Krugman:

[Clive Crook] accurately describes the destructive behavior of the GOP and how it’s making the country ungovernable. But does he then condemn the perpetrators? Not exactly. Instead, he calls a plague on both houses:

If positions were reversed, Democrats would feel just as entitled to disable, by any means necessary, their enemies’ legislative accomplishments.

Would they? Did they in fact behave like that when Republicans held the White House? No, they didn’t; Crook equates real GOP behavior with an imagined Democratic future.

And look at what this does to incentives: no matter how badly Republicans behave, they don’t draw condemnation from the Very Serious People. All you get is tut-tutting about how politics is awful, and if only we had a third party to install Mike Bloomberg as dictator president all would be well.

Pundits who won’t call out extremism without pretending that it’s symmetric aren’t a big part of our problem, but they are a part of our problem.

Reporters (not just pundits) are guilty of journalistic malpractice when they fetishize “objectivity” to the point of refusing to acknowledge that sometimes one side of a political argument is deliberately lying. I don’t know what can be done about it, but it’s neither helpful nor healthy for a democratic society when the press fails to be honest.