Today's Press Poodle

Michelle Goldberg can be one of the Poodliest of the Press Poodles.

That said, she does show signs - on occasion - of pulling her head out of her ass.

Her OpEd piece today is one such occasion. Kinda.

(pay wall)

Four Stark Lessons From a Democratic Upset


By Michelle Goldberg

When I reached Marie Gluesenkamp Perez on Monday morning, the Democratic representative-elect from Washington State was sitting on the steps of the U.S. Capitol.

Her race against Joe Kent, a stolen-election conspiracy theorist endorsed by Donald Trump, had been called on Saturday, giving her enough time to get to Capitol Hill for new-member orientation. Because of the Republican lean of her district, Washington’s Third, her victory was widely considered the biggest upset of any House contest; FiveThirtyEight’s final forecast had given her a mere 2 percent chance of winning. “A lot of people sacrificed to get me here,” she told me, speaking with particular gratitude of all the mothers who called in babysitting favors to knock on doors for her.

I’d gone to Gluesenkamp Perez’s district in September because I saw it as a microcosm of the midterms. Kent, a Fox News regular who put a member of the Proud Boys on his payroll, had ousted Jaime Herrera Beutler, one of the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection, in the primary. Gluesenkamp Perez hoped that there would be enough moderate Republicans worried about the future of American democracy, and aghast at the end of Roe v. Wade, to offset Kent’s partisan advantage. The outcome, I thought, would tell us whether Republicans would pay any price for their extremism.

It is a profound relief to see that they have. Having spent a fair amount of time thinking about this bellwether race, I see four main takeaways from it.

1. Democrats need to recruit more working-class and rural candidates.

Gluesenkamp Perez is a young mother who owns an auto repair shop with her husband. They live in rural Skamania County, in a hillside house they built themselves when they couldn’t get a mortgage to buy one. On the trail she spoke frequently of bringing her young son to work because they couldn’t find child care. She shares both the cultural signifiers and economic struggles of many of the voters she needed to win over.

“I hope that people see that this as a model,” she told me on Monday. “We need to recruit different kinds of candidates. We need to be listening more closely to the districts — people want a Congress that looks like America.”

2. Voters can see the link between abortion bans and authoritarianism.

During her campaign, Gluesenkamp Perez spoke about having a miscarriage and being forced to make her way through a wall of protesters to get medical care at a Planned Parenthood clinic. While Kent called for a national abortion ban, she appealed to her district’s libertarian streak by including both gun rights and reproductive rights in her promise to “protect our freedoms.”

On Monday, she said that voters connected abortion bans to a broader narrative of right-wing radicalism. Even if voters thought abortion rights in Washington State were safe with Democrats in charge, the end of Roe showed that Republicans are willing to upend some basic assumptions undergirding American life. “It made people take Republicans, especially the extreme wing, seriously when they say they want to defund the Department of Education, the Department of Justice, the F.B.I.,” she said.

Heads Up: Here comes the Both Sides razor blade in the apple - although it's a tiny bit less obvious than what NYT editors usually require.

Please proceed.

3. MAGA Republicans are stuck in a media echo chamber.

A common rap on liberals is that they’re trapped in their own ideological bubble, unable to connect with normal people who don’t share their niche concerns. This cycle, that was much truer of conservatives. The ultimate example of this was the Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters, the human incarnation of a right-wing message board, who lauded the Unabomber manifesto and put out gun fetishist campaign ads that made him look like a serial killer.

Kent suffered from a similar sort of insularity. He attacked sports fans, suggesting it’s not masculine for men to “watch other men compete in a silly game,” a view common in corners of the alt-right but unintelligible to normies. Gluesenkamp Perez said Kent seemed shocked when, during a debate, his line about vaccines as “experimental gene therapy” didn’t go over well, which she took as a sign that he’d spent too much time “operating in the chat rooms.”

