First it was Krugman calling out the "centrism" of the media, the fetish journalists and opinion makers have for pretending that both sides are at fault, no matter how insane or intransigent one side is while the other compromises even to the point of giving up good policy for bad:
[T]he...true moral failure is the cult of balance, of centrism.
Think about what’s happening right now. We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating — offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans that are far to the right of public opinion.
So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent...
You have to ask, what would it take for these news organizations and pundits to actually break with the convention that both sides are equally at fault? ...
And yes, I think this is a moral issue. The “both sides are at fault” people have to know better; if they refuse to say it, it’s out of some combination of fear and ego, of being unwilling to sacrifice their treasured pose of being above the fray.
Now it's E.J. Dionne, calling out centrism both in politics and in the media, and making an important distinction between centrism and moderation:
What the country yearns for is moderation. What we hear about is the political center. But centrism has become the enemy of moderation.
Moderation in politics is about balance. It means believing in a vibrant and innovative private sector and a government substantial enough to do what the private sector doesn't and to enforce sensible rules for economic competition. It means incentives for success, help for those making their way up, and security for the sick, the aging, the poor, the unlucky. It means equilibrium between our love of individualism and our desire for community....
Centrism is something altogether different. It's not a philosophy. It's a position based on calculation. It doesn't start with fixed principles. It measures where everyone else stands on some political spectrum at a given moment and then frantically adjusts....
[T]he center's devotees, in politics and in the media, fear saying outright that by any past standards -- or by the standards of any other democracy -- the views of this new right wing are very, very extreme and entirely impractical...
Instead, the center bends. It concocts deficit plans that include too little new tax revenue. It accepts cuts in programs that would have seemed radical and draconian even a couple of years ago....
It's time for moderates to....state plainly what they're for, stand their ground, and pull the argument their way....
And he calls out President Obama himself (though not strongly enough, IMO, considering that his twin mantras of bipartisanship and "both sides are at fault" are responsible for allowing the current ridiculous state of affairs to take hold), because if Obama doesn't reverse course on this and take a stand again on principles, he'll have little to go to the voters with again in 2012:
[W]hen this [debt ceiling negotiation] ends, it's Obama who'll need a reset. At heart, he's a moderate who likes balance. Yet Americans have lost track of what he's really for. Occasionally you wonder if he's lost track himself. He needs to remind us, and perhaps himself, why he wants to be our president.
Indeed, that would be a worthy exercise.