Here is what it sounds like in D.C., when the rats begin abandoning a sinking ship:

LOSING DAVID BRODER….What’s the modern day equivalent of "losing Walter Cronkite"? Perhaps losing David Broder?

In today’s column he doesn’t quite come right out and say that we need to withdraw from Iraq, but he sure wiggles up to within kissing distance of it. Will the rest of centrist Washington follow?

This is painful for someone who grew up watching Walter Cronkite to read.  You just see in it so horribly the decline of the American spirit since the Reagan years. I doubt Drum was thinking in those terms when he wrote that…he’s probably thinking in terms of the environment of the inside the beltway kool kids.  And he’s probably right.  For the D.C. kool kids, loosing Broder may well be, in a sense, like loosing Walter Cronkite.  And this very nicely sums up what’s wrong with the mainstream news media today, and in particular, the shitfaced pundocracy.  Comparing David "they came in and trashed the place" Broder to Walter Cronkite is like comparing the Matterhorn to Walt Disney’s recreation of it.  One’s a real goddamned mountain and the other is a hollow fake created purely for entertainment.  And that’s Broder.  And that’s why he’s thought well of by the D.C. cocktail party crowd.  He entertains them.  If, as Broder said, Bill Clinton came in with his trailer trash crowd and "trashed the place", Broder was the man to tell them all their cheapshit Georgetown conceits were insightful and high principled pearls of wisdom.  As Atrios points out:

The country doesn’t care what David Broder thinks. He reflects the conventional wisdom of his clique back at them. That’s his audience.

Just so.  Broder’s audience is his own Washington inside the beltway clique.  The same mindless soulless lapdogs who have been breathlessly kissing the feet of anti democratic republican thugs ever since Kenneth Starr started sniffing Bill Clinton’s underwear.  What we’re seeing in the beltway pundocracy now, is that Deer In The Headlights expression of a person watching a catastrophe rushing at them like an out of control semi, bearing their own words on its bumperstickers. 

In the months and years to come remember: these people mindlessly, witlessly, cheered President Junior on his way to war, when anyone with half a brain and a functional conscience could tell it was bullshit.  These people mindlessly, witlessly, roused American passions for war.  Saddam was a threat to our national security they said.  And defended Bush and the republicans when they began shredding our consitution.  The war would be over in days they said.  They’ve been making excuses for why it’s been relentlessly killing people for going on four years now.  The Iraqis would shower our troops with flowers they said.   They’re killing and maiming more and more every day now.  The tyrannies of the middle east would all fall like dominos they said.  Now an anti-human religious fanatisism sweeps the entire Arab world, taking its moral authority from everything Bush has done to destroy democracy in America and ignore treaties on the conduct of war, and the practice of torture.  And now it’s become too much, even for the likes of David Broder.  Second thoughts?  No.  He’s looking for a way to deflect his share of the blame.  They all are.

They’ll say they were all bamboozled by a bunch of terrible, wicked men.  But…no.  They were willing to be fooled.  They held the Clintons in the same contempt Imelda Marco held her shoe shine girl, worshipped the republicans for the same arrogance of power that brought us war, corruption, and an America divided against itself like it hasn’t been since the civil war.  They roused the mob, not because they believed in Dubya, but because they loathed the democrats, and their prissy preoccupation with the rights of common people, and that bleeding heart liberal crap about liberty and justice for all.  Their support for President Junior was more a gesture of contempt for liberalism then a hurrah for republican oligarchy, but it did its work. 

Now president Smirk is egging the Israelis to make war on Syria, and rumbling that maybe we should start another one with Iran.  With what troops and with what money who knows…but the republicans don’t care about details like that.  They’re Big Picture folks.  Broder and the entire inside the beltway kool kids crowd hated liberals and democrats too much to notice or care who they were sanctifying, but it wasn’t their father’s republican party.  It is the party of Pat Robertson and James Dobson, men who think the end of the world will begin in the holy lands.  Now that they have the power they’ve always wanted, it’s too late to politely suggest to them that they’re making a mistake.  They think they’re doing God’s work.  They’re ushering in the Second Coming. 

Broder and his audience could have used their position to make this country a better place.  Instead they pissed on it, and blamed the democrats.  They didn’t think it mattered who governed America, as long as it wasn’t common trash who didn’t know how to throw a proper Georgetown party.  And now a terrible wind is blowing at the foundations of everything America ever stood for, everything America was, everything America could ever have become, and worst of all, it is bearing their own words back to them.