Scientists have long pondered the question:
"Is Chuck Todd as big a 'Both Sides Do It' hack as he appeared to be when he
had the big chair on Meet the Press, or was he performing the part of a Both
Sides Do It hack on Meet the Press because that's what NBC executives
require of anyone who sits in that chair?"
Sadly this question seemed doomed to remain a topic of mere idle armchair
speculation, with scientists spending their lunch breaks arguing one side of
the question and then swapping around and arguing the other (you know how
scientists are) because there was insufficient funding available to build the
extremely sensitive equipment that would be required to settle the matter.
And then, one day last week, on local radio, right here in Springfield,
Illinois, the matter was settled when Chuck Todd dropped by the Patrick
Pfingsten show on WMAY to remove all doubt.
A thing to know about Mr. Pfingsten is that he is, in his own words,
"a conservative who's a former Republican" who, like so many other Never Trumpers who got run out of their own party but
cannot abide admitting that, far from being the dirty, commie, America-hating,
terrorist-loving, baby-killing caricatures his party made us out to be,
we on the Left are, in fact, the only group who have been right about the
Right all along.
And so Mr. Pfingsten has taken up residence in the mighty fortress of "Both
Sides Do It" about which we had a long chat
one post ago. You should
also know that the station where Mr. Pfingsten works also syndicates Brian
Kilmeade and Clay Travis, so put a pin in that because it'll come up later.
Anyway, out of the clear blue comes now Chuck Todd to share his cultural and
political wisdom two days after Charlie Kirk was killed. And I, your
humble scrivener, listened to the whole fucking thing, grinding a quarter in
of enamel off my back molars in the process. So here are selected
portions of that conversation. It does not start well.
TODD: Well, here's the thing. We we all kind of know what we
should be doing, but in in some ways, you know, our ... we're going
to have to give up hoping our political leaders are going to do the right
things.
Right off the bat, fuck you and your "our political leaders" claptrap, Chuck
Todd. It's Republican political leaders, starting with
President Shits-His-Pants von Cheats-At-Golf, who throw gas on these fires,
and Democratic political leaders who try to tamp it down, which
he fucking well knows.
TODD: Sometimes you need incentives to do the right thing.
You need reward structures to do the right thing. And right now all of our
incentives are aligned against us ... uh... to, to bring us together. All
of the incentives are aligned against us to sort of figure out how to act
bipartisan.
And right there, in three short sentences, Chuck Todd memory holes the legacy
of the last three Democratic administrations, and the increasingly berserk Republican reactions to each of them.
And, again, Todd fucking well knows better.
Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans are the Problem
by Thomas E. Mann and Norman Ornstein
...We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than
40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past
writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was
warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the
core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is
ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional
understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the
legitimacy of its political opposition.
When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly
impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the
country’s challenges.
Chuck Todd continues, remembering 9/11 as a great, uniting
experience.
TODD: 9/11 is the last time we ... we ... we really got ... we
brought ... got brought together as a country and it lasted a good year or
so. But even when we stopped being united, y'know, the
wars. The... the wars divided us, it was respectful right?
It was sort of conventional political debate.
No surprise that a creature of a Beltway media that rolled over for Bush and
Cheney remembers those times very differently than those of us who live in the
real world. There are literally tens of thousands of Liberal blog posts
by those of us who were writing about what was really going on in real time,
but this should give you a taste of what those "respectful", "conventional"
debates were actually like:
The host then chimes in that, yes, it was all great until those god damn
Liberals...
PFINGSTEN: I don't know. There was a lot of calling George Bush
a war criminal...
For the record George Bush and Dick Cheney were and are war criminals.
And the rest is just more cask-strength, Chuck Todd Both Sides Do It drivel
TODD: I mean, this is where I don't, you know, if you
go online, most conservatives think most liberals are communists and most
liberals think most conservatives are fascists... The online world has us
at each other's throats.
For the record, conservatives were making a living slagging us liberals as
dirty, commie, America-hating, terrorist-loving, baby-killing monsters long
before "the online world" was as omnipresent as it is now. And, for
the record, conservatives nominated a degenerate, corrupt, lying, rapist,
racist, fascist for president three times in a row and elected him twice, so
yeah, the case for thinking most conservatives are fascists is fucking well
open and shut.
TODD: It is instead like you could build an audience much
faster if you go hard right or hard left, right?
Who is there "hard left" of which Todd speaks? Where are they?
And what the hell does Todd think "hard left" even means?
TODD: The left doesn't police the left and the right doesn't
police the right.
For the record, everybody polices the left. The legacy media Tone
Police stomp all over any Liberal who raises their voice using unapproved
vocabulary. Meanwhile, nobody polices the Right, which is how hate-vampires like Charlie Kirk came to be.
Never has a man’s own words so adeptly justified contempt for him
People are having a grand time digging through Charlie Kirk’s own
words to show that he deserved being dragged.
It’s tempting to sit down and just compile a list of all the hateful
things the man said — I could spend the next few weeks documenting
what a horrible little man he was. But that’s something that should
have been done before he was killed, because what should have been
assassinated was his reputation while he was cuddling up to racists
and anti-semites and anti-gay and trans people, all that stuff
journalists shied away from while he was living and building a
movement. All we can do now is condemn him when it is too late...
“Murc’s Law” [was] named after a commenter at the blog
Lawyers, Guns, and Money
who noticed years ago the habitual assumption among the punditry that
Republican misbehavior can only be caused by Democrats.
Do Republicans reject climate science? Must be because Democrats failed to persuade them!
