There are a few things we can say definitively about the mainstream media. One is that they tend to latch onto the most superficial issues imaginable and cover them with mind-numbing repetitiveness. Another is that they love, love, LOVE the two-party system and believe in the concept bipartisanship more than any normal human being.
When I say bipartisanship, what I mean is any effort to reach across the aisle, compromise, and reach consensus between the two major parties on legislation, appointments, and so on. The media’s fealty to this concept is pretty much absolute, and mostly makes no allowance for the fact that (a) bipartisanship has kind of a toxic history, and (b) one of the two major parties has gone bat-crap crazy over the past 30-40 years.
Toxic consensus
When I think of bipartisan legislation, I think of the 1994 Crime Bill, so-called “welfare reform”, the Patriot Act, the resolution to authorize the use of force in the War on Terror and to extend that authority to Iraq, and so on. Suffice to say, a lot of misery and death has been strewn in the wake of bipartisanship over the years, and I don’t think it’s coincidental.
The same might be said of presidential appointments, particularly with regard to the Supreme Court. John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, and even Neil Gorsuch were confirmed on a bipartisan basis, lopsidedly so in the first two cases. The Democrats who voted to confirm these justices bear some responsibility for the results of their opinions.
Praising the maverick
If you’re old enough, you remember the degree to which the press loved John McCain, mainly because he straddled the center-line in a politically strategic fashion. It’s typically enough for these “mavericks” to adopt a controversial opinion on a single topic for them to be carried on the shoulders of the mainstream media. For McCain, it was campaign finance. For Liz Cheney, it’s Donald Trump.
I’m not sure I’ve ever heard MSNBC talk about a congressional representative more than they have about Liz Cheney over the last two weeks. They’re doing this on the basis of her refusal to accept her party’s line on who won the presidency in 2020. In other words, she’s being roundly praised for speaking a very simple, obvious truth. As a result, they are helping her build her national brand in a dramatic way, though she voted to support Trump’s agenda from one end of his regime to the other.
Don’t buy it!
Bottom line, MSNBC and other mainstream outlets are working overtime to mainstream extremists like Liz Cheney as well as Wall Street reactionaries like Mitt Romney. As people on the left, we can’t adopt the standard of the enemy of our enemy being our friend. These people are building a national brand that they hope will carry them to higher office. The difference between that and a Trump 2.0 presidency is one of degree, not of kind.
luv u,
jp
As far as I’m concerned, the GOP has demonstrated its bad will in about as many ways as can be imagined. And before anyone gives me a lesson on how politics works, on how you can disagree from morning to evening but at the end of the day you need to work together, etc., let me just say that the Republicans have become an extremist party bent on wrecking the country, and the only thing to be done with them is to beat them at the ballot box and then drag their sorry asses into the future along with us, kicking and screaming if necessary. Nothing short of that will do.
Will this lead to a brief era of civility and bipartisanship? Maybe, but probably not. Civility, we should remember, starts at the top, and with a legion of TV pundits decrying the toxic tone of political rhetoric, I have yet to hear anyone call out President Trump for setting that tone during his campaign last year, even to the point of suggesting that