The ultimate expression of the right-wing echo chamber was the Stop the Steal movement itself. Conservatives might have been less credulous about it if they weren’t so out of touch with the Biden-voting majority.

4. Data isn’t everything.

As FiveThirtyEight’s Nathaniel Rakich acknowledged on Twitter, the site’s model didn’t take into account Kent’s personal weaknesses, and included only one post-Labor Day poll. An overreliance on a few data points made Gluesenkamp Perez’s position look weaker than it really was. Democrats I spoke to in Washington State — as well as some Republicans — believed she had a decent shot, but national Democrats seem to have remained unconvinced. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee gave her no financial support.

Democrats obviously shouldn’t disregard poll numbers or data about the partisan breakdown of the electorate. But we underestimate the human factor in politics at our peril.

“You’ve got a Trump cult-of-personality acolyte, and everybody writes off the district,” Brian Baird, a Democrat who represented the Third District from 1999 to 2011, told me in September. “But up steps this young, feisty, bright, moderate woman, with a young child, trying to run a small business, and she says, ‘I’m not going to put up with this.’” Sometimes stories tell you what statistics can’t.

Today's Beau

The parties are not the same. We can drop the Both Sides crap because - well, because it's crap.

Hypothetical:

• Your buddy needs a ride home from the Pride Parade.
• He's dressed to look the part - shiny boots, short shorts, crop top, and rainbow hair.
• You decide you should stop in for a beer or two, and when you're inside, you notice you need to go a few doors down and hit the ATM.
• You excuse yourself, and leave him at the bar for a few minutes.

• In one instance, you notice some of the other patrons are wearing band t-shirts or kinda quasi-hippie-looking garb, some of the men have ponytails, etc. Classic Rock is playing on the overhead.
• In a second instance, about half the the men are wearing MAGA hats, and there's a few Let's Go Brandon shirts, and some of the ladies are decked out with several pounds of costume jewelry, and big hair. The music is Toby Keith and Lee Greenwood.

Based solely on appearances, you have to know that the first gang is pretty likely to lean to the "liberal" side - and they'll be voting mostly Democrat.

You can be just as sure that the second gang is prob'ly pretty "conservative', voting Republican.

Question: Which crowd do you feel more comfortable leaving your friend alone with?

Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column

Eric Swalwell

"Who are you here for?"

For a long time now, Republicans have been pushing the manichean concept of dichotomy. ie: it's always and only one way, or it's always and only the other way - there can be no nuance - there's no spectrum.

If you're not going to do anything to stop gun violence - in fact, if you're going to actively pursue policies that have the effect of enabling it, and thereby encouraging it - then you are no longer siding with the kids. You're siding with the people who murder those kids.

So there ya go, GOP - you've wanted this Either/Or shit, and now you've stepped in it your own bad selves.

Of course, there's also a branch of their disinformation organization that's always pimping the contradiction of idea of Both Sides Do It, and Why-Bother-They're-All-The-Same.

And that's a lie, which fits perfectly, because - Daddy State:

THE BASICS:

The Daddy State lies as a means of demonstrating their power.

The lies have practically nothing to do with the subject of the lies.

Lying about everything is a way to condition us - to make us accept their premise that they can do anything they want.

THE GOAL IS

TO DICTATE REALITY TO US

From Outa The Past

Not that long ago.

Tess Rafferty wrote this piece on November 10th, 2016, 48 hours after the election.

And into the very near future - Dana Milbank, WaPo:

Meet the Trump saboteur in charge of undermining Biden — and America

If, in the new year, pandemic vaccines aren’t available as promised, Americans can’t return to work because economic relief isn’t delivered or an adversary successfully attacks the United States because national security agencies couldn’t pay for new defenses, a hefty share of the blame should be placed on a man you’ve probably never heard of: One Russell Thurlow Vought.

As President Trump’s budget director, he conspicuously failed in his stated goal of controlling the debt. Despite his efforts, the debt increased by $6 trillion on his two-year watch as director of the Office of Management and Budget, the biggest jump in history.

