Mushy Middle
It's really sad to see how far down the pants of John McCain and Joe Lieberman once-decent writer David Broder has reached. His column of a few days ago comparing Harry Reid to Alberto Gonzalez was not only stupid, it was incomprehensible. And in Friday's WaPo column, he once again strokes his boy McCain, who has been flipping and flopping around so hard the last few years that he's starting to make Mitt Romney look like a model of consistency.Broder believes that there is this Neverland of the middle, where old white guys like the afore-mentioned McCain and Lieberman hold sway between the rantings of the moonbats on the left (where I'll include myself) and the ravings of the wingnuts on the right and he's convinced that's where most of the people in the US actually live. I say thee nay. I'm convinced that there is a relatively small percentage of people in the country that actually think about this stuff and they end up on one side or the other of the middle. That's not to say that they necessarily go way to one side or the other, but they do typically identify as either red or blue. (I do realize that there are some thinking folks that are "left" on some issues and "right" on others - socially libertarian and fiscally conservative, say - that may appear to inhabit the middle but only if you somehow "average" their positions. That's not particularly useful.) That middle, which Broder seems to think is big and full of the people that have real common sense, is in fact I'm convinced filled with people who basically don't give a shit or who are so easily swayed by the talking heads in the media that they flop to whatever the flavor of the day is. If it were otherwise - if Broder was right - I can't imagine why voter turnout would continually be so abysmal. Instead of this deliberate mass of folks that are waiting until the last minute to make up their minds because they're carefully weighing every word of every candidate, they mostly either don't give a rat's ass or they're too busy with their own little personal dramas to give it any thought until some soundbite grabs them along the way and they say "okay, that guy". I might disagree with the wingnuts (okay, there's no "might" about it) but by golly I admire their willingness to get out and vote. It's that mushy middle that I have no respect for, just I no longer have any respect for fantasy writer David Broder.
Labels: Politics
3 Comments:
Another reason to forget respecting Broder: he's apparently admitted to having been a guest of Rove's at occasional dinner and hunting get-togethers.
And also this:
http://mediamatters.org/items/200704280002?f=h_top
Great link, PC!
TPM offers us a link to a new article about Broder where he says he's "astonished and delighted" that 50 Democratic Senators wrote to support Reid... and that Broder actually agrees with him...? Huh?
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/horsesmouth/2007/04/broder_reid_is.php
Here's the article in Editor & Publisher itself:
Broder, who's syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group, isn't sure if he'll use a future column to address the reaction his April 26 piece stirred up. Rather than looking back, he said, "I try to keep dealing with new topics."
I'll bet.
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