Because here's another one. I just read this NY Times op-ed by Alex Pareene, who "has covered politics and the Senate since 2004," says the guest writer's byline. Indeed, for nearly 20 years Pareene has written about politics for The New Republic, Salon, Gawker and The Baffler. Either he's learned next to nothing or his mind is a muddle.
In a "A Pyrrhic Victory in a Broken Senate," he observes that "what may appear to be an imminent victory for bipartisan deal-making was in fact a drawn-out demonstration of how broken the Senate is as an institution." No argument there. Yet then he writes that "the Senate (with the White House’s support) wasted months cajoling and rehabilitating a handful of key Republicans only to pass a smaller version of something Democrats could theoretically have passed entirely on their own."
Note the inclusion of "theoretically" — a political theory as verifiable as physics' strings, which in reality means months were not wasted on cajoling and rehabilitating key senators. What Pareene posits on the one hand — the truth of a broken Senate — he takes away with the other — a fix born in fantasy.
It gets worse, the rabbit hole deeper, the disconnect complete. The Democratic Party’s "right flank — Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema in particular," writes Pareene, "made it clear that they did not support eliminating the Senate’s de facto 60 vote requirement for legislation." This had nothing to do with the infrastructure bill, amenable as it was, and still is, to reconciliation. So why throw it in? Merely as a way to re-outrage some readers (and we know who they are), a lyrical ploy akin to Bush-Cheney's 9/11 and Iraq.
Pareene then casually, or obliviously, acknowledges the senselessness of bringing it up in the first place. "Biden’s full infrastructure plan would not have passed with 51 votes the day after the Covid relief bill even if he had tried to do it that way." Exactly.
Then, in a really weird leap of condemnatory logic, he goes on to do what he wanted to do all along: bash the only remaining alternative, that of a bipartisan deal. And to that he adds: "Any White House effort to get two Democratic senators, Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema, on board without also bringing along at least 10 of their Republican friends was quickly thrown aside." For weeks, months, Manchin, at least, made it enormously clear that he'd vote for no other, which Pareene interprets as "quickly." Oh, that wicked President Biden — and so again he feverishly rings the bell of "some readers."
In no passage does Pareene blame the people who hired 49 senators led by another who said in May of this year: "100 percent of our focus is on stopping this new administration." Nor with any deserved focus does he blame the 50 senators themselves. Nor does he seriously confront the immovable objects of Manchin et al. In brief, as political analysis, Pareene's writings are useless.
But he'll go right on writing for populist progressives who prefer not to read any inconvenient truths. This is also immensely unhelpful. It feeds the same sort of blindness preferred by those other guys.