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:
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.
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:
This reminds me of Murc's Law. I think what happens is that Democrats and "the media" are available and salient to us in a way Republicans aren't, so commentary ends up focusing that direction.
Mitch McConnell doesn't care if I'm mad at him, but the NYTimes might, so our instinct is often to complain about the NYTimes.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=murc%27s%20law