DL Open Thread Wednesday September 29th – “Both Sides”

jason330

3 years ago

From 1642 to 1651 the English fought a series of civil wars that ended with King Charles v1.0 killed and King Charles v2.0 in exile. Having suffered under successive horrible Kings, the first thing the English did after getting rid of the King was look around for a new King. Except for a few kooks and crackpots, nobody could conceive of a country without a King in charge. As a fish is unaware of the fact that it lives in water – the English were unaware of the fact that monarchy was not some inviolable natural law, but in fact bullshit.

Bothsiderism, Glorious Moderation, The Benevolent Virtues of Centrism, these are all lazy but widely accepted paradigms. They are world-views based on nothing but consensus. They may have worked to explain the world for a while, but they could not be more toxic now. That’s the bad news. The really bad news is that it takes generations to change consensus world view…and we don’t have 50 years, let alone generations.

In a frustrating display, NBC News host Chuck Todd came so close to giving an accurate presentation on the facts of the debt ceiling debate in Congress — in which Republicans are obstructing a necessary measure to avoid the U.S. government defaulting on its debts and plunging the economy into a catastrophic meltdown.

But at the end, he reverted back to a both-sides framing that had no basis in reality.

“As we expected last night, we got another clear example of just how dysfunctional Congress is right now,” Todd said on Tuesday’s edition of MSNBC’s MTP Daily. “As Mitch McConnell promised they would, Senate Republicans blocked a bill to temporarily fund the government and raise the debt ceiling. That leaves the government heading toward a shutdown on Thursday, and a much more catastrophic fiscal crisis in just weeks.”