. completely unprompted, went waaay out of his way to open a whole new super-secret sub-basement emergency spider-hole beneath the main sanctuary of High and Holy Church of Both Siderism. A special, emergency pundit panic room for members of the Beltway media who wake up one day to discover that Both Siderism is (at least temporarily) no longer able to hide them from the baleful gaze of Reality. Behold as Chuck Todd once again betrays his profession by going full David Brooks and simply erasing the entire depraved and inconvenient history of the modern Republican Party prior to 2015:
CHUCK TODD:... Amy Walter, look, it is not new to have this fringe. The Republican Party for a long time has fought very hard to keep these people out, you know. The Democratic Party pushed them out. Republican Party pushed them out. Until 2015, there's been this sense that there was a permission slip.
It is no exaggeration to say that the powerful media gatekeepers like Chuck Todd believe their primary professional duty is to absolve Republicans of any behavior no matter how heinous or treasonous in order to preserve the Big Lie of Both Siderism.
And until that changes things are never going to get any better.
These days, playing the Both Sides Do It card is no longer the automatic win
it was just a few years ago. Yes, it's still with us like the chronic
ideological disease it has always been, but the unalloyed deference to anyone
who invokes it is not so omnipresent.
To save what's left of his career, Matthew Dowd, the undisputed King of Both
Siderism during the 2016 presidential campaign, has gone so far as to nuke his
entire, damning Twitter archive full of gloating, pissy Both Siderism and
automatically block anyone who brings up his very inconvenient past.
Pundits who, make no mistake, are still members of the High and Holy Church of
Both Sides Do It, now routinely couch their Both Siderism by prefacing their
lie with
"This is not one of those both sides do it things".
And even recently-former Republicans regularly roll their eyes at Both
Sides-ism.
Don't get me wrong. It's still out there and it's still virulent,
especially at the local level where fools, cowards, simpletons and Republicans
still hide their foolishness or stupidity or cowardice or the rank evil of
their party by aping the ersatz savviness of the pundits and waving off any
Republican atrocity with, well, y'know, Both Sides
But the Pig People would be nothing but a minor nuisance -- a
boil on the ass of democracy -- without their Centrists who keep
the "Both Sides Do It" spider hole well-furnished and open for business.
Pound for pound, Centrism is the biggest and most debilitating lie in American
politics bar none. It is the Big Lie that makes all the little lies possible,
which is why I focus so hard on those who traffic in it. They are the ones most vulnerable to and terrified of being called out in
public. They are the ones we must run out of the media on a rail.
-- was the darkest of heresies. Merely whispering your doubts about Both
Siderism, questioning whether it was a toxin that had poisoned our politics,
was considered shameful and transgressive.
So just imagine the fate of those of us who shouted this heresy out loud.
Over and over again.
Decade after decade.
All of the following is from a two-week period, a decade ago, in September of
2012.
On this blog, I have made the point thousands of times over the last seven years that Fake Centrism is our most dire and dangerous political problem.
Without a Fake Centrist narrative, Conservatives have no place to
hide their lies, slander and depravity. With a Fake Centrist
narrative, there is no Conservative fraud or treason so large that the
media will not* bury it under an avalanche of reflexive, "Both
sides do it"-ism.
Fake Centrism is the retrovirus that is killing our democracy's
capacity to defend itself from its internal enemies: it is the
immune-system-destroying disease which allows every other kind of
Hate Radio/Fox News opportunistic political malignancy to
run wild through our body politic. And man, once you start to
notice how automatically every water-cooler Cicero and
two-bit Tom Friedman uses Fake Centrism to prop up
their lazy arguments, it's really creepy.
"Both of our political parties have become openly uncivil toward
each other and toward anyone or anything that disagrees with their
programs. The televised debates focus on which candidate can hurt or
dishonor the others the most. The winners are usually the most
dishonest, unscrupulous and immoral of the lot and who have the most
money to wage the most comprehensive “hate” campaigns."
How this has fuck-all to do with creativity, I have no
idea.
