Lol. Brent Bozell’s far right Media Research Center is calling for the smelling salts because Never Trumper Charlie Sykes laughed at Kevin McCarthy.
Here’s Sykes (from his newsletter, subscription only):
On yesterday’s podcast with Will Saletan, I read this piece aloud, but I’m not sure I can do justice to how much I love this bit of pearl-clutching from the snowflakes at the Media Research Center, so I’ve provided some footnotes.
Here’s how it starts:
The liberal media like to depict Never Trumpers like Charlie Sykes as the voice of center-right reason and moderation. But in recent days¹, the founder of The Bulwark and MSNBC columnist has revealed a spiteful, vulgar streak.²
Believe it or not… it gets better.
Last week, we caught³ him literally laughing⁴ as he reveled in Kevin McCarthy’s sticky predicament in seeking the speakership, and pronouncing with malicious glee⁵ the names of George Santos and Marjorie Taylor Greene, as people McCarthy had to rely on⁶. But that was tame compared to his spit take⁷ on Jonathan Capehart’s Sunday Show.
We now get to the Main Event.
Now that McCarthy has secured the Speaker’s gavel, Sykes took Sunday’s Democrat talking point about how the House Republicans will be incapable of governing and headed straight for the crotch⁸:
“You look at the kind of concessions he’s made, putting the bomb throwers on the Rules committee, the motion to vacate. It is extremely difficult to see how Kevin McCarthy can negotiate anything, because the man has self-gelded his speakership.”
The author then felt he had to define the term for his MRC’s readers:
“Gelded” is, of course, a synonym for castrated.⁹
You might have thought that the normally proper Capehart would have been offended by Sykes’ crude metaphor¹⁰. But to the contrary, he and Michael Steele, of the disgraced Lincoln Project, could be heard laughing off-camera, with one of them saying, “that is true.”¹¹
Right-wing doilies were rumpled and tea spilled. Standards, must be upheld.
For the liberal media, rules of decency and decorum are apparently suspended when it comes to belittling Republicans.¹²
Decency and decorum. Exactly what we always expect from the right-wing media eco-system
I like Sykes and I appreciate that he’s seen the error of his ways and has come over to the light. But I can’t help but remember stuff like this from guys like Sykes. In 2018 he wrote a piece reminiscing about the Democrats’ terrible bad manners at the Paul Wellstone funeral and gave them hell for being too hysterical during the Kavanaugh hearings, saying they were succumbing to the degradation of discourse in public life or some such nonsense. He closed with this:
This raises several questions: Will it be like this if the Democrats take control of Congress? Will they realize that woke emotionalism is not a substitute for sober, substantive politics? Will they discredit their legitimate investigations with illegitimate allegations? Will they embrace Trump’s own ethos in their efforts to overthrow him? Will they overreach and propel Republicans to a 2020 victory? Can they even help themselves?
They answered that question quite handily, didn’t they? So maybe it would be good to look back at the pearl clutching we got from Sykes and all the others throughout the Bush years to assess whether they weren’t just playing the same phony games the Media Research Center is playing with Sykes today. They’ve been using this bullshit double standard for years.