He also has been disastrous in his fiscal forecasts. On Feb. 10, he predicted 2.8 percent growth for the year, saying, “our view is that, at this point, coronavirus is not something that is going to have ripple effects.” A few weeks later, the economy collapsed.

But what Russ Vought is very good at is sabotage. He’s sabotaging national security, the pandemic response and the economic recovery — all to make things more difficult for the incoming Biden administration. That he’s also sabotaging the country seems not to matter to Vought, who has spent nearly two decades as a right-wing bomb thrower.

He has blocked civil servants at OMB from cooperating with the Biden transition, denying President-elect Joe Biden the policy analysis and budget-preparation assistance given to previous presidents-elect, including Barack Obama and Trump himself. Transition figures warn that it will likely delay and hamper economic and pandemic relief and national security preparation (the Pentagon is the other key agency resisting transition cooperation with the incoming administration).

Thursday afternoon, Vought released a bombastic letter accusing the Biden transition of making “false statements” about OMB’s uncooperativeness — and then essentially confirming that it would not cooperate: “What we have not done and will not do is use current OMB staff to write the [Biden transition’s] legislative policy proposals to dismantle this Administration’s work. . . . Redirecting staff and resources to draft your team’s budget proposals is not an OMB transition responsibility. Our system of government has one President and one Administration at a time.”

Nobody should have expected otherwise from Vought.

He was the author of a Sept. 4 memo attacking critical race theory and canceling racial sensitivity programs, which he called “divisive, anti-American propaganda.” The issue, apparently prompted by a segment Trump viewed on Fox News, became key to the final weeks of Trump’s race-baiting campaign.

Vought was also the mastermind of Trump’s executive order that attempts to reclassify tens of thousands of civil servants who work in policy roles so they can be easily fired. Vought has proposed reclassifying 88 percent of OMB staff (425 people).

He was a key figure in the Ukraine imbroglio, freezing military aid to the country as Trump pushed for Ukraine’s president to announce a probe of Joe and Hunter Biden and the Democrats. The Government Accountability Office determined the budgetary freeze violated the Impoundment Control Act. Vought also ignored a subpoena during the impeachment inquiry.

Vought’s 2017 nomination to be OMB deputy director (he later served 18 months as acting director and has served five as director) was nearly undone over a 2016 article in which he wrote: “Muslims do not simply have a deficient theology. They do not know God because they have rejected Jesus Christ, his Son, and they stand condemned.”

Vought spent seven years on the vanguard of conservative extremism as a senior official at Heritage Action, the political wing of the Heritage Foundation. The group fought GOP leadership and pushed lawmakers into unyielding positions.

During that time, Vought wrote a series of rambling posts for RedState.com arguing that “incrementalism doesn’t work for the right,” that Republicans “are fundamentally in their DNA unwilling to fight” and that Republicans needed to have “a willingness” to shut the government down. He exhorted Republicans to “embrace the sort of brinkmanship that shows they are playing to win.” He railed against a 2012 infrastructure bill as “communism.”

Before Heritage, Vought worked for the right-wing House Republican Study Committee whose job, he said, “is to push leadership as far to the right as is possible and flat out oppose it when necessary.”

He has continued to lob grenades from inside the White House. At an antiabortion rally, he claimed credit for blocking Planned Parenthood’s funding. He infuriated Democrats by refusing to share projections with Congress.

But when it comes to governing, Vought has been a loser. He ran the botched White House response to the 2019 government shutdown, issuing legally dubious decisions and, as one Republican budget expert told The Post, “making up the rules as they go along.” It became the longest-ever shutdown and ended in Trump’s surrender.

Now Vought is intentionally botching the transition, without regard for the dire consequences Americans could suffer. This is what happens when you put an arsonist in charge of the fire department.

That Northam Thing

As bad as it is already - and it's going to get worse the longer Northam delays his departure - one of the worrisome aspects is that it's giving the Press Poodles a chance to smash-fit it into their bullshit False Equivalence narrative.