The author uses the list to whine about what big meanie heads our
politicians have become
Of all the places to come across centrist bullshit. They could at least
have the decency to confine it to the news sites.
Once you start listening for it, you cannot help but notice how the Big
Lie of Centrism has seeped into everything and now shows up everywhere.
And on. The Big Lie of Centrism -- Like
Strontium-90 In The Milk, Continued.
And on: The Big Lie of Centrism -- Like Strontium-90 In
The Milk, Continued Again
A million posts have been written by a thousand bloggers debunking the
Fake Centrist equivalence using every instrument in our orchestra,
from methodical deconstruction to operatic swearing.
None of it works, because aging Villager clowns like Ted Koppel will
never put themselves across the table from people who will press the one
question for which there is no rebuttal:
And what if you're wrong?
What if the actual history of the rise of Hate Radio and Fox News and
Regnery Press and on and on exactly parallels the craven, capitulating,
Broderite fail, fail, fail of your Mainstream Media?
What if the simple, sad truth of the matter is that your "objective"
corporate media was simply, hideously unfit to cope with
an aggressive, coordinated and sustained siege from a mob of
well-funded demagogues and liars (Hunter Thompson from The Atlantic, 1997):
MH: How will history remember Bill Clinton?
HST:I don't know about history. I don't get any satisfaction out of the
old traditional journalist's view -- "I just covered the story.
I just gave it a balanced view." Objective journalism is one of the
main reasons American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for
so long. You can't be objective about Nixon. How can you be
objective about Clinton?
MH:
Objective journalism is why politics have been corrupt for so
long?
HST:If you consider the great journalists in history, you don't see too
many objective journalists on that list. H. L. Mencken was not
objective. Mike Royko, who just died. I. F. Stone was not objective.
Mark Twain was not objective. I don't quite understand this worship
of objectivity in journalism. Now, just flat-out lying is different
from being subjective.
MH:If you found yourself teaching a journalism
course -- Dr. Thompson's Journalism 101 -- what would you
tell students who were looking to go about covering stories?
HST:You offering me a job? Shit. Well, I wouldn't do it, I guess. It's
not important to me that I teach journalism classes.
MH: But if you did, what would your reading list be?
HST:Oh, I'd start off with Henry Fielding. I would read writers. You
know, I would read Conrad, Hemingway, people who use words. That's
really what it's about. It's about using words to achieve an end.
And the Book of Revelation. I still read the Book of Revelation when
I need to get cranked up about language. I would teach Harrison
Salisbury of The New York Times. All the journalists who
are known, really, have been that way because they were
subjective.
I think the trick is that you have to use words well enough so that
these nickel-and-dimers who come around bitching about being objective or the
advertisers don't like it are rendered helpless by the fact that
it's good. That's the way people have triumphed over conventional
wisdom in journalism.
It was the relentless fail, fail, fail of your Mainstream Media, Mr. Koppel, more than any other factor, which left our democracy
staked out like a goat at a watering hole, wide open to the predations
of monsters like Rove and Limbaugh, DeLay and Coulter, Cheney and
Hannity...
And Trump.
And on:The Big Lie of Centrism -- Like Strontium-90 In
The Milk, Contd Yet Again.
They've been both relentlessly courted and politically sidelines for
years. But two new books show how voters who reject both Democrats and
Republicans can become a force.
In the final stretch of this play-to-the-base presidential election,
it is strange to say that the 40 percent of Americans who identify as
independent are currently close to an afterthought. With so few
undecided voters left, even most independents have chosen sides by
now.
But some day this election is going to end, and if the next president
and the next Congress hope to break through the hyperpartisan
stalemate, they are going to have to find ways to appeal to the
largest and fastest-growing segment of the American electorate.
Edwards details prescriptions for each of these problems: primarily
election reform, including open primaries and redistricting reform and
congressional reform, including filibuster reform. (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)...
Sigh.
