TPM Reader SR is heartened but amazed if this could really have happened …
Steve Benen touched on a sentence from a First Read report on Obama’s dinner with Republican Senators:
“[O]ne senator told us that he learned, for the first time, the actual cuts that the president has put on the table. Leadership hadn’t shared that list with them before.”
He called it “amazing” and then moved on. But if NBC News had been an actual news gathering organization one would have expected to follow it down three paths of inquiry:
1. Really? Or did you just skip the meeting?
2. Are Republican senators so deeply embedded in the right wing epistemologically closed feedback bubble that they don’t even read the frakking Washington Post? And, let us remember there have been multiple instances over the last several months of Republican politicians being stunned to find out that things they demand Obama put onto the table were put onto the table by him weeks or months earlier.
3. Assuming they didn’t just miss the meeting or zone out, why isn’t McConnell sharing actual information with his caucus? Why are the members of his caucus depending on him for their news?
And, now that I think about it . . .
4. Are the Beltway pundits insisting that both sides are being equally intransigent getting their facts from Mitch McConnell and Fox? Has the entire power structure of Washington truly become the caricature of elites so engrossed in an alternate reality of cocktail party chatter and platitudes that objective reality no longer matters?
