The Village loves the GOP. Almost as much as its mancrush on itself.
The rules that apply to the GOP? They do not apply to anyone else.
The rules that apply to everyone else? They do not apply to the GOP.
The Village loves the GOP because tracking, covering, and analyzing the GOP is like keeping track of an angry child. It requires no deep thinking, no conceptualizing complicated domestic and geopolitical issues like a chess player rather than a bunch of kids in a snowball fight, and it requires no questioning of the conventional wisdom about what you see, hear, and believe.
You see an angry child.
The angry child wants to throw blocks in the playpen.
Punch the kid next door for some sin, real or imagined, that occurred in the sandbox.
The angry child wants a piece of candy. Now. NOW!!!! NOW!!! NOW!!! NOW!!!!
You see an adult.
The adult tries hard not to jump at every flash of anger, rash impulse, or selfish desire.
The adult actually thinks ahead. Sometimes even very far down the line. The adult realizes that we do not govern from moment to moment, hour to hour, day to day.
What the adult wants is not as simple or as easy to reason out as a child throwing a tantrum over wanting a piece of candy NOW!!!!.
If you are a hack? If you are one of many just like you?
You want a media, and a DC, and a political climate and culture that plays to your skillset. Gossip columnist meets the keepers of the slambook.
You want the ease and comfort of tracking the angry child.
You want to ask questions of Sen. John McCain and not President Barack Obama.
You want to interview fading Michelle Bachmann and not rising Elizabeth Warren.
You offer America the intellectual equivalence of an armful of aging gas station sushi, and then you lament why most of America doesn't trust you anymore. That is the Village that I know.
Where the wise man or woman is as rare as a blue moon.
Where the wise man or woman is as scorned as the screeching toddlers are lauded.
Where being a hack is to be beloved. An institution. Where Luke Russert is James Dean.
And where a creepy rich white deadbeat domestic terrorist can field a merry band of brigands and thugs and make lawbreaking cool. Where this cancerous lot can then train AR-15s on BLM employees and law enforcement without consequence and be held up as John Wayne and company. Until they are all caught up in Cliven's ego and rapidly disgraced the next. Not for holding guns on cops. Not for breaking the law. But disgraced for the sin of the unspinnable truth caught on tape. Or should I say "Disgraced". As everyone who was involved in elevating him into a modern day John Wayne can just, apparently, awkwardly shuffle off to the side and clumsily walk away whistling in a sea of flopsweat and fail. Scott free.
Being a Movement Conservative Republican means that is how things roll for you.
Even the memory of Timothy McVie and Terry Nichols couldn't stop the sick but mercifully aborted rise of Cliven Bundy, but the age of Fox News meant never having to say your are sorry for marching around with him on your shoulders.
This can only happen in the age of the hack. Sure, this looks bad, but. It will pass.
Like Iran-Contra, WMDs in Iraq, or the Economic Collapse the Cult of Cliven Gave Us.
There are no screaming police light gifs and 72 pt. Headlines from Drudge for anything else.
But the hack also wants to see themselves as serious grown-ups and not overgrown teenagers passing around their own private mashnotes and burns and calling it journalism. So. What do you do? Why, you take a page from your favorite and preferred political movement. You do for them? Why can't they do for you? It's not like you are reflecting the bad behavior and corrosive institutional mindset you don't hold to the same standards you hold everybody else to because they make your life easier professionally.
You are only borrowing it. It's not like embracing their rules is corrupting.
So, when reality doesn't jibe with how you roll, you disregard reality and insert your own.
That means living in a fansyland about your own role in the great dysfunction of everything you see. It means enabling and enhancing the dysfunction to preserve your own mythology about yourself and what role you play in the playground.
If you are a Villager you can choose to see yourself as you are. To see how you do things and the role that this plays in our great national disfunction. But. That would be unpleasant. Or. You can see yourself as you fantasize yourself. Competent. Cool. An observer. One part The Watcher from Marvel Comics, one part the Fonz. Again, the only kind of place where a Luke Russert can be James Dean.
The GOP and the Village elite both prefer fantasy over reality. Both prefer to see the world as they imagine it, rather than the way that it is and they are in it.
So that means playing The Very Serious Game.
Where you decry that it is not your job to explain issues or events to people, except when you do. Where you lament that it is not your job to take a biased look at issues or events, except when you do. Where you bitch and moan about how everything is broken, and pretend you didn't play a key role in the breaking of important checks and balances for expediencies sake.
The problem for the Village? (Not to mention for the nation and all of us poor saps who are supposed to accept that it is our betters world, we just get live in it?) Is that as much as they like to think that they are in charge, that they are the grown-ups, in the world that they prefer, they are not.
They are abdicating their duty by chasing memes and being conventional wisdom pimps.
What do the Iraq War, the economic collapse, the hijacking of the nation's ability to govern, voter disenfranchisement, income inequality, the second coming of Congressional McCarthyism, and rich white welfare king Cliven Bundy all have in common?
The people who brought them all to us have never had to pay the price for their actions, and a large part of this is that they were all aided and abetted by the Village.
When the GOP runs everything, the grown-ups, the Very Serious People, the elites who think of themselves as read-in insiders striding the corridors of power with their peers in office, they are noise. Somewhere between a fart and television static.
But that, apparently, is okay as long as everybody who should get theirs... gets theirs.
If you are a hack? You want a media, and a DC, and a political climate that plays to your skillset.
If you want America to function and fire on all cylinders?
You want to be anything but a hack.
But that's hard. That's no fun. Where's the donuts and tire swinging in doing that?
Hence... "Obama is empty suit, timid, weak, lazy, too intellectual, too fixated on history, too focused on the long game". It's not x, y, and z. It's not a, b, and c. It's him. Or "Elizabeth Warren is naive, shrill, unrealistic, needlessly combative." Darrell Issa and Louis Gomert can attack the sitting AG like he's some punk kid they caught without a hall pass outside metal shop, but if Warren asks a hard question? She doesn't understand how the game is played. How DC works. If you are flummoxed and frustrated because you want the ease and comfort of babysitting married to hanging out with your buddies? You want the GOP. You want the Bushies back. It's the go-to perfect answer for why you are uncomfortable as a Villager in the Obama era. It's him. It's her. it's them. Right up until the moment the country collapses.
Movement Conservatism has never been more intrenched in American life as it is today.
The GOP has had long, long runs of being in charge of the levers of power. The results?
Disaster. After Calamity. After Near-Collapse. After Disaster.
But covering the cavalcade of clown cars piling up in the center of the intersection is fun.
Covering the people who are trying to clean up the mess fairly? That is so, so boring and hard.
So. Here we are. Like frogs inside a giant pot as the heat is slowly being turned up.
Knowing what is coming, but hamstrung to do what must be done because stupid is kewl.
Because it is a bigger sin to call somebody a liar in DC, than to be a liar in DC.
Anybody who has picked up a newspaper or turned on a tv to a basic cable news channel since about, oh, the fall of the Soviet Union should probably just be thanking God that we are all still here and not orbiting the sun on an ashen radioactive ball of hell because of this dynamic.