I frankly cannot see the other side of this river of offal. It runs
as deep and wide as the mighty Mississippi and carries so much freight for awful, lazy and cowardly people that I can't imagine the
corporations who own our media will allow it to be dredged without a
fight.
But what else can we do?
What immortal hand or eye/
Can reframe this fearful symmetry?
Not a Liberal hand, certainly.
Not a Liberal eye.
Because as long as Liberals are not permitted to exist anywhere within
our national political conversation except as strawmen and cartoon
characters, there will never be a spare nickel in the system for anyone
who stands athwart this nonsense and shouts "bullshit".
As the Hunter Thompson interview reminds us, the plague of Both Siderism in
American political reportage has spanned the millenia. It's the engine
that drives a mighty, multi-billion dollar machine that smooshes anything that
would stand against it. Which made it all the more dispiriting trying to
pound home the same point that no one wanted to hear over and over again on a
platform so tiny that maybe no one listening it at all.
In fact, a few of you might recall that, just to relieve the mind-numbing barrage of Both Siderism which rained down on us every day from every direction, 12 years ago I very briefly spun off a parody blog called "The Driftington Post" --
-- in the voice of the endless parade of Both Siderist opportunists and scuttlefish over the decades who have all but destroyed our ability to speak honestly about our national problems.
[Fun Fact: The Driftington post above links of a now-dead-and-gone article from The American Conservative that was entitled, "Can The Tea Party Deliver?"]
Now flash forward 12 years and you can, perhaps, imagine my reaction to the most recent
crew of Both Siderist grifters launching, with great fanfare and national
media coverage. this latest political scam which is literally nothing but a
big ol' slab of moldy Both Siderism --
-- served up like Elmer Gantry selling salvation to the rubes.
On the other hand. looking back at where we were 10 years ago in this
long, uphill slog, it's fair to say that you and I have made some actual progress.
The mindless repletion of some variation Both Sides Do It lie has become the all-purpose, all-occasion excuse that every degenerate, every coward and every fascist-in-smiley-face tosses out every time they're cornered. I still contend that Marco Rubio's sweaty, stumble-bum performance on The Daily Show in 2012 set a standard for Gish Galloping Both Siderism that very few will ever match:
Centrism Triumphant
In case you missed Jon Stewart's award-verging "interview" with Marco Rubio, here is your rush transcript of Senator Rubio's answer to Jon Stewart every single time Mr. Stewart tried very respectfully to point out that Senator Rubio was, um, lying, and that the relentless, pathological obstructiveness of the Republican Party was unmatched by anything Democrats have done in modern history.
"Both sides..."
"Well, you know, both sides..."
"Both Democrats and Republicans..."
"That's just politics..."
"The Democrats left us no choice..."
"Both sides..."
"Democrats and Republicans..."
"Both sides..."
"Both Democrats and Republicans..."
And so forth, to the point of being comical.
Like every other Republican culture war criminal, Senator Rubio has been conditioned within an inch of his life to always answer any question about the unique perfidy and hypocrisy of his political Party with the Big Lie of Centrism and to refuse to stop repeating the Big Lie of Centrism until the questions stop regardless of circumstances.
My point being that the Big Lie of Both Sides Do It is now so automatic that today even the most famous doddering, mush-brained fuck-up in the world knows to grab for it when Scary Facts start closing in.
Trump, pressed on the environment in U.K. visit, says climate change goes ‘both ways’
And now, President Trump, who has called global warming a “Chinese hoax” and pulled the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, appears similarly unmoved by an appeal from British royalty. The president left a 90-minute meeting this week with Charles, Prince of Wales, unconvinced that the climate is warming, which it is, according to overwhelming scientific consensus. The Earth’s average surface temperature in 2018 was the fourth-highest since 1880, when record-keeping began. That means that the past five years have been the warmest in recorded history. But the president has other beliefs. “I believe that there’s a change in weather, and I think it changes both ways,” he said in a wide-ranging interview with Piers Morgan on “Good Morning Britain” that aired Wednesday morning. “Don’t forget it used to be called global warming. That wasn’t working. Then it was called climate change. Now it’s actually called extreme weather, because with extreme weather, you can’t miss.”...
