00:00:44.080And so what better way to highlight that stance and dig in than to have a series
00:00:50.800where we explain some to each other and to our audience.
00:00:54.980Where we introduce each other to specific pundits and their punditry.
00:00:59.480Yeah, especially because I think a lot of these people sort of blend together in my mind, right, where I have a sense that if I hear a name, oh, that's a dummy.
00:01:09.800But I couldn't quite pin specific opinions on them.
00:01:12.560Also, I think there's something interesting with punditry and maybe with, like, everybody on the Internet where it's like they just come to you fully formed.
00:01:19.280You're like, this is just a political pundit whose views I'm hearing.
00:01:22.620And oftentimes you don't know, like, wait, who is this person?
00:01:29.900Although I won't be doing that too much.
00:01:31.080I was subtweeting my own segment, but maybe we're not going to do that for years.
00:01:36.040Well, my pundit portrait is Kathleen Parker, columnist for The Washington Post, who is pretty distinctly uninteresting in terms of her history.
00:01:58.220Yeah, she's at the Post. She's been a columnist since 1987. She started off with the Orlando Sentinel, eventually makes her way to the Post where she remains because that's the kind of job you get and you die with. It's like a Supreme Court appointment.
00:02:12.940It is really weird to me that like this is just like background noise of these fucking columnists. They just have their jobs for life.0.99
00:02:20.020And you will see as we go through some of her greatest hits.
00:09:54.080Let's step forward a couple of years.1.00
00:09:57.240September 18th, 2018, Kathleen drops a heater.
00:10:03.020This is during the Brett Kavanaugh nomination drama.
00:10:07.420He's in the midst of his confirmation hearings, and they have been sort of derailed by a very credible, very detailed accusation of sexual assault made by Professor Christine Blasey Ford.
00:10:21.120Kavanaugh, of course, denies the accusation.
00:10:24.400And then before either Ford or Kavanaugh so much as testified, we get this piece, which I'm going to send you.
00:10:34.600It says, is there a Kavanaugh doppelganger?0.95
00:10:39.360Was this this fucking deranged thing where it's like she misidentified someone who was also there and it was based on like Google Street View analysis?0.95
00:10:49.320That's the Ed Whelan spinoff from this op-ed.0.98
00:16:04.440It was like a social event where she knew who was there.
00:16:07.780It was like a very finite number of people.
00:16:10.080And she obviously feels confident enough that years later.
00:16:13.740Yeah. She like stood up knowing that it would ruin her reputation.
00:16:17.080And for those who aren't aware, like she tried to keep her identity private in this because she knew she was going to get dragged in the mud, which of course she was.
00:16:25.060And then ultimately she got up there and testified like how confident she felt.
00:16:29.940Right. You know, I know that people on the right sort of imagine that there are like rewards for people who accuse powerful men of sexual assault.
00:16:38.220But of course, the opposite is true. That's all incredibly strong evidence that she's confident about his identity.
00:16:43.860Yeah. And Kathleen Parker just can't hold those two thoughts at once.
00:16:46.960She needs to be able to support Brett Kavanaugh. And so she's just working her way there without going off the deep end like Matt Drudge.
00:16:54.020This is me continuing to follow Azalea Banks on Instagram. I don't want to like her, but I still like her.
00:16:59.700She's not always right, but when she's right, ooh.
00:18:26.860This is like the tactic that like angry guys use when they're in a fight with their wives.
00:18:33.360Is this the thing like Roberts won't destroy the reputation of the Supreme Court or whatever?
00:18:38.220It's almost it's less sophisticated than that. Here's what's going on here. Big picture. Anthony Kennedy was generally considered the fifth vote for Roe v. Wade. He was a supporter of it. And so he's stepping down. He's going to be replaced by Trump. Several legal analysts, notably Jeffrey Toobin, flagged the distinct possibility that Roe v. Wade was going to be overturned.
00:19:02.000She says, quote, what new justice would want to be that man or woman who forevermore would be credited with upending settled law and causing massive societal upheaval?