Did Republicans pass unpopular tax cuts for the rich? Must be that Democrats didn’t do enough to guide them to better choices!
Do
Republicans keep voting for lunatics and fascists? It must be the fault of Democrats for being mean to them! Even D____
T____’s election was widely blamed on Democrats — who voted against him, to
be clear — on the
bizarre grounds that Barack Obama
should have rolled over and just let Mitt Romney win in 2012:
Chuck Todd continues:
TODD: 10 years ago, 15 years ago, if there was a bad
actor on one side or the other, this, you know, there would be
people that would speak out about it so that the totality would
look bipartisan.
Barack Obama was president from January, 2009* until January, 2017. In
what fucking universe did the Republican Party's unified, racist, obstruction
of every single thing Obama tried to do "look bipartisan" in its
totality? In what fucking universe does Donald Trump oozing down the
escalator and into the hearts of the GOP base qualify as heroically standing
up to a "bad actor".
Once again, in one sentence, Todd simply erases the inconvenience part.
TODD: And and this is where ... I don't know if this is a
leadership problem. It's, y'know, I am ... I am exhausted from pointing
fingers somewhere. Oh, it's here, it's here, it's here. When really,
it's all of us, right?
There's that deep, well-reasoned, fact-based political analysis for which
NBC News shelled out big bucks.
TODD: And look, I... I accept the premise that there are
folks on the left who say, "Yeah, we have our extremists, but we think
those guys are worse." And I accept the premise that on the right they
say, "We may have our extremists, but those guys are worse."
This, right here -- the media' pathological obsession with providing "Both
Sides Do It" political cover for the worst people in America and an
all-purpose excuse for the laziest and most cowardly people in America -- is
the real reason American politics is fucked.
But at least those battling scientists can finally move on with their their lives
now that the question of which-came-first has been settled.
Chuck Todd continues:
TODD: Like take the Matthew Dowd comment. Okay. Terrible
thing that he said. What do we think? 125,000 people saw it in real time.
It gets amplified on social media, right?
First, as much as it pains me to admit, what Matthew Dowd said wasn't
terrible. At all. And second, it was
Fox News that amplified it... just as they have been
originating and amplifying the most grotesque slander during all those
halcyon decades of "bad actor" policing and "respectful", "conventional"
debate.
And now, let's remove the thing I asked you to pin 527 paragraphs ago and
get back to the issue Mr. Pfingsten's fellow WMAY talking heads, Brian
Kilmeade and Clay Travis.
'Just Kill 'Em': Fox Host Makes Shocking Comment On Homeless
People
“Fox and Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade suggested this week that
homeless people suffering from mental health issues who refuse help
should simply be killed...
“Or uh, involuntary lethal injection. Or something,” he said. “Just
kill ’em.”
The other two hosts barely react to his remark before continuing
their discussion.
WMAY syndicated radio host and Fox News employee, Brian Kilmeade, got
to keep his Fox News gig and his WMAY gig after casually suggesting on live
television that the homeless should be mass murdered, while Matthew Dowd was
crucified by Fox News and fired from his MSNBC gig even after apologizing
profusely for what were a few anodyne comments about violent language.
Which brings it to that other WMAY syndicated radio host, Clay Travis and his
violent, unhinged rant about Liberals following the killing of Charlie
Kirk. From
Crooks & Liars:
Fox News Contributor Clay Travis Should Be Fired
The right can say and do anything and are not allowed to be criticized for
it.
Clay Travis, the host of Outkick, and a Fox News contributor went a
scorched earth to Sean Hannity on the left after the Charlie Kirk
shooting and received no push back from Fox News for his antics.
The incendiary rhetoric by most of the right-wing talk shows, media
outlets, and podcasters is a staple of the institutions, and they make
their living by vilifying the left with eliminationism.
They are quick to vilify anyone else who correctly describes the
actions some of them take, as well as their political leaders, and they
look for events to pile on.
Matthew Dowd was fired by MSNBC, where is Fox News' accountability?
Where's the accountability, WMAY?
Chuck Todd again:
TODD: You know, there was a time where we punished a
politician that didn't try to unify the country, right? It was just that's
bad politics.
By my calculations, Todd had now used up an entire Olympic swimming
pool's-worth of Kilz and White-Out to blot out the actual history of the
Actual Republican party. But he's not done yet, because
the stupidest, most craven and most sinister comment of all was buried inside
this slab of mildewed nonsense:
TODD: And that's what frankly both sides do
this. They grab the nubbest, nuttiest thing somebody says in one of these
somewhere online and says, grabs it, isolates it, right? Gets it to take
off and go viral and say that's all of them, right? This person, it was
representative of this entire community, right?
And you know, the right has been arguing that this has been happening
way too often in ... in mainstream media. And I know exactly. And my
answer is yes, you're correct.
But the answer isn't to do it that that there should be sort of mutual
assured destruction, right?
At a stroke, Todd has not only told the MAGA mob that, yes, one of their most cherished delusions is real -- that there is a Giant Liberal Media
Conspiracy plotting against them -- but that the mainstream media is in on
it! Also, hey asshole, you are the mainstream media.
What are the odds that the next time the Crooked Media lads --
-- or the Bulwark crew --
-- welcome Chuck Todd back onto their podcast like a long lost lodge brother,
his embarrassing WMAY wallow in the Both Siderist shitpile will be politely
forgotten or ignored by the hosts.
* Thanks to Alert Reader Bruce for catching my temporal error.
I Am The Liberal Media