Driftglass is one of my favorite bloggers, writing with passion, flair and anger. He's a "spiritual descendent" of the late, brilliant Steve Gilliard, graduating from a commenter on Steve's blog to his own blog (just as Steve began as a commenter here and then started his "News Blog").
I just read Driftglass's brilliant post, James Buchanan, Centrist Hero, in which he excerpts Buchanan's State of the Union addresses to illustrate the quintessential "phony centrist" of 1860. Here's Buchanan on the "centrist" solution to the vexing slavery issue:
How easy would it be for the American people to settle the slavery question forever and to restore peace and harmony to this distracted country! They, and they alone, can do it. All that is necessary to accomplish the object, and all for which the slave States have ever contended, is to be let alone and permitted to manage their domestic institutions in their own way. As sovereign States, they, and they alone, are responsible before God and the world for the slavery existing among them. For this the people of the North are not more responsible and have no more right to interfere than with similar institutions in Russia or in Brazil.
Driftglass comments:
When faced with a clear, moral choice, the Counterfeit Centrist -- being a natural coward and terrified at the thought of having to pick a fucking side in anything that is not 100% safe and risk-free -- will instead predictably attack the shrillness of the Dirty Hippies who disturbed his establishmentarian somnolence by blowing the whistle on the Establishment's gross failings and hypocrisies in the first place.
Read the whole thing. It's a searing indictment of the bullshit "both sides do it" crap that spews from the media every day. Just as slavery was an unmitigated evil, so too are policies like the Ryan Plan that starve children, health care repeal that leaves thousands to die and phony wars based on lies.
In his next post, Driftglass illustrates this with newly minted "centrist," former rights and "Axis of Evil" coiner, David Frum:
"Four conditions made the rumor [of drones being used to spy on farmers] possible:
1) A readiness by important sections of the population to believe that they live in some kind of imminent police state. In this, the paranoid conservatives of the Obama era are no different from the paranoid progressives of the Bush years..."
Right. No difference at all!
Driftglass asks: "Where are the WMD Mr. Frum?"