But The Most Amazing Thing Of All Is...


...they get paid for doing this.

The New York Times paid Peter Baker to write this:
Bound to No Party, Trump Upends 150 Years of Two-Party Rule

When Donald J. Trump set his sights on the presidency in the 2000 election, he pursued the nomination of the Reform Party, a home for disenchanted independents. “The Republican Party has just moved too far to the extreme right,” he explained. “The Democrats are too far to the left.”
...

Now in the White House, President Trump demonstrated this past week that he still imagines himself a solitary cowboy as he abandoned Republican congressional leaders to forge a short-term fiscal deal with Democrats. Although elected as a Republican last year, Mr. Trump has shown in the nearly eight months in office that he is, in many ways, the first independent to hold the presidency since the advent of the current two-party system around the time of the Civil War.

“The truth is that he is a political independent, and he obviously won the nomination and the presidency by disrupting a lot of norms that Republicans had assumed about their own party and their own voters,” said Ben Domenech, publisher of The Federalist, a conservative website.
...
I'm pretty politically aware, but I must have missed the "Solitary Cowboy Independent Lone Ranger Party" nominations, primaries and convention.  

When were they, exactly?

Also the truth is, Ben Domenech wouldn't know "the truth" if it crawled up his leg and bit him in the yam sack, but Ben is a teevee-friendly wingnut with all the right hype men in all the right places --

I got your back, Bilbro Baggins!

-- so there he is in The New York Times, helping to inflate the "He's Not Really a Republican" lifeboat on which the Beltway establishment plans to escape the righteous judgement of history this time.

And speaking of Beltway establishment hacks picking up a paycheck for writing drivel, The Washington Post paid America's Most Famous Cyborg Sent From The Future To Destroy America to write this:
Journalist, heal thyself
By Hugh Hewitt
For the record, "Hugh Hewitt" is to "journalist" as "Juggs" magazine is to "The Physicians' Desk Reference."

But please, do go on!
...
The medical condition most akin to what is happening to journalism generally and to Manhattan-Beltway-elite journalism in particular is glaucoma, a disease that takes vision gradually, with no early warning signs or painful symptoms. Journalists are losing the full scope of our collective vision, coming to see every story through the lens of Trump, often through a lens colored by hostility toward him. Detachment about the president and his actions — genuine objectivity — is rare and getting rarer. Tell me the “Trump subject” and the pundit or reporter speaking to it — and there is an increasingly small difference between those roles — and I am pretty good at predicting not just the response but also the decibel level and the precise adjectives.

This is new for the media. That Manhattan-Beltway media elites skew left on the American political spectrum is not a bulletin. What is new is the transparency of that bias and, with regard to the president, a celebration of “resistance” to him — indeed, contempt for him. “Journalists” want very much for their audiences to know where they stand on the president and all the president’s men (and women).

This is “virtue signaling,” an exercise in thinking oneself on the “right side of history”...
No, Hugh.  The "medical condition most akin to what is happening to journalism generally and to Manhattan-Beltway-elite journalism in particular" is a mental disorder called "Asymmetriphobia": a horror of asymmetrical things.  A disorder so profound in the case of "Manhattan-Beltway-elite journalism" that they are powerless to write any column other than this one -- observe some act of by-now quotidian Republican madness/sadism/treason, manufacture a contrary Liberal position out of whole cloth, and then damn Both Sides and advise a nonexistent middle course is wisest -- over and over and over again.
It is, in fact, the only reason you have a job anywhere of the fetid wingnut fever swamp from which you came.

I have written about this phenomenon literally thousands of times over the past 12 years.  Which I suspect is one big reason why you will never see me "virtue signaling" in a column in The New York Times or The Washington Post.



Behold, a Tip Jar!

اPopularPosts