WaPo:

Northam controversy threatens to complicate Democrats’ bid to draw sharp contrast with Trump, GOP on race

The headline is all that's needed for people to stay comfortably numb and disengaged - sitting conveniently paralyzed in the middle.

As Northam defied a nationwide chorus of fellow Democrats calling for him to resign on Sunday, party activists and officials struggled to move past the growing controversy.

“Without question, the longer he stays in, the more of a distraction it becomes and that’s not good for Democrats,” said Gilda Cobb-Hunter, the president of the National Black Caucus of State Legislators and a veteran South Carolina Democrat.
Buried 9 paragraphs deep:

Democrats argued Sunday that the Northam episode has also highlighted an important difference between the two parties. They argued that their swift and widespread calls for Northam to step down stand in contrast with the way Republicans have handled recent racial controversies in their own ranks.

Shouldn't the media's job include a way for us to keep score on this shit?

In Search Of Consensus

Charlie Pierce:

By all accounts, the most civil action taken in L’affaire Poule Rouge was the way Stephanie Wilkinson handled her refusal to serve Sarah Huckabee Sanders at the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia. She first consulted with her staff, several members of which were gay and were angry at the administration*’s policies in that regard, and everyone was outraged by what was going on at the border. Wilkinson then took a vote on whether or not to serve Sanders. When the staff voted not to do so, she politely informed Sanders and her party that they would not be eating at the Red Hen that night. She even comped them the cheese plates they’d already ordered.

She did not use an official government Twitter account to discuss the episode, as Sanders did later. She did not use the power of the Oval Office to try and destroy someone’s business, as the president* found time to do later. She asked the staff what they wanted to do. She took a vote. She abided by their wishes. If there’s a more civil way of saying “no” to someone, I don’t know what it would be.

But some Press Poodles insist that we can't call complete assholes complete assholes.

Right on cue, Fred Hiatt’s Washington Post editorial page, which has no compunction about publishing the words of torture-enthusiast Marc Thiessen, blurted out the most embarrassing single paragraph written about the events at the Red Hen. 

To wit:
We nonetheless would argue that Ms. Huckabee, and Ms. Nielsen and Mr. Miller, too, should be allowed to eat dinner in peace. Those who are insisting that we are in a special moment justifying incivility should think for a moment how many Americans might find their own special moment. How hard is it to imagine, for example, people who strongly believe that abortion is murder deciding that judges or other officials who protect abortion rights should not be able to live peaceably with their families?

For the benefit of those people also living in Fred Hiatt’s Land Without History: abortion providers have been stalked. Their children have been stalked. Their places of business have been vandalized. And, lest we forget, doctors who perform abortions have been fucking killed! They’ve been gunned down in their clinics, in their kitchens, and in their churches. They have not been allowed to live peaceably with their families, Fred, you addlepated Beltway thooleramawn. They haven’t been allowed to live at all. I’m no expert, but I’m fairly sure that a bullet in the head is far more uncivil than a complementary fucking cheese plate. What is wrong with these people?

- and -

This debate is stupid. It’s also dangerously beside the point. SarahHuck is the lying mouthpiece of a lying regime that is one step away from simply hauling people off in trucks. That she was politely told to take her business elsewhere is a small step towards assigning public responsibility to public officials that enable a perilous brand of politics. There are bigger steps to be taken, but everyone in official Washington is too damn timid to do what really needs to be done about this band of pirates.

Eric Zorn, Chicago Tribune:

Sorry, no, I won’t suffer lectures about civility from members of a party led by a swaggering, unrepentant bully who relentlessly attacks his detractors with schoolyard insults.

The GOP was revived in the furious swamps of Tea Party rallies starting in 2009 and sustained by a campaign of hatred and lies against President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Today's Quote

"Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish."

