What hath Republicans wrought?

Charlotte Observer: How Journalistic Balance Fails

Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, are savvy political scientists who know Washington politics well. They have been regarded as centrists for a number of years. Their new book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, argues that the core of Washington’s political dysfunction lies with the Republican Party. As they put it in The Washington Post:

“The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

Ornstein and Mann also had some harsh words for the press. Columbia Journalism Review's Trudy Lieberman sat down with Mann to explore these ideas. Here are excerpts. For the full interview, go to CJR's website via http://bit.ly/QxAqQT.



When your house is full of disease, vermin and mold of your own making, your best bet is to burn it. Burn it all to the ground.

I will mirror the Republican's attitudes toward the poor, helpless and destitute back to them: I do not feel sorry for them. They brought it on themselves.