One of the giant problems in handling the bullshit from Republicans is the journalists (supposed journalists) and other media types covering the Republican bullshit.

And for instance, from yesterday:

No push back. No fact check. No follow up. Just hateful lies allowed to be mainstreamed. https://t.co/DmUWG50LAF

— Wajahat Ali (@WajahatAli) November 27, 2022

Coverage of asshole Republicans is at a fever-pitch dumb-ass. The above isn’t just the rich players like Upchuck Todd at NBC, but also ABC‘s Martha Raddatz, who sure as shit should know better. When I Googled McCaul and DHS, I couldn’t find any pushback from anywhere. It sounds sketchy and full of BS.

Last month, Margaret Sullivan, on a promo tour for her new memoir, “Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life,” had this to say about journalists covering lying, asshole Republicans (The Associated Press): ‘“There still seems to be a tendency to not want to offend, to not want to offend the Republican establishment, to not offend the Trump Republicans, but rather to normalize them with democracy on the brink. I don’t think that’s the right approach … I don’t think it’s about being aggressive. … I think it’s about framing things differently so we don’t see these very high stakes politics as a game, we don’t see it as horserace, we don’t see it as entertaining. We see it as extremely consequential and happening before our eyes.”‘

Will Bunch, a Washinton Post op/ed writer conurred: ‘“This criticism isn’t coming from the outside,” Bunch said. “It’s coming from someone who is in many ways the ultimate insider. People at the highest levels are going to have to engage with someone like Margaret.”
But, Bunch conceded, “listening to her and doing something in response are two different things.”‘

Yes, they are.

And in the seriousness of the moment — Ian Bassin, co-founder and executive director of Protect Democracy, and former associate White House counsel in the Obama administration, noted in an interview published this morning at Salon the wedge point America is in right now:

We should be able to hold two truths in our minds simultaneously. We are living in an era of global democratic recession. The United States has not been immune to that trend. The evidence is clear that the quality of American democracy has been declining precipitously over the last 15 or so years. We have to understand that we are living in a moment of real danger for democracy, regardless of what happens in any given election. This is a 15-year trend. The challenge is not ending in the next three months or next year. The great political orders of history have all at some point come to an end, and the way it can happen here is if we convince ourselves that it can’t.

Here is a second truth: As much as we are experiencing rising authoritarianism here in the United States with Trumpism and the Republican Party’s turn against democracy, we are not Venezuela or Hungary or Turkey. We are the world’s oldest continuous democracy. We do have stronger democratic traditions and institutions than those countries and others that are succumbing to illiberalism and authoritarianism.

American exceptionalism is going to make us more resilient than Turkey or Brazil, for example. As we saw with the midterms, there are radical extremists in the Republican Party who are running on a platform of election denial, the Big Lie and pledging that if they are put in office, Republicans will never lose an election again. Right now, a person who attempted a violent coup to stay in power illegitimately is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, which in a 50-50 country puts him a coin flip, give or take, away from achieving power again. And if he does that, he’s already made clear he doesn’t intend to relinquish that power so long as he lives and breathes on this earth.

And he seemingly will never pass away if he can help it.

Pushback or not, yet once again here we are…

(Illustration out front found here.)