( - promoted by Chris Bowers)
Telling me again exactly what's wrong with the DC press corps yesterday were Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post and Frank Foer of the The New Republic. They were on a panel about the press and the elections, and repeated just about every stupid conventional wisdom myth about bipartisanship I've heard over the last few years.
We all know how it goes. When Democrats are in office, the important thing for the ruling party to do is be nice to the minority. Liberal politicians don't know what they're doing, and are unpopular. I've read all of those refrains a hundred times at least, but it's still sort of odd to be there live and in person and see that the people who write that stuff really think that way.
For instance, when Foer talked about "flailing Democrats" in referring to Clinton and Obama's plans to draw down troops in Iraq.
First, he said that they planned to get the troops out within a year, when neither has committed to get all of them out even by 2012. But that was the trivial error.
Someone can actually look at the incredible mess George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, KBR, Halliburton and Blackwater have made of Iraq and describe the people who are trying to fix it as "flailing." Wow. It's like mocking firefighters for trying to put out a burning building. Like mocking an E.R. surgeon for their attempts to save a motorcyclist who crashed into an overpass without their gear.
Then Marcus really warmed up to her subject. If you know how I am, you'll be very proud of how I totally did not stand up, demand that she tell us what she was smoking, and ask if she'd brought enough for everyone.
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| As bad as it was that the usual catchphrases and thought-substitution devices were a comfortable part of her vocabulary -- she really said that fixing politics would take "not listening to the crazies on both sides" and that the problem was "not allowing people to coalesce in the center" -- it was worse when she went from vague to specific.
Because she talked about Social Security as though she didn't even know its recent history. She said that if you locked the 10 smartest Democrats and the 10 smartest Republicans in a room together, they could fix Social Security in about 2 hours. You can get a lot done, after all, when Democrats and Republicans "join hands" in Marcus' world.
First, as most of you reading this know, Social Security is fine.
Second, there is no compromise between the Republican 'we want to defund and eventually dismantle this program' position, and the Democrats' stance of 'we like it just fine, thanks, think we'll keep it.' It's a death or cake choice.
Third, the public is solidly, with overwhelming majorities, behind the completely reasonable Democratic position of wanting to preserve this program. The Republican position, all by itself, was so out there, so crazy, so unpopular, that even when Republicans held the glorious Trifecta, they couldn't kill Social Security. They knew that if they went with the Bush administration and all the 'smartest' Republican government bashers, they'd get flayed alive by their constituents.
There aren't crazies on both sides in this.
There's a pack of idiots who'd dearly love to get rid of the most popular government program in American history, and a bunch of liberal to centrist politicians who stand with the mainstream position of the American public. Which again, you probably already know, even though you don't spend upwards of 40 hours a week sitting in the nerve center of one of the country's premier news outlets.
Which is exactly the problem, because Ruth Marcus does sit there. And whoever she's been getting her information from, on this subject at least, doesn't know their bum from their elbow. |
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