Chris Cillizza alternately writes the obvious as if it is a new revelation, follows the mainstream media’s pro-Left lockstep, He now in in the opinion for profit business, unlike me, who is in the opinion for free business, and yes, I realize that this places my criticism of Cillizza’s acumen on shaky ground immediately.
He recently wrote a substack essay (his newsletter is called “Chris Crucial”….no, I’m not kidding) titled “What does Kamala Harris *actually* believe?” criticized the “She Isn’t What She Is” candidate for so flagrantly flip-flopping to pander to voters who might be inclined to oppose a radical progressive, which is what she had been literally up to this moment. The essay concludes,
“Harris staked out all of her more liberal policy positions when she thought that the path to the 2020 Democratic nomination would be to portray herself as a more electable Bernie Sanders. Now that she is the Democratic nominee, she is walking away from them because she needs to appeal to the electoral middle. I get it! But it also makes me wonder — and should make you wonder too — whether she actually believes in any sort of specific policies. Or whether everything is negotiable based on her political circumstances.”
Hasn’t anyone not in thrall to the Democratic Party no matter who or what it nominates figure that out about Harris? And yet this unremarkable analysis unleashed the whirlwind on poor Chris, resulting in that declaration of independence above. I have written almost the identical sentiments as each of Cillizza’s points on Ethics Alarms, usually in comments, some of the many times. The problem is that Cillizza is hack as well as an idiot. I wrote about him in one post,
“….journalists, as a group, just aren’t that sharp. There are exceptions, but they are exceptions: this is a field that has never attracted the best and the brightest, and it is a structural problem that has become a major problem in the age of the “new journalism,” which is advocacy journalism, as in unethical journalism. The people with the largest metaphorical megaphone lack the wisdom, acumen, education of critical thinking skills to justify their having it. Yet they really think they know best, and have the right and the duty to use a job that was supposed to be about informing the public to manipulate public opinion for what journalists think is “the greater good.” They don’t know what the greater good is. Most don’t know what “good” is.
Chris Cillizza isn’t just any journalist: he’s supposed to be one of the better ones. Horrible thought: he probably is. He’s an editor at CNN, and before that he wrote the daily political blog of The Washington Post, and was a regular writer for the Post on political issues as well as a frequent panelist on “Meet the Press.” He also has a long rap sheet on Ethics Alarms, despite the fact that I avoid following his regular forays into fake news, propaganda, and biased punditry. Who knows what I’ve missed.
What I haven’t missed is plenty, though. In a 2019 post, for example, Cillizza wrote that Secretary of State William Seward’s purchase of Alaska from Russia “didn’t work out too well,” which is why it is called “Seward’s Folly.” When I finished taping my skull back together, I wrote,
It is astounding that Cillizza could write this, and that CNN could allow it to be published. Never mind that Alaska has the largest oil field in North America. In Harvard historian Oscar Handlin’s book,”Chance Or Destiny: Turning Points In American History,” the purchase of Alaska is #5 out of ten. Written during the Cold War (I have an old copy of it right here, because unlike Chris Cillizza, I know something about American history, ’cause I read and stuff…), the book explains that had it not been for Seward’s prescient purchase, “the bases that today flank the northern ocean would not have been American, pointing toward Asia, but Russian, pointing toward the United States. If our citizens, in the air age, still feel that distance from the potential enemy gives some security to their national borders, it is in no small measure due to Mr. Seward’s bargain.”.
That’s right, bargain. Alaska’s location is now considered critical protection for the continental United States, and has been for about a hundred years. The state is uniquely positioned for supporting space surveillance and satellite control networks, tracking thousands of orbital objects on a daily basis, and providing access to refueling tankers and the Greenland ice sheet.
Did it ever occur to Cillizza to do a little research regarding Alaska, since he obvious knows less than nothing about it (knowing what isn’t true is less than nothing)? Nah. Nobody checks facts at CNN anyway.
