Is it possible that both siderism is dying a slow death, and that it’s demise will be brought about from the bottom of the media heap?
Right now, I know of only one person in the national media who doesn’t play the both siderist game, and that would be Paul Krugman (see, e.g., today’s column), who nobody listens to because he is almost always right, whereas we must all listen to David Brooks, the finest exemplar of both siderism, who is always either wrong or too busy gushing platitudes to say anything of substance that is capable of being fact checked, even in retrospect.
The New London Day, our local newspaper, has been a tithes paying member of the high church of both siderism for quite a while, which, oddly enough, as with most both siderists, has given it a clear rightward tilt. But one of its columnists, Dave Collins, went off the reservation today, and actually called out a common Republican tactic which, guess what, is not common to both sides:
I was stunned this week that Sen. Paul Formica of East Lyme proclaimed during a virtual forum with legislators that he and every other lawmaker in Hartford support an expansion of absentee ballot voting in Connecticut.
The devil is in the details, he seemed to suggest.
If I were drinking something at the time, I would have had to spit it out.
Not only are Formica’s Republican colleagues already in court to try to stop Secretary of the State Denise Merrill from expanding absentee voting for people with health risks in the pandemic, but he was a prominent Senate vote last year against an early voting measure that would not have helped in the coronavirus pandemic but would have put the question on the ballot this fall.
Connecticut is one of only 11 states that don’t allow early voting.
This is a familiar Republican dodge tactic, used when they try to cater to their base or appease party leaders and then justify those votes that are generally unpopular with everyone else.
Oh, sure, I’m for gun control, many Connecticut Republicans have said, while voting against gun control legislation, with lame excuses about the language of the bills or the length of the public hearings.
Dave goes on to mention that the even more loathsome Heather Somers, who is the Senator from my district, uses the same dodge always, though at times she’s more forthright, for when she voted against the constitutional amendment, she opined that we shouldn’t hand people their right to vote “on a silver platter”. We still don’t know what element or alloy the platter should be fashioned from, but I’m sure Heather would tell us if asked.
The important thing here is that Dave didn’t feel the need to assure us that “both sides” do it. He correctly identified this obfuscatory method as a common Republican tactic.
We won’t save this country unless the media too (Fox excluded, of course) forthrightly recognizes the Republican Party for what it is: an authoritarian institution dedicated to the proposition that this is a government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich, achieved by the dissemination of propaganda to, and the intentional fostering of divisions among, the non-rich, primarily along racial lines. In other words, they are American Nazis. We won’t get to that point until the media stops propagating the delusional fiction that both parties are somehow to blame for the current state of this nation. The Republican response to COVID-19 is just the latest example of this divide at all costs strategy. The Democrats took no part in making the wearing of masks a “partisan issue”. It was Republicans who chose to spread the meme that this common sense health measure was a deep state plot.
Who knows, if folks like Dave continue to eschew both siderism, the movement may percolate up to the folks in the national media. Someday the major media might even acknowledge that there are such things as facts.