The Owls' Nest

Click here for an article on Substack by Robert Reich, entitled "Four ways the mainstream media is quietly helping Trump and his Republican allies."

First, it’s drawing a false equivalence between Trump and Biden — claiming that Biden’s political handicap is his age, while Trump’s corresponding handicap is his criminal indictments.

Secondly, every time the mainstream media reports on another move by Trump and his Republican allies toward neofascism, it tries to balance its coverage by pointing out some fault in the Democratic Party (such as the ongoing federal corruption and bribery case against Senator Bob Menendez).

It makes it seem as if the dysfunction in Washington is coming from both parties.  

Finally, blaming both sides for this chaos plays into Trump’s and his allies’ goal of wanting Americans to believe the nation has become ungovernable, so it needs a strongman.

Bothsiderism: the fiction that the two parties are equally bad; or that to be fair and evenhanded, criticism of one side must be tempered by criticism of the other.

That point of view may have some validity when discussing two parties behaving in the way we've become accustomed to over the last 75 years. But when one party -- but not the other -- has gone off the rails, the principle no longer applies.