Like the Matrix ...
... the fascist-enabling poison of Both Siderism is everywhere now.
In our political groundwater. In the rain. On the breeze.
And if you would like to take the matter up with the man who has done more than anyone else to spread this plague into every corner of of our political ecosystem -- the Pope of the High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It --
-- he can currently be reached on his book tour where he is busy monetizing his midlife crisis as a book of Moral Instruction for Our Parlous Times.
Houston "thank you" for sharing @nytdavidbrooks. Happy for your journey toward joy, the soul, filling voids, especially heads up on "Weaver: The Social Fabric Project." Sad to miss over subscribed May 23 @WACHouston book lecture, "The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life"
— Deborah Mansfield (@STEAMtoInnovate) June 6, 2019
My 12th Anniversary Fundraiser (Day Two) brings us the two subjects Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times loves to obsess over far and away more than any others: guilt and Both Siderism.
Because collectively they encompass the contents of his mingy little soul.
So you know he's having a helluva day when he decides to take these two moldiest ingredients off the shelf, shove them in a blender, purree them into mud and them wallow in it for 800 words ("The Strange Persistence of Guilt".)
And since this is a David Brooks column, once again the collective "We" are the problem.
We have words and emotional instincts about what feels right and wrong, but no settled criteria to help us think, argue and decide.
Sure we do.
Just look past your own navel, Mr. Brooks, and you'll see that over here on the actual Left and not the one you invented out of whole cloth to make your toxic Both Siderist claptrap balance out, the principles that scare the shit out Conservatives and Both Siderist -- facts, reason, history, science -- are still well regarded and used as our common currency every day.
The problem, as Mr. David Brooks fucking well knows-but-will-never-say is that his Movement and his political party and his propaganda engines have all gone straight to the devil, on purpose. They're all nuts. They have Brexited from the Enlightenment and they no longer honor the coins of that realm.
But of course Mr. Brooks' is so deeply in hock to that Movement and that political party and that media that he cannot even hint that any of this is true. So he must lie continually (hence the obsessive Both Siderism) in the full knowledge that he is lying (hence the guilt.)
Secular philosophies that grew out of the Enlightenment have fallen apart.
No they haven't. For the last 30 years they have been taking a shit-ton of incoming fire from the ghouls and con men who run Mr. Brooks' Republican party, but the fundamentals of the Enlightenment aren't going anywhere.
And here comes the Both Siderism...
We haven’t entered the age of milquetoast bourgeois relativism. Instead, society has become a free-form demolition derby of moral confrontation: the cold-eyed fanaticism of students at Middlebury College and other campuses nationwide; the rage of the alt-right; holy wars over transgender bathrooms; the furious intensity at every town-hall meeting on every subject.
Got that?
Students protesting "Bell Curve" Murray at one campus = "campuses nationwide" = the American fascists who now occupy the White House. And "holy wars over transgender bathrooms" = millions of Americans who are terrified and furious that the Randites and fascists who now run the government of the United States are trying to strip them of their health care.
This is the kind of filthy false equivalence which Mr. Brooks has traded in ever since he ducked out of the "George Bush is an economic and military genius" scam back during his Weekly Standard days. He gets paid for this, kids, Paid a lot of money by three different American media corporations to dismiss your righteous fury over the rise of the American fascist party as nothing more than the same kind of ruckus raised by America's most depraved Christopaths,
Which is why Mr, Brooks never lets his handlers book him into any venue where anyone might actually ask him any tough questions.
We’re living in an age of great moral pressure, even if we lack the words to articulate it.
We don't lack the words, Mr. Brooks. We have plenty of world. Millions of words. I myself have 12 year's worth of words piled up om this little blog. Sure a lot of them are "fuck", but there are ten dollar college words in there as well. Picture too, at no additional charge.