--A Lincoln - 2nd Inaugural

hat tip = driftglass

Mr Lincoln was breaking the rules. He was supposed to say something stupidly passive - something like:

"The south keeps yelling about how white people are just better than black people, and slavery is what the good lord intended so the masters could prosper while improving the negroes' debased and inferior nature (a bit - let's not get carried away)."

"While the north is yelling that slavery is cruel and sinful, and it's not OK for southerners to come north hunting runaways, and sometimes kidnapping free men and selling them as chattel."

"So the only real problem is that both sides are yelling."

Mr Lincoln would never make it in USAmerica Inc these days.

Coffee Cast

A new one for me.  Pretty "hard left" (not that there's anything wrong with it).

This episode features Blue Gal and driftglass. Mighty fine.

Oy

A near-perfect example of how hard they're trying to convince us Cult45 is legit.

The effort to get us to think in terms of "the leader of the country is the country" is some seriously creepy Daddy State bullshit.

Notice also, they're trying to make it look like the Dems are being hypocritical, since they complained about Mitch McYertle's policy of blocking everything Obama wanted to do. The difference being that Obama intended (eg) to make Healthcare affordable and more accessible, while Repubs want to do just the opposite.

Both sides my ass

.@PressSec: “At some points Democrats have to decide whether they love this country more than they hate this president.” pic.twitter.com/gVQPfDSZ0B

— Fox News (@FoxNews) April 23, 2018

 

It never ceases to amaze me how they tell us they're doing things so very differently, while at the same time they insist they're just doing things according to the way things are always done around here.

A reply overheard on Twitter:

Hey Sarah, I'm a Democrat.

I served in Saudi Arabia '02, Iraq '05, Afghanistan '10 and Afghanistan '12.

At no time did I ever see you over there.

I never saw a Trump either.

Trump worked with Russia to undermine our democracy.

You're cool with it. We aren't. Fuck you.

The Great Divide

Basically, there're two kinds of people, so we generally find them on opposite sides of the "political divide", and it ends up like this:

Side 1:
I've suffered
I don't think anyone else should have to suffer
I'll try to do the things that can help people avoid all that suffering

Side 2:
I've suffered
Others should suffer as well
I'll do what needs to be done to make sure they all suffer

Both sides my ass.

'Bout Damned Time

driftglass and Blue Gal have been nailing this one for a good long time - politics is broken, and it's because we have a party making a mainstay of its raison d'etre to piss in our gas tank.

And finally, NYT is starting to catch up:

(Mann and Ornstein)

What is astounding, and still largely unappreciated, is the unexpected and rapid nature of the decline in American national politics, and how one-sided its cause. If in 2006 one could cast aspersions on both parties, over the past decade it has become clear that it is the Republican Party — as an institution, as a movement, as a collection of politicians — that has done unique, extensive and possibly irreparable damage to the American political system.

Even today, many people like to imagine that the damage has all been President Trump’s doing — that he took the Republican Party hostage. But the problem goes much deeper.
These guys have been here before, but as they point out in the piece, they've been going along with the standard crapola that it's all even - the corporate media's insistence on the horse race - the evil duopoly - yada yada yada. 

Not any more.

Pushing Back

WaPo:

A new poll from Quinnipiac University suggests that while people may be broadly unhappy with the mainstream media, they still think it's more credible than Trump. The president regularly accuses the press of “fake news,” but people see more “fake news” coming out of his own mouth.

The poll asked who registered voters “trust more to tell you the truth about important issues.” A majority — 52 percent — picked the media. Just 37 percent picked Trump.

The poll did find that registered voters by a narrow margin think the media has treated Trump unfairly, with 50 percent saying they disapproved of the coverage of Trump and 45 percent approving. But voters are even more critical of Trump's treatment of the media, with 61 percent disapproving and 35 percent approving.

Even 23 percent of Republicans say Trump is mistreating the media, and independents disapprove 59-35.

