Among the worst media offenders is Dylan Ratigan, the liar and sophist infecting MSNBC's programming, who has (mis)used his big microphone to perpetuate the LIE that both political parties are equally to blame, promote the rise of the Tea Party, and set off on so-called "30 million jobs" junkets while joining Republicans to sabotage every effort by Democrats in Congress to get any kind of jobs bill (or bills, period) passed.
His cheerleading for the Teabaggers' rise to power was, outside Fox, the most irresponsible misuse of political cable programming I have ever seen. Especially considering the hypocrisy, the failure to be objective, to the point he wouldn't identify Democrats (unless when frequently bashing them) by party designation, a common practice everywhere else on the network, and populating his program with neutered "progressives" seemingly under orders not to say negative things about a "certain political party" by name.
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Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.
By
Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, Published: April 27
Rep. Allen West, a Florida Republican, was recently captured on video
asserting that there are “78 to 81” Democrats in Congress who are members of
the Communist Party. Of course, it’s not unusual for some renegade lawmaker
from either side of the aisle to say something outrageous. What made West’s
comment — right out of the McCarthyite playbook of the 1950s — so striking was
the almost complete lack of condemnation from Republican congressional leaders
or other major party figures, including the remaining presidential candidates.
It’s not that the GOP leadership agrees with West; it is that such
extreme remarks and views are now taken for granted.
We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for
more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past
writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted.
Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the
problem lies with the Republican Party.
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is
ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy
of its political opposition.
When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly
impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s
challenges.
“Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the
traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of
bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when
discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their
search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center,
a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach. [...]
[T]he real move to the bedrock right starts with two names: Newt
Gingrich and Grover Norquist. [...] From the day he entered Congress in 1979,
Gingrich had a strategy to create a Republican majority in the House:
convincing voters that the institution was so corrupt that anyone would be better
than the incumbents, especially those in the Democratic majority. It took him
16 years, but by bringing ethics charges against Democratic leaders; provoking
them into overreactions that enraged Republicans and united them to vote
against Democratic initiatives; exploiting scandals to create even more public
disgust with politicians; and then recruiting GOP candidates around the country
to run against Washington, Democrats and Congress, Gingrich accomplished his
goal.[...]
Norquist, meanwhile, founded Americans for Tax Reform in 1985 and rolled
out his Taxpayer Protection Pledge the following year. The pledge, which binds
its signers to never support a tax increase (that includes closing tax
loopholes), had been signed as of last year by 238 of the 242 House Republicans
and 41 of the 47 GOP senators, according to ATR. The Norquist tax pledge has
led to other pledges, on issues such as climate change, that create additional
litmus tests that box in moderates and make cross-party coalitions nearly impossible.
For Republicans concerned about a primary challenge from the right, the failure
to sign such pledges is simply too risky.
Today, thanks to the GOP, compromise has gone out the window in
Washington. In the first two years of the Obama administration, nearly every
presidential initiative met with vehement, rancorous and unanimous Republican
opposition in the House and the Senate, followed by efforts to delegitimize the
results and repeal the policies. The filibuster, once relegated to a handful of
major national issues in a given Congress, became a routine weapon of
obstruction, applied even to widely supported bills or presidential
nominations. And Republicans in the Senate have abused the confirmation process
to block any and every nominee to posts such as the head of the Consumer
Financial Protection Bureau, solely to keep laws that were legitimately enacted
from being implemented.
In
the third and now fourth years of the Obama presidency, divided government has
produced something closer to complete gridlock than we have ever seen in our
time in Washington, with partisan divides even leading last year to America’s
first credit downgrade.
On
financial stabilization and economic recovery, on deficits and debt, on climate
change and health-care reform, Republicans have been the force behind the
widening ideological gaps and the strategic use of partisanship. In the
presidential campaign and in Congress, GOP leaders have embraced fanciful
policies on taxes and spending, kowtowing to their party’s most strident
voices.
Republicans often dismiss nonpartisan analyses of the nature of problems
and the impact of policies when those assessments don’t fit their ideology. In
the face of the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression, the
party’s leaders and their outside acolytes insisted on obeisance to a
supply-side view of economic growth — thus fulfilling Norquist’s pledge — while
ignoring contrary considerations.
Democrats are hardly blameless, and they have their own extreme wing and
their own predilection for hardball politics. But these tendencies do not
routinely veer outside the normal bounds of robust politics. If anything, under
the presidencies of Clinton and Obama, the Democrats have become more of a
status-quo party. They are centrist protectors of government, reluctantly
willing to revamp programs and trim retirement and health benefits to maintain
its central commitments in the face of fiscal pressures.
No
doubt, Democrats were not exactly warm and fuzzy toward George W. Bush during
his presidency. But recall that they worked hand in glove with the Republican
president on the No Child Left Behind Act, provided crucial votes in the Senate
for his tax cuts, joined with Republicans for all the steps taken after the
Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and supplied the key votes for the Bush
administration’s financial bailout at the height of the economic crisis in
2008. The difference is striking. [...]
We
understand the values of mainstream journalists, including the effort to report
both sides of a story. But a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon
distorts reality. If the political dynamics of Washington are unlikely to
change anytime soon, at least we should change the way that reality is
portrayed to the public.
Our advice to the press: Don’t seek professional safety through the
even-handed, unfiltered presentation of opposing views. Which politician is
telling the truth? Who is taking hostages, at what risks and to what ends?
Also, stop lending legitimacy to Senate filibusters by treating a
60-vote hurdle as routine. The framers certainly didn’t intend it to be. Report
individual senators’ abusive use of holds and identify every time the minority
party uses a filibuster to kill a bill or nomination with majority support.
Ratigan's political proclivities, mindless rants, and idiotic "solutions" wouldn't be such a turn-off had he an ounce of integrity, such that rather than making sweeping accusations of "both parties" when in fact the Republicans are RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS MESS, he didn't "distort reality" by failing to point fingers at the REAL culprits, and name names. But he won't do it because Dylan's "greedy bastards" (criminals, wingnuts, fascists, etc. etc.) are overwhelmingly on the Republican/conservative side. But that would distort his reality. And drain his guest pool.
of you have sat, and perhaps thought, with us!
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