Let's surrender this pretense forever, shall we? The fantasy of putting two people in a room, one who claims to be "independent" and the other who claims to be a Democrat which is mediaspeak for "liberal" might make viewers think they're witnessing some kind of civil discourse from the two sides of the spectrum, but it's all a big fabrication.

Take this exchange, for example, where Mark Shields actually had the nerve to utter these words in response to Judy Woodruff's question about the 2014 midterm results.

I will say this, Judy. If you were a Republican who lost in 1982 in Ronald Reagan’s first midterm, you had the comfort and the consolation of having voted for something big, even though you lost, or the same thing if you were a first-term Democrat with Bill Clinton or even a first-term Democrat in Barack Obama. You had voted for affordable care. You had voted for stimulus. You had voted for Dodd-Frank. You had really taken some tough stands.

You lose in 2012 and you lost because of the climate of this administration has created because of Veterans Administration, because of Ebola, because of the Secret Service, because the sense that they — of ineptitude of governing, not because of tough heroic stands or votes you have cast. And so there is a certain resentment, and I’m not sure the president has gotten that message.

Someone really needs to hold me back from sewing his lips shut with a fat needle. First, let's talk about 2012, when we did not lose. That would be the same year that President Obama was at the top of the ticket, we gained Senate seats back from 2010, and more voters voted for Democratic congressmen than Republicans did for their side, despite the lopsided outcome.

And now you'd like to pin the media narratives of 2014 on the President, who was not out campaigning because his chicken party sidelined him. No self-examination here, just pure cynical bullshit claptrap.

So for the record, Ebola was handled just fine by the administration. The press? Not so much. The Secret Service, which is tasked to protect the President and his family seems to have a loyalty problem. And finally we come to the Veteran's Administration, which the Republicans in Congress managed to stall and stymie for months while Fox News went to town with it.

I'm only surprised Shields didn't throw in Benghazi! and Fast and Furious to round out the list.

If you're going to use right wing talking points, don't bother pretending you're liberal. You're just another Beltway shill, a mirror image of David Brooks.

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