Paul Krugman wrote a terrific column that the clip above depicts perfectly where Chris Cilizza and the panel on Chuck Todd's show on MSNBC are bemoaning the loss of those great "compromisers" in the U.S. House of Representatives -- those rotten corporate Blue Dogs who got voted out of office during the last election.
Heaven forbid we've now got some actual Republicans with an "R" behind their name instead of a "D", but they're rabid right wingers who would rather burn the whole house down than give an inch on their extremist ideology.
The Villagers love "centrism" and compromise as long as it always means everyone governing like Republicans and as Krugman points out later in his column, their fetish for it is allowing the extremism in the Republican Party to go unpunished. As John already wrote about here, I'm not sure what it will take to get them to quit with the "both sides" false equivalencies either, but I'm as tired of it as Krugman is.
Sadly the example in the clip above is just one of hundreds that are being pushed by the Villagers on every network day, after day, after day.
The Cult That Is Destroying America:
Watching our system deal with the debt ceiling crisis — a wholly self-inflicted crisis, which may nonetheless have disastrous consequences — it’s increasingly obvious that what we’re looking at is the destructive influence of a cult that has really poisoned our political system.
And no, I don’t mean the fanaticism of the right. Well, OK, that too. But my feeling about those people is that they are what they are; you might as well denounce wolves for being carnivores. Crazy is what they do and what they are.
No, the cult that I see as reflecting a true moral failure is the cult of balance, of centrism.
Think about what’s happening right now. We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating — offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans that are far to the right of public opinion.
So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent — because news reports always do that. And we have influential pundits calling out for a new centrist party, a new centrist president, to get us away from the evils of partisanship.
The reality, of course, is that we already have a centrist president — actually a moderate conservative president. Once again, health reform — his only major change to government — was modeled on Republican plans, indeed plans coming from the Heritage Foundation. And everything else — including the wrongheaded emphasis on austerity in the face of high unemployment — is according to the conservative playbook. Read on...
