Quote of the Week

“Damn straight I [feel vindicated]. But I would have rather been proven wrong -- honest to God -- because we're talking about the fucking country that is at stake here.”

-- Norman Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, who co-wrote in 2012, "It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism." 

I quoted from the book in a 2013 post wherein I was ranting about one of my favorite subjects, namely, how some folks in the mainstream press still clung to the idea that Washington Gridlock was the fault of both parties and not solely the fault of the GOP. Ornstein and co-author Thomas Mann challenged that notion:

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.

I similarly could not understand why the press was clinging to their bullshit narrative that it's "the fault of both sides" when Republicans were openly bragging about the fact that they were the ones causing the gridlock. If a group wants to claim credit for intentionally causing a serious problem, I asked, then why not take them at their word?

As TPM reports in the above-linked article, Ornstein and Mann were viciously attacked by right-wingers who simply did not buy into the book's premise that Republicans were more to blame for the gridlock and that "a sea change" is occurring within the GOP which reflected a willingness to risk harm to the United States in order to achieve certain ideological goals:

The Weekly Standard called the book "relentlessly one-sided." Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin wondered if Mann and Ornstein's analysis was "parody." The National Review said, "Their argument bears all of the characteristics, and the subtlety, of a rant."

Well, if recent events are any indication, Ornstein and Mann's "parody" turned out to be right on the money.  Well done, gentlemen.

BONUS QUOTE:

"After a year of peddling selectively leaked transcripts and hyperventilating over and repeating tendentious readings of unexceptional process stories, suddenly everyone is asking whether it could possibly be true that this was just a political witch hunt all along.

"Let's set aside whether it's a witch hunt or even what it is. What it is has been obvious all along to anyone paying attention with even the most baseline level intelligence and experience. And yet it took an offhand remark from Kevin McCarthy to suddenly make the obvious discussable. Step back and think about it and that's amazing. Why didn't reporters feel empowered to pose these completely obvious questions absent McCarthy's remarks? It's been out there totally in plain sight all along. How could journalists of all people either be oblivious to this or not feel they had permission to discuss it?"

-- Josh Marshall, on the sudden unravelling of the Select Committee on Benghazi.