Stop Trying to Work the Refs

Be mad or don't

I wasn’t going to blog today, but Matt Yglesias had a couple of tweets about some responses to the failure of a bill to fund health care for a particular subgroup of veterans that perfectly fit with one of my recurring pet peeves, and I think it’s worth hitting them harder:

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

I don't think we should underrate the political risk Democrats are running here, but one reason for the asymmetry is that a lot of progressive media figures have Hasan's instinct to respond to these kind of events with arch, ironic meta-commentary rather than first-order outrage.

Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan

Funny how Dems get destroyed when a random activist says ‘defund the police’ but congressional Republicans can just screw over military veterans in public, for the world to see, and pay no political penalty. https://t.co/2iMaEyxX3X

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

If you want the public to see Republicans' conduct on the burn pit bill as outrageous, then you have to act like you yourself are outraged by it. I think it's pretty outrageous! They themselves agreed that the bill was good right up until they blocked it.

This is something that happens all the time, and it consistently drives me nuts. When Democrats do something politically dumb or hypocritical, Republicans scream and wail about how it’s the greatest outrage in the history of organized human societies. When Republicans do something equally dumb and hypocritical, on the other hand, we get a whole bunch of tweets of the form “Can you imagine the reaction if a Democrat had done this?”

And, you know, that’s quite possibly the most perfectly useless thing anyone who cares about the issue can do. If you think it’s an outrage that they did a thing, act outraged: scream and yell into every camera and microphone you can find about how this is the Worst! Betrayal! Ever! If you don’t think it’s a big deal, note it and move on.

But this bullshit where you complain that it’s not being covered as an outrage when you’re not acting like it’s an outrage is stupid and counter-productive. It’s an attempt to appeal to some imaginary referee that some sort of imaginary rule is being violated in an unfair way. And as basically any sports fan can tell you, nobody likes players or coaches who whine to the ref.

And not to get all Freddie deBoer, here, but what makes this even more maddening is that a huge fraction of this nonsense comes from people who are in the media. If you’re a reporter for a major paper or network, you are the referee. You’ve got the platform to see to it that this gets covered however you think it ought to be covered, so stop whining on Twitter that whatever dumbass thing Mitch McConnell just did isn’t being greeted with Fox-level indignation, and get indignant.

(To be fair, there are some people in this specific case who are genuinely acting pissed off in the right way— Jon Stewart is getting some of the right kind of press. But I’ve also seen a lot of the arch meta-outrage that Yglesias highlights.)

This is in some ways a subpart of a broader issue I have, which is that nobody actually cares about hypocrisy— anybody clueful enough to follow the news is bright enough to retcon some reason why an apparently contradictory action is not, in fact, that bad, because the situations are not directly comparable. But the media-wankery angle of this piece just irritates me to no end.

Get mad, or don’t get mad. Don’t complain about other people failing to get mad on your behalf.

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That’s a quick angry rant; if you want to see if this ever happens again, here’s a button:

If you want to call this hypocritical on my part, it won’t work, but you can give it a shot in the comments: