The idea that issues fall, through some accident or fault of their own, into a “memory hole” is a blatant lie. It’s a false frame, a construction the media uses to hide the fact that it ignores certain issues, either completely or soon after they arise, and not because they wouldn’t appeal to an audience.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo made this point, well, pointedly the other day in a subscriber-only piece.
I must say that I am looking forward to the raft of articles in the works from the Times, WaPo, Politico and above all Axios about the GOP’s reckoning with the fact that their party leader (and most of his party) has spent the last several years toadying and obsequiously embracing Vladimir Putin and Russia. I jest of course since I have little hope that any of these pieces will be written. But the leader of this party has spent the last seven years fawning over the increasingly dictatorial leader of the country who has now tipped the world into the biggest international crisis in a generation and I guess we’re somehow not going to talk about that.
I mean, he actually got impeached over it and for participating in a scheme to make the country Russia just invaded easier to invade. It would be as if in the aftermath of 9/11 Richard Gephardt or perhaps Al Gore were in a terrible bind because they were the co-chairs of the U.S.-Bin Laden Friendship League or ran a nonprofit focused on training the next generation of al Qaeda airline pilots. But somehow bygones and all that. It really is pretty much like that. And frankly, this is the most generous read of the facts before us.
We know all this and we know that his party has followed him reflexively in this course. And somehow, well … where are those articles?
I think I can quote that much under fair use, and I should note that I find the $60 annual subscription well worth the price.