00:19:12.980What? They would get more fishing trips to Wisconsin or whatever the fuck Clarence Thomas is doing.0.99
00:19:17.680Why would someone not want to do that?0.94
00:19:19.000She says, quote, only Clarence Thomas would likely vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.
00:19:45.220She says, many Americans, including some conservatives, would rather Trump not have access to the employee suggestion box, much less the Supreme Court.
00:19:53.920Then again, Gorsuch, whom he nominated upon taking office, is hardly a radical wingman.
00:19:59.100And though true that Trump promised during his campaign to select justices who would send abortion back to the states, he doesn't actually get to dictate how they rule.
00:20:06.960Oh, this is again like although he says explicitly he wants to overturn Roe v. Wade, he's not going to overturn Roe v. Wade.
00:20:13.880Yeah, that's why I like this paragraph so much, because once again, Donald Trump is saying something very specific.
00:20:20.360I'm going to select justices that will overturn Roe v. Wade.
00:24:44.660She she was like very pro mask and like wrote a lot about that during covid and was very critical of Trump's response.0.62
00:24:52.060But on the other hand, like she will never get behind trans rights.
00:24:56.420Whenever partisan politics come to the front, she's pretty distinctly Republican.0.92
00:25:01.580And this thing of blaming like left wing activists for basically everything that the right wing does.
00:25:05.200I feel like this is another like very common trope in these columns.
00:25:07.920And I think a lot of what makes her so shitty is that a lot of what she writes about when she really gets into substantive issues is just sort of like, oh, it's not so bad.
00:25:49.640So you – I have kept this a secret from you.
00:25:52.360I'm doing a somewhat obscure – although I don't actually know if this is obscure to you because you're like a Twitter super user and this is a person that got yelled at on Twitter constantly, which is how I first heard of him.
00:26:03.640So we are going to talk about Chris Saliza.
00:26:26.620Which is that he's just sort of like a horse-brained sort of dummy who gives these sort of like middling, hedging takes that are sort of like bizarrely critical of the left.
00:26:40.480But I don't really know any actual details.
00:26:44.440It's true that I've seen him get dunked on on Twitter quite a bit, but I've never like dug in because he doesn't seem like the type of person that's worth digging into.
00:26:54.760Well, this is I mean, I think this is like one of the core paradoxes of this show is that there's people that just aren't that interesting to talk about.
00:27:01.640But also like his posts on The Washington Post would get three million views.
00:27:06.340And he was one of the most popular pundits on CNN.
00:27:09.440So like these are worlds that just don't interest us very much.
00:27:12.200Yeah. TV news commentary, like the fucking Sunday morning talk shows.0.99
00:27:16.280Right. Also, like we ignore it at our peril because like these fucking self-help books that we talk about, people like listen to these people.0.99
00:27:22.540I mean, I think we're still sort of just haunted by the fact that old people vote and young people don't.0.97
00:27:27.140And like these people just have like the news on in their home.0.90
00:28:14.020It appears that he like grew up in like a fairly middle class family, but he also went to an elite boarding school whose name I forget and I don't care about.
00:28:24.560He gets into it because he gets an internship with George Will when he's in college.
00:28:31.300And the only reason he's even heard of George Will at the time is that George Will wrote a book about baseball.
00:28:36.480And he's like a sports guy. And I actually, I mean, we talked about it briefly before, but like, I think the rise of people like Chris Silliza is part of this transformation of political journalism into essentially sports commentary.
00:28:51.300After he works for George Will, he works for something called Roll Call, which is one of these like political who's up, who's down things. Then in 2005, he gets hired by the Washington Post and has a column called The Fix.
00:29:02.980he gets famous when he starts doing these videos for Washington Post of like who had the best
00:29:09.540and worst week in Washington oh yeah you remember this and there's like a wheel that he spins and
00:29:14.320everything yeah yeah yeah I man this is this must have been when I was actually absorbing
00:29:19.980political nonsense like this as like a young as a young guy I was living in DC for a bit after
00:29:28.020college and uh reading the hot blogs and just absorbing absorbing trash into my brain so we're0.98
00:29:36.080gonna watch uh some of this trash oh god okay0.98