Somehow, someway, via the secret byways and hidden passages of New York media power and privilege a person named Bari Weiss was decanted directly from the Columbia University Class of 2007 to a gig at the Wall Street Journal and thence onward to her current job as "Opinion Editor" for The New York Times where she has taken up the most hilariously self-negating postulate in America political culture: That overcaffeinated Conservative crackpots like Ben Shapiro and Rent-a-Troll Christina Hoff Sommers are not getting their fair share of column inches in respectable high-class media shoppes like The New York Times.

Which is weird because on any given morning I can hardly make it from coffee maker to newspaper and back again without tripping over Ben Shapiro scamming some credulous mainstream media outlet like ABC News or CBS or the Washington Post or The New York Times or The Hill or Morning Joe into giving him or his "Why Are Mainstream Media Outlets Silencing Conservative Deep Thinkers Like Ben Shapiro" cause a huge platform.

About which I have already written once or twice --

Who Reads Shite Like This And Thinks --

-- "I have got to find a way to get this sniveling racist man-pig to speak at my university because we deeply value lively, honest debate about important issues facing our country"?

Or better yet, how about a free platform on a major American news network to whine about how cruelly the freedom of speech for sniveling, racist man-pigs like him is being restricted?

From ABC News:

Outspoken conservative Ben Shapiro on whether free speech still has a place on college campuses

Funny old world.

-- but I'm sure you've all already read all about my League of Extraordinarily Entitled Men Hot Takes given how wildly over-represented the opinions of shitty Liberal bloggers are in Liberal Media Conspiracy franchises like ABC News and CBS and the Washington Post and The New York Times and The Hill and Morning Joe.

Anyhoo, the Beltway Force is apparently so strong with Ms. Weiss that just this morning I saw her Jedi Mind Trick her way onto the Morning Joe teevee program and and Jedi Mind Trick Mika Brzezinski into looking directly into the camera and reading aloud from her column about how criminally silenced her League of Extraordinarily Entitled Men are on mainstream media outlets like Morning Joe...

Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web

An alliance of heretics is making an end run around the mainstream conversation. Should we be listening?

...and then asking Ms. Weiss what she thought of her own column.

Or, as we on the wildly over-represented Left used to call it, the Full Gregory.

For example, one of his innovations back when he was Mr. David Gregory of "Meet the Press" was to make sure that at no point were the fleeting and ridiculous opinions of Mr. David Brooks of the New York Times underrepresented. When Mr. David Brooks was available, Mr. Gregory would read reverently from his latest New York Times blatherings and then ask Mr. Brooks what he thought of his own writings, after which the panel of Beltway inbreds and shut-ins would ooh and coo over Mr. Brooks' inerrant wisdom.

It was such an obvious bit of Beltway parasitic symbiosis that even I noticed it and touched upon the subject of it once or twice.

So at this point, you, as an Alert Reader, are probably wondering just how in the name of Joseph and his Pantone Pantsuit does such a one as Ms. Weiss come to exist in the first place? By what alchemy do such dismally mediocre creatures promoting such hackneyed codswallop make their way to the pinnacle of American media?

Well, if you listen very carefully you will hear Ms. Weiss effortlessly deploy the most powerful Beltway Conjure Phrase of all.

The phrase that opens all doors to any mope no matter how deficient.

The phrase that magically converts duplicity into respectability (at the 5:36 mark)

Yes indeed.

Both Sides Do It.

The indispensable, Conservative-enabling Beltway lie which I promise you I will methodically deconstruct and expose the very next time I am on

Meet the Press or
This Week or
Face the Nation or
Fox News Sunday or
State of the Union or
Steele and Unger or
Sunday Morning Futures or
Fareed Zakaria GPS or
The Michael Smerconish Show or
Reliable Sources or
MediaBuzz or
Inside Politics or
In Principle.

But truly the most touching moment came when Joe Scarborough very nearly squeezed out one, tiny tear as he pleaded with the media to throw wide the gates and lets us all have a buncha difficult, honest conversations about some real shit, man!...

...just as long as none of those tough-but-honest conversations stray within a light year of the subject of how exactly Joe Scarborough's Republican Party became a such an unholy shitpile of bigots and imbeciles, who exactly needs to be tarred and feathered and run out of polite society on a fucking rail for helping to make that happen, and whether or not letting Joe & Mika's very good friend Donald Trump call in from the comfort of his solid-gold toilet and run his mouth for free on Morning Joe once a month, every month, from November 2015 through August 2016 might have been, y'know, a bad thing.

Crossposted from Driftglass