And in case you missed it, WaPo quietly added a little something to it's banner:

 

Which brings us to Three Things About The Daddy State

1. Every government needs to do certain things without telling us about it, but the Daddy State needs the dark more than any other. There are way too many things they can't afford to let us see - a lot more than in anything resembling a democracy. Leakers and the Press are light-shiners; Daddy Staters hate them, and spend a shitload of time and energy covering their own asses and fighting disclosure - because they're always up to no good, and they know it.
2. The greatest threat to the Daddy State is anybody with a functioning memory. 45* is always carping about the Press because they write things down and compare what he says today with what he said before - sometimes moments before.  Creating the illusion of near-infallibility is a key element in any cult. Pointing out mistakes and contradictions makes you their enemy. And boy oh boy do they love having enemies.
3. Citizens who insist on being involved in the decision-making process comprise the best possible preventative measure and the best remedy.

That last one sounds like a very old and very tired cliché because we always assume we get to make up our minds and freely express our opinions and go out and vote once in a while.

But we've internalized the Rent-Seeker's ambition - sit on your ass enjoying the benefits while everybody else does the work.  Anywhere from 40% to 60% of the people who could vote don't vote.

Because we've also internalized the bullshit (fed to us all the time) that government sucks; they're all the same anyway; both parties are corrupt; the major candidates are just two sides of the same coin so why bother blah blah fuckin' blah.

Get past it.

You want better choices? Get your ass out to a Caucus; or vote in the primary.  And take somebody with you. And stop being so damned polite to people who won't help. When you refuse to be part of the solution you become part of the problem. ie: If you think it's shitty but you refuse to make even the simplest effort to improve it, then you're helping the buttheads who're making it shitty. Silence implies consent.

Or you could run for office yourself.  Have you not seen some of these bozos? Look who's in the White House right now.  It is - for all practical purposes and by every modern standard - impossible for you to be any worse than what we've got now.

Cutting to the chase: Bullet point 3a is real simple. When everybody votes, the Daddy State loses - by definition the Daddy State loses and Democracy wins when we all take part in this little experiment called Self-Government.

It Just Gets Weirderer

...and weirderer and weirderer.



I gotta wonder why the producers at DumFux News decided to put Duke on their air when it seems like they just wanted O'Reilly to pimp the usual False Equivalence crapola.  It did in fact come up, but it was kinda lost in the the clutter of Duke's flailing rants about Jewish Media and Jewish Bankers and Wars for Israel etc.  And pimping his book? WTF was that about?

Also too, I'm thinking O'Reilly wanted to have Duke on to show everybody what they ought not to be doing and/or saying, in order to re-assert the GOP Establishment thing(?), but that doesn't make a lot of sense either because Duke ends up saying very much the same thing DumFux News has been saying, and as convinced as I am about how The Rubes will swallow anything Rupert feeds 'em, it's still gotta be possible to push their credulity a little too far - doesn't it(?)

Anyway, that bit was as close to being a complete disaster as you can get, and it reaffirms for me what driftglass has been saying for a good long time, which is that the GOP is getting  what the GOP has been wishing for.

I guess I'm thinking somebody's trying to figure out the next few moves as The Southern Strategy continues to evolve.  Repubs have to come up with ways to go on rousing the rabble without scaring too many more "regular folk".  It's almost like they're finally realizing their message has actually morphed into something like, "Yeah, the GOP really is being run by a buncha racist assholes, but when ya stop to think about it, you're a racist asshole too because you've agreed with enough of what we've been saying all along to keep voting for us - so fuck it - let's just admit we're all racist assholes and we can all be racist assholes together."

One last thing - Duke has "threatened" to make public his "associations" with other prominent Politicos if they don't lay off his buddy Scalise.  Now, if it's a bad thing to reveal those associations, doesn't that mean David Duke is a bad guy? And doesn't that also mean David Duke is admitting he's a bad guy?  Or is David Duke suddenly the good guy because he's threatening to reveal the true ugliness of it all?

All these little flips and turns make my head hurt.

