Writing for the WashPost this a.m., Greg Sargent argues that "the false equivalence pundits are part of the problem" with the sequester.
Republican no-new-taxes-though-the-skies-may-fall intransigence is the heart of the problem, Sargent writes, but mealy mouthed pundits, steeped in the old objectivity norms, can't bring themselves to make this clear.
Perhaps the fact that my previous post on the sequester idiocy (immediately below) was headlined"You can blame whom you want for the sequester crisis" explains why Sargent's argument is so appealing as it enables me to assign blame to both parties plus myself for something that Sargent says is the Repubs' fault. Writes he:
"Analysts reluctant to embrace this conclusion — an affliction I've called the 'centrist dodge'— have adopted several techniques. One is to pretend Dems haven’t offered any compromise solution, when in fact they have. A second is to argue that, okay, Dems have offered a compromise while Republicans haven’t, but Dems haven’t gone far enough towards the middle ground, so both sides are still to blame for the impasse. (The problem with this dodge is that it fails to acknowledge that Republicans themselves have openly stated that there is no distance to which Dems could go to win GOP cooperation, short of giving them everything they want.)
We’re now seeing a third technique appear: Acknowledge that Republicans are the uncompromising party, but assert that it’s ultimately on the President to figure out a way to either force Republicans to drop their intransigence or to otherwise 'lead' them out if it.
His main point is that when one side says, essentially, there's lots of ways we can resolve but we insist that the deal include some new tax revenue, and the other says not one penny of new taxes, it should be clear where lies the intransigence.