Now, our problem is that we represent an existential threat to both the Right and Mr. Brooks' Fake Center, Which means that no one is ever going to gift us a New York Times/Meet the Press/NPR-sized platform from which to enunciate our words to the world.
But like Super Chicken, we knew the blog was dangerous when we took it.
Onward.
And yet we have no clear framework or set of rituals to guide us in our quest for goodness. Worse, people have a sense of guilt and sin, but no longer a sense that they live in a loving universe marked by divine mercy, grace and forgiveness. There is sin but no formula for redemption.
So where the hell does David Brooks get off speaking for "we" and "people"? Because if Mr, Brooks' long career has demonstrated one fact beyond dispute it's that he hasn't the first fucking clue what anyone outside of his tiny, cloistered world thinks about anything. No, this reeks of a middle-aged man projecting his own, immeasurable guilt onto the rest of the world. Guilt over moralizing for years about God and Marriage and Family even as he was dumping his wife to take up with his young assistant. Guilt over spending his entire career paving the way for the monster that now occupies the White House. Guilt which Mr. David Brooks is too morally polluted to admit, so "we" get one more sermon on "our" collective naughty behavior.
So bend over, because here comes more Both Siderism!
We see events through the lens of moral Marxism, as a class or ethnic struggle between the evil oppressor and the supposedly innocent oppressed. The moral narrative of colonialism is applied to every situation. The concept of inherited sin is back in common currency, only these days we call it “privilege.”
And even more Both Siderism!
As the political scientist Thomas U. Berger put it, “We live in an age of apology and recrimination.” The conflicts on campus take on a Salem witch trial intensity. In the Middle East, the Israelis and the Palestinians compete for the victimhood narrative. Even America’s heartland populists see themselves as the victims of the oppressive coastal elites. Steve Bannon is the Frantz Fanon of the whites.
And then Mr. Brooks sticks the landing with a final, steaming pile of his barely-sublimated guilt:
I notice some schools and prisons have restorative justice programs to welcome offenders back into the community. They tend to be more substantive than the cheap grace of instant forgiveness. I wonder if the wider society needs procedures like that, so the private guilt everybody feels isn’t transmuted into a public state of perpetual moral war.
This from a man who has made his fortune trafficking in the cheap grace of Whig fan fiction and Both Siderist fairy tales. Because, as one cold-eyed Liberal fanatic put it a couple of years ago...
...it is not merely a boo-boo or two or a misstep or two from which Mr. Brooks is trying to separate himself: he is seeking to annul thirty years of well-documented facts.
He is filing for divorce from his own past, and factual reality does not grant such requests.
And so, like Henry VIII, Mr. Brooks has had to invent a brand new church which would grant his divorce. A church from which history and causality have been excommunicated in favor of cheerful fairy tales. (from Mr. Brooks today, "Goodness and Power")
...
Maybe once upon a time there was an environment in which ruthless Machiavellians had room to work their dark arts, but we don’t live in Renaissance Italy. We live in a world of universal media attention. Once there is a hint of scandal of any kind, the political world goes into maximum frenzy and everything stops.
We live in a world in which power is dispersed. You can’t intimidate people by chopping your enemies to bits in the town square. Even the presidency isn’t a powerful enough office to allow a leader to rule by fear. You have to build coalitions by appealing to people’s self-interest and by luring them voluntarily to your side.
Modern politics, like private morality, is about building trust and enduring personal relationships. That means being fair, empathetic, honest and trustworthy. If you stink at establishing trust, you stink at politics.
Three words: Bengahaaazi!Bengahaaazi!Bengahaaazi!
Also death panels and birth certificates.
Also Vince Foster and "It's been pretty well confirmed..."
Also a thousand other very real atrocities which Mr. Brooks' Conservatism has committed against the common good but which have been exiled from Mr. Brooks' new church for unrepentant cowards and con men: a church which purloins the language of morality and humility from honorable faiths in order to cobble together an infinitely flexible dogma of ouchless redemption without confession or atonement for Mr. Brooks and the rest of our loathsome media elect.
