Inside the Blue Bubble

[George K]

Taibbi:

https://www.racket.news/p/inside-the-blue-bubble

He talks about the interview with Phillip Bump, who walked out of the interview when presented with uncomfortable questions.

But the last paragraphs, I found interesting.

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The other episode involved professor and frequent media commentator Dan Drezner, who laughs hysterically and at great length the instant it registers that Noam plans on countering a claim that Trump was a bad president. It’s at about the 52-minute mark:

Link to video

I’m not sure I could classify Donald Trump as a good president. I’d feel extremely confident however in saying, for instance, that George W. Bush was a worse one, not just for the WMD lies and accompanying Iraq disaster (which Drezner supported, by the way), but because of his and Dick Cheney’s ambitious innovations in anti-democratic grotesqueries like state-sponsored kidnapping (i.e. rendition) and mass surveillance. Drezner is doing what Bump did, albeit with more humor: gagging in disbelief when a mainstream piety sent up the flagpole isn’t instantly saluted.

I think a lot of people in the world I once inhabited, in center-left media and academia, don’t realize they’ve slipped into a deeply unattractive habit of substituting checklists of unquestioned assumptions for thought. In the blue bubble Trump’s limitless evil is an idea with such awesome gravitational pull that it makes nuanced discussion about almost anything impossible. It’s why no one in media could suggest even the possibility he hadn’t colluded with Russia. He’s become an anti-God, of a faith that requires constant worship. When do we get to go back to being atheists?