Sauce For Ganders

Seems like every time I get into any debate on any subject with any "conservative", it's all but inevitable for that "conservative" to tell me I really just want "the nanny state" to take care of me.

It's a tough one to rebut because it takes time (which the opponent doesn't give you), and you have to string a buncha things together (which the opponent insists on disrupting); it requires a bit of thought (which the opponent seldom allows himself to do), and assumes a fundamental level of knowledgeability (which the opponent refuses to acquire).

So here's the thing:  "What's the difference between my Nanny State and your Daddy State?"

You claim I want to be taken care of by a government that will meet my every need by stealing from somebody else.

At the same time, you say I shouldn't be involved in the decisions being made regarding what happens to me and mine; I should just shut up and go along with whatever you and your coin-operated politicians think I should be willing to kiss your ass for; and BTW - the stuff your Daddy State is handing to you and your guys is the stuff you're stealing from me and my guys, so go shit in your hat.

Need one more?  Both sides, motherfucker.  Since both sides do it; both sides are the same; both sides are to blame for whatever it is we wanna piss and moan about right now - well if the Nanny State's a thing, then the Daddy State has to be a thing too.  Booyah.

Listen To Charlie

Logical fallacy is the bread-n-butter of American Media.  Almost everything that goes out on TV & Radio, or into what's left of the Dead Tree Publications business is going to include some level of "Yeah but the Democrats" and "Both sides do it" and "It has to be all and only this way or all and only that other way".  

Wanna know where all that False Equivalence and False Dichotomy shit gets us?

Here's Charlie Pierce to 'splain some of it to us:

What we had in the AIDS epidemic was political opportunism married to what became obvious ignorance. What we are seeing now, promulgated by a conservative bubble machine that has built a self-sustaining universe around itself, is political opportunism married to an active campaign of disinformation. This is a terrible thing. The people making a profit out of it are people who are too lazy to mug old ladies or swindle the blind. The people making a profit out of it are people without consciences, people who are as free of patriotism as they are free of the inconveniences of having a soul. These are dangerous people, and it's far past time for the honorable people in my profession to stop treating them like the worthless hacks they are. They are no longer cute. They are no longer funny. They are no longer the respectable "other side" of some fanciful imaginary political debate. They are dangerous propagandists. They are peddling poisonous lies and putting people's lives at risk. Every journalist who treats them as anything else, and every politician who treats them as anything else, are actively abetting evil.

Take, for example, Laura Ingraham, who cashes a very nice check from ABC News in addition to her day job as a radio flamethrower. Ingraham has begun to traffic in "alternative" theories about Ebola, treating a virus as though it were another vote to suppress or immigrant to bash, and lending her microphone to fringe nitwits because panic is profitable, and because almost everything, even a rare disease, is worth throwing at a president you don't like.

Like the man said - the earth is a roughly spherical body that turns on its axis about once per day and orbits the local mid-sized star about once every 365 days, and while you're entitled to believe otherwise, your opinions to the contrary don't mean diddly-shit.

--and--

The country simply cannot go on this way, with one of our two political parties completely insane, and with a counter-cultural universe that claims the right to promulgate its own science as equal to the science produced by actual scientists, and with this dangerous lunacy treated as legitimate by powerful people who ought to know better. As I once wrote, it doesn't matter how many people vote for the anti-gravity party, you still can't flap your arms and fly to the moon. A dangerous disease is not a matter of debate. Your profitable fantasy and the reality of the disease do not deserve an equal place in the discussion of what we as a society will do about the disease. The response is going to have to be precise and empirical. It is going to have to be impatient with cant, and immune to the delusions on which demented ideology feeds.

It's kinda important to believe as many true things as possible, and to not believe as many false things as possible; and so it's really really really important to be able to tell the difference.

Listen to driftglass and BlueGal every Friday, and almost every time, you'll get a decent reminder on how to spot the "both sides" crap.

John Fugelsang