Ron Fournier really outdid himself yesterday morning:
Trumpmania is what you get after the conservative wasn’t compassionate and the liberal abandoned hope for change. He’s a symptom, not a cure— Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) August 31, 2015
Yes. Liberals bear equal responsibility for a xenophobic whackjob making a mockery of the already mock-worthy electoral process because liberals somehow “abandoned hope for change” while ushering in universal health coverage, marriage equality, two more women on the Supreme Court and the end of two damn wars, while conservatives were busy debating just how many blood draws it would take to get $200 a month in food stamps for your hungry children.
I can see the equivalence there, can’t you?
This Trump thing has really brought out the desperation in the old guard of the Beltway press corps. As long as they could treat politics as a tennis match between two equally matched and equally worthy opponents, in which the only doubt about the outcome is whose name gets engraved on the trophy, they were free to not pay attention very much. Go to all the parties, stay at the ones with the hottest women and the best food. Watch the tussles happening on the House floor with detached amusement; it’s not like any of this MATTERS, right?
They’ve spent their whole lives like this, following these rules that they created and pretended were ironclad: Both sides deserve mention, both sides are equally good or bad, both sides are equally to blame for any failing. This allowed pundits like Fournier to bounce back and forth between Democratic and Republican camps being, if not everybody’s friend, at least nobody’s enemy. He followed the rules and therefore was virtuous.
Then along comes Donald Trump, who rips the fucking doors off the whole thing. Whose rhetoric is so utterly hateful and whose campaigning is so nakedly greedy and small that it just gobsmacks the people who expect the rules to be followed. Trump’s candidacy would, if they had the self-awareness God gave a carrot, force people like Fournier to confront the polite fictions that keep everything running smoothly, question the bullshit he feeds himself and his readers, and begin to consider that perhaps there is a difference between a president who tried to close Gitmo (even if he failed) and one who wants to put all of Mexico in there.
If he did start to question that, though, the fucking earth might cave in underneath him, so Fournier twists himself into knots trying to make Donald Trump the fault of liberals AS WELL AS conservatives, because that way Fournier can go about his business and nothing has to change.
A.