The Associated Press pipes up with a 'both sides' Trump take so dumb it may redefine the genre

The Associated Press pipes up with a 'both sides' Trump take so dumb it may redefine the genre
Hunter
Daily Kos Staff
Wednesday January 09, 2019 · 1:43 PM EST


Presenting: the worst take of all time. The record-holder and now-and-forever champion. The Holy Grail of Both Sides-ism. The dumbest thing you have ever heard. The final, definitive proof that this country will collapse in on itself before the press comes to terms with the manifest unfitness of the current White House occupant or the consequences of his nation-be-damned acts. The Great Stinker of Takes.

Link to tweet

Not only was the Associated Press ratioed thoroughly and well for this abomination of punditry, but most commenters were rightly focused on just what this would mean for every other fact-check in the world. "Police officers put the blame for the bank robbery on the bank robber, but it takes two to tango. Perhaps the bank should not have been open on Tuesdays" was a typical formulation.

All government shutdowns—and, apparently, this is going to be a commonplace Republican tactic now—are caused when one side wants a new concession that it estimates it can get if it holds the entire United States budget and every United States citizen hostage. Trump's version, however, is unusual, in that he, a raging self-absorbed narcissist still furious over the shellacking his allies got in the recent midterm elections, is demanding a ransom that even the majority of his own party has not been able to stomach giving him. Trump had two years of undivided Republican government to press for his wall; he did not get it, because even his own party considered the demand too expensive and too stupid to force through.

In a sudden new fit of pique after the midterm drubbings (and a series of indictments and court filings that have implicated him, personally, in likely state and federal crimes), Trump is now demanding that Democrats give him what a unified Republican government would not. His hostage: the whole of government, but most critically furloughed and unpaid federal workers and the Americans who rely on the services they provide. His demand: billions of dollars for a vanity project his own party refused to give him. His motivation: a purely political effort to prove his virility to an increasingly shrinking but still obsessively racist base.

There has been absolutely no non-Trump-humping evidence of any new crisis that would justify the extraordinary demands Trump has made, in any venue. The Associated Press headline writers know that as well as anyone else.

And from a "fact-checking" standpoint: When the government shut down, the Democrats were not in charge. It was just before Christmas. We were there. The Associated Press reported on it.

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