The spineless Democrats

You've heard me bemoan the unwillingness of the Democrats to stand up and fight a good many times on this blog. Here's an article that reports on a speech by Bill Clinton saying that too. The article is entitled, "Democrats must address tough issues, Clinton says". Here's some of what it says:

AUSTIN - Democrats can't be afraid to talk about hot-button issues like abortion and should fight back against personal attacks from conservatives if they want to regain power in Washington, former President Bill Clinton said Saturday.

"You can't say, 'Please don't be mean to me. Please let me win sometimes.' Give me a break here," Clinton said. "If you don't want to fight for the future and you can't figure out how to beat these people, then find something else to do."

Clinton, whose 2004 memoir My Life was a bestseller, drew roaring applause during his speech from the several hundred people gathered in the Texas House chamber to kick off the 10th annual Texas Book Festival, an event begun by first lady Laura Bush when her husband was governor.
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The speech was Clinton's first in the Texas House since 1991, when Democrat Ann Richards was governor and the party controlled both chambers. Now all statewide officeholders and a majority of U.S. representatives are Republicans, and the GOP controls both chambers of the Texas Legislature.

Republicans also control Congress, a fact Clinton attributed to Democratic candidates' inability or unwillingness to "stand up and be heard" on issues that matter to people.

He said Democrats too often aren't willing to talk about abortion because they're afraid of virulent reactions from anti-abortion groups.

But the vast majority of people fall somewhere in the middle, agreeing that abortion is a tragedy but not wanting "to go back to the days when we criminalized the conduct of scared young girls and their doctors," he said.

"So how come we can't talk about it?" he added. "Because we basically let political ads turn every player in this drama into a two-dimensional cartoon instead of a three-dimensional person."

Clinton also criticized political reporters and authors for failing to use reason and common sense in their writing and to dig deeply into stories. Instead, he said, reporters let officials get away with saying things that aren't true just so their stories include comment from both sides of an issue.

This really quite recent practice of the news media to think they're being fair by reporting "both sides" of an issue regardless of the truth leads me almost to despair. If one side says the earth is round, do we then have to be "fair" by quoting a representative of the Flat Earth Society? What about the news media's job to report the facts in an impartial manner? Instead we have stenographers for reporters who just repeat what various partisans say without taking their job to inform the public seriously.

Of course, what I've noticed is that there is only this compulsion to present "both sides" when something that supports the liberal viewpoint is being reported. The press is very happy to report events from a right-wing point of view without offering equitable balance. Yesterday, Media Matters published a chart that reveals just how one-sided TV news was on reporting the Alito nomination. It's entitled, "Cable news coverage of Alito nomination skewed right". I really recommend that you click through and read it.