We're going for an extended dive into
Paul Krugman's op/ed in the New York Times because it echoes the point many of us have been making for a long time about the insipid political press in this country. While he doesn't name names, we and others have over the years:
Dan Balz, Chris Cillizza, Ruth Marcus, Maureen Dowd, Fred Hiatt, Chuck Todd, Ron Fournier, Mark Halperin, George Stephanopoulos (giants all!) and countless others in the print and electronic media. (Note that we're not even covering the objectively right-wing media here, simply the corporate "mainstream media.") And, no matter how deep into the weeds the Republican/ New Confederate/ Stupid Party goes, the media is there to assure us that everyone and everything is still normal:
The point is that while media puff pieces have portrayed Mr. Trump’s
rivals as serious men — Jeb the moderate, Rand the original thinker,
Marco the face of a new generation — their supposed seriousness is all
surface. Judge them by positions as opposed to image, and what you have
is a lineup of cranks. And as I said, this is no accident.
It
has long been obvious that the conventions of political reporting and
political commentary make it almost impossible to say the obvious —
namely, that one of our two major parties has gone off the deep end. Or
as the political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein put it in
their book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” the G.O.P. has become an “insurgent outlier … unpersuaded
by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science.” It’s a
party that has no room for rational positions on many major issues.
Or
to put it another way, modern Republican politicians can’t be serious —
not if they want to win primaries and have any future within the party.
Crank economics, crank science, crank foreign policy are all necessary
parts of a candidate’s resume.
Until
now, however, leading Republicans have generally tried to preserve a
facade of respectability, helping the news media to maintain the
pretense that it was dealing with a normal political party. What
distinguishes Mr. Trump is not so much his positions as it is his lack
of interest in maintaining appearances. And it turns out that the
party’s base, which demands extremist positions, also prefers those
positions delivered straight. Why is anyone surprised?
Remember
how Mr. Trump was supposed to implode after his attack on John McCain?
Mr. McCain epitomizes the strategy of sounding moderate while taking
extreme positions, and is much loved by the press corps, which puts him
on TV all the time. But Republican voters, it turns out, couldn’t care
less about him.
Can
Mr. Trump actually win the nomination? I have no idea. But even if he
is eventually pushed aside, pay no attention to all the analyses you
will read declaring a return to normal politics. That’s not going to
happen; normal politics left the G.O.P. a long time ago. At most, we’ll
see a return to normal hypocrisy, the kind that cloaks radical policies
and contempt for evidence in conventional-sounding rhetoric. And that
won’t be an improvement. (our emphasis)
This moment, with Rump Trump acting as the Republican
id, is almost unique in our recent history. The more polished demagogues/ cranks that occupied both the Kiddie Table and the main event last Thursday are the kind of "leadership" the party has fostered over the years: as Krugman says, they cloak their "radical policies and contempt for evidence in conventional-sounding rhetoric." And as a reward, the corporate "mainstream media" applauds them as having
"talent" and being "well-qualified." But it's much harder for them to ignore Rump Trump, so they try to make him an un-serious side-show, the better to hide both their lack of courage and their unpreparedness at the resultant birthing of an ugly political movement they themselves midwifed.
UPDATE: Case in point - here's how the
once-great Washington Post Bezos Bugle "reports" on the Trump brouhaha
this morning on the front page:
Republican leaders who have watched Donald Trump’s summer
surge with alarm now believe that his presidential candidacy has been
contained and may begin to collapse because of his repeated attacks on a
Fox News Channel star and his refusal to pledge his loyalty to the
eventual GOP nominee.
Fearful that the billionaire’s
inflammatory rhetoric has inflicted serious damage to the GOP brand,
party leaders hope to pivot away from the Trump sideshow and toward a
more serious discussion among a deep field of governors, senators and
other candidates.
Mix wishful thinking with cluelessness about the already-toxic "Republican brand" and stir with a "deep field" of "talent" and "well-qualified" candidates; serves two Republican-wired stenographers at the Bezos Bugle.
