What’s worse? The Movement in amoral full flight or mewling and whining on ‘the Left’ [sic], with tiresome gnashing of teeth and typing in dismay? Always despairing the [Senegalese?] referee’s failure to pull a Red Card, to make clear To The Whole World the score a blatant, invalid Rightist foul?
Josh Marshall’s swan dive into the victimization pool is rather typical:
Still, you just have to back up from that and realize that as disappointing as Tom Vilsack’s first crack at this was, the idea that he or Obama is the bad guy in this story is not only preposterous but verging on obscene (emphasis added). It’s like the NYPD as the bad guy in the Son of Sam saga because they didn’t catch David Berkowitz fast enough. Or perhaps that the real moral of the story is that the woman with the stalker should have been more focused on personal data security. Not for some time has something so captured the essential corruption of a big chunk of what passes as ‘right wing media’ (not all, by any means, but a sizable chunk along the Breitbart/Fox/Hannity continuum) and the corruption of the mainstream media itself as this episode.
Marshall’s diversionary examples are sophomorically inapposite. And irrelevant. Notice how the Administration’s premature panic, collusion and later attempt to brush it all away is literally acknowledged as just ‘disappointing’ (with Vilsack alone holding the bad)? The real story, according to TPM? Fox made them do it. (Note the perpetually passive psychological construct?)
Kos was wrong lamenting about this phenomenon (pathology?) 6 years ago. It’s not at all like he said – they [Dems et al.] always bring knives to a gunfight. ‘The Left’ [sic] bring nothing. And then scream for Mommy and Daddy. We wouldn’t want to give Dr. Krauthammer an idea for a column (without residuals) but there is something deeper going on.
What exactly has to happen in Marshall’s world for non-Righists to function effectively? He doesn’t know. We like TPM and have from day one when it was a simple blog. This is a friendly reader’s exasperation. TPM and its readers need an intervention. We’ll leave that to the pros. But in the interim, here’s free advice. Stop flinching and stop ‘enabling’ flinchers. Be careful what you wish for, too, re getting a ‘ref’. Maybe Josh never played competitive sports. Or had a different experience. In ours, even referees get tired of premature flinchers and secretly despise them.
Can you imagine the coup d’etat that would have happened somewhere along 1992-2000 with this crowd? By what year do you think Rush or Newt would have driven Clinton into house arrest at the Streisand Estate? And seized the (newly enlarged) crown out of the Pope’sAiles’ hands and put it on his swollen head? Recall Tweety *and* Hitch shoulder-to-shoulder cheering Newt and Ken Starr on like high school cheerleaders. Notwithstanding Clinton basically *was* a good Republican president, to boot.
On such gossamer thin strands hope rests.
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