Saying that the Alaska purchase is known today as “Seward’s Folly” is like saying that the sun never sets on the British Empire, or that Babe Ruth holds the career home run record. Try to keep up, Chris: the name “Seward’s Folly”—cartoonists drew Alaska as a worthless and uninhabitable iceberg, which is what most Americans, who were like Chris, though they had an excuse, it being the 19th Century and all—- was officially retired in 1896. That was when the Klondike Gold Rush brought over100,000 prospectors to Alaska , creating “boom towns,” businesses, and eventually, a new state.
The man is an idiot. In another infamous post, Cillizza put his name on a story headlined, “The New Sneaky Issue in the 2022 Election.” The “new issue”? Illegal immigration. In 2020, Cillizza claimed that President Trump’s use of the word “riots” to describe Black Lives Matter riots was racist. The Cillizza EA dossier is full of either throbbing progressive, anti-Trump bias, or disqualifying outbreaks of journalism malpractice, and yet there he is, sounding just like me.
Where’s a wood-chipper when you need one?
Ethics Alarms 
There was a time when all clocks were analog – in fact, they used springs and/or weights to provide the motive forces that permitted their operation.This is no longer the case; almost everyone who still wears a watch relies upon a battery-operated machine, and those who rely upon a digital device are also impaired. Within a generation or two, the saying “a broken clock is correct twice a day” will mean nothing.
And so it is with Cillizza.
He was the one who wrote that Barack Obama was having trouble because the modern-day Presidency is an impossible job. In response, you wrote a brief history of the Presidency that I practically have memorized about successful and unsuccessful Presidents.
I was going to say a blind squirrel finds a nut occasionally.
My wife and I pretty much said that, too. “Blind pig, acorn. Stopped clock, twice a day.”
Even the worst archer sometimes hits the target, and the bigger the target, the greater the likelihood that even the worst archer can hit it. What’s going on here is becoming so obvious that even some on the left are saying this is going too far.
Look, I get that where you stand sometimes has to depend on where you sit. Caspar Weinberger was Director of the Office of Management and Budget and as such tried to cut back defense spending. As Secretary of Defense he advocated for more defense spending. Do you think Cap Weinberger changed one bit just by holding a different post? No, just different jobs have different priorities.
However, it’s one thing to take apparently contradictory positions because your job responsibilities are different. It’s another thing to take positions that are all over the place because you think it will get you more votes. It’s still another to essentially lie about where you stand because you think it will fool others into giving you what you want and then you can do what you were going to do all along.
Anyone who’s been paying a normal level of attention the last eight years knows that Kamala Harris has always been a liberal from one of the three or four most liberal states in the union, and she’s more liberal than most. Her actions haven’t always screamed liberal, though, because she built part of her career (the part that wasn’t built on being the mistress of a local power broker) on locking up young black men and keeping them locked up to provide the state with cheap labor. Then once she got elected to the Senate in 2016, she staked out such super-liberal positions she was rated the most liberal Senator of all. In a legislative house that includes Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Mazie Hirono, that’s saying something.
She spent not even one term there, during which the most notable thing she did was scream at now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Then Biden tapped her for Vice-President because of what she was, not what she did. She achieved nothing as Vice-President other than being shuffled off the stage before a year was over as she proved herself incapable of being comprehensible when off-script. The rest is history. Anyone who advocates for her know is either a partisan who’d vote for a ham sandwich if it had a D next to it or just stupid.
you can’t fault yourself that some idiots share your thoughts at times.
they have to think something, right?
all I think is that, when she said, “My values have not changed,” anyone with any critical thoughts would follow up with, “what are those values, if your positions changed.”
sadly, we were stuck with Dana Bash
they were not smart enough to ask that follow up
-Jut
He secretly reads this blog and merely summarized many of the underlying sentiments of your explicit comments.
No identity crisis needed.
Cue Bruce Willis and “Welcome to the party, pal.”
The gravitas with which people like Cillizza are able to cloak themselves in because they work these jobs is preposterous. They deserve as much deference as those guys in the TV commercials who stayed in a Holiday Inn last night.