If you listened to all the 'Very Smart People' in the Washington press corps over the last few weeks whinging about how this time Trump had crashed and burned once and for all, that he is broken and beyond salvation and his Presidency is all but over, I'm guessing you're not buying and probably think otherwise. And they don't care. They don't have to be right.
In the game of professional punditry there clearly exists a special set of rules designed for one sort of person: Liberal's parade of bomb-throwing, hate-mongering, race-baiting bottom feeders. That breed which makes their daily bread from grifting the leftist soft skulls by generating an endless flood of books, magazine articles, broadcasts, speeches and videos all telling the soft skull liberal base over and over again that their bigotries are noble and their paranoia is real. Of course, part of the downside of wallowing in the wingnut sewer and trafficking in slander and lies is that, sooner or later, you become a toxic mess.
Your stink becomes unacceptable to the general public, which is where the Sunday morning talk shows -- the Mouse Circus -- comes in. Because despite having long ago devolved into a sinkhole of Beltway twaddle, it is still viewed by altogether too many people as a bastion of Very Serious people. It's the strip-mall of political opinion where casual shoppers go to feel smart and validated.
And so a bargain is struck; the bottom feeders deliver a temporary hike in the only thing these show's owners really care about -- audience share -- and, in exchange for being teevee friendly and keeping the worst of their batshit crazy on a leash for a few minutes, their Mouse Circus deburrs the bottom feeders' public image, replates and burnishes their credibility and temporarily transfuses them with Seriousness, which can then be redeemed at ten times its face value back among the soft skulls.
And in the key to that bargain we will now call "The Biden Rule": an agreement that the moderator will never, ever ask the bomb-thrower, the hate-monger or the race-baiting goon sitting directly across from them a single question about their bomb-throwing, hate-mongering or race-baiting activities. Instead they will be represented to the public merely as a liberal / Never-Trumper commentator or talk radio host or pundit who, at worst, might be known for some "controversial" opinions, which the moderator will never bothers to explicate.
Obvious rapacious hucksters like Al Sharpton find a safe and nurturing environment within the American political media for the same reason that clowns and flakes and demagogues like Never-Tumpers Rick Wilson and Jennifer Rubin, and anti-trump race baiters like MSNBC Nutty Negress Joy Reid and NPR's Yamiche Alcindor prosper within the same media midden pile because they are needed for the media to keep their Sunday freak shows running.
I'd say there's a revolving door between naked political pimping and network punditing, but as the case of the NYT's Paul Krugman amply demonstrates, there is no door at all anymore. If you pay any attention at all to the Beltway Media Club you will not fail to quickly notice that their highest priority is the mutual defense and protection of fellow Club members. No matter how many times they publicly shit the bed they can always rely on the likes of Chuck Tard of 'Meet the Press' or 'This Week with Georgie Stephanopoulos', to hose them down, fluff them up and sit them down in front of the camera for their newest rehabilitation session. The Beltway Fixers will always, always, always fish bottom-feeding ghouls out of the gutter, hose them off and put them back in front of a camera.
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