crap analysis

Here's an example of how political writing in the mainstream press can get the facts right only to follow with lame analysis.

The facts are that More than 2.5 million voters have left the Democratic and Republican parties since the 2008 elections, while the number of independent voters continues to grow.

Rather than post his own thoughts concerning what's mainly responsible for the decline of party identification in the US, the reporter Richard Wolf turns the podium over to Doug Lewis, a minor political functionary, who believes that "The strident voices of both the left and the right have sort of soured people from saying willingly that they belong to one party or the other. If both sides call each other scurrilous dogs, then the public believes that both sides are probably scurrilous dogs."

Besides perpetuating the "they're both the same and equally bad" falsehood, Lewis's narrative implies that the "correct" political position is roughly equidistant between "the strident voices of both the left and the right," in the mythical, nonexistent, and irrelevant middle.

"Left" and "Right" and the background static of extreme partisanship, however, is just part of the show, and has little to do with the eclipse of party politics. More and more, American adults consider the paralysis of government, the large Republican presidential field of morons and misfits, a Democratic Party corrupted and so demoralized it has no plan, and turn away in contempt.

Late in his story, Richard Wolf offers that "The decline (in party identification) is due to a variety of factors," one of which is "people revolt in disgust." But overall the analysis is typical MSM stuff which seeks to avoid the obvious: that we have to both make our own damn future and get a new political system, because the one we've got now is dead as a smoked oyster.