Sadly this isn't something we see happen in our corporate media every day of the week when one of these pundits tries to play the false equivalency game where they pretend there are "extremists" dominating both the Democratic and Republican parties.
June 6, 2013

During what was for the most part a very intelligent discussion on money in politics, what it costs to get elected and why most Americans don't even like their own members of Congress these days -- we saw something on Current TV's The Young Turks that sadly doesn't happen each and every day in our corporate media -- someone was called out for playing the "both sides" are equally horrible false equivalency game.

Cenk Uygur asked his guest, Politico's Reid Epstein about the recent polling showing that people don't even like their own member of Congress, which is something we haven't seen in the past. The norm has usually been that they like their own member and don't like most of the rest of them. Here was Epstein's respose:

EPSTEIN: That's true, but what those numbers don't tell you is the reasons why they don't like their own member of Congress and almost all of these Congressional districts, the House districts, are drawn so they're either Democratic or Republican districts. And so these members have much more to fear from the extremes on the right and the left than they do from the middle or the other party. And so you have members that... among both Democrats and Republicans who cater to the extreme edges of the party. And the people who don't like them are often the people who are even more extreme on the right and the left than the members are themselves.

After Cenk took exception to what he said and asked him to name anyone on the left that was the equal to these crazy wingnuts we've seen being elected on the right, all Epstein could come up with is voters who are upset with individual members of Congress on the Democratic side of the aisle.

Cenk did a really good job of calling bullshit on Epstein's talking points and ended up getting him to concede that there is no equivalent to the Koch brothers and their ilk and their money on the left. And as Cenk rightfully noted, the backlash we've seen on the Democratic side of the aisle isn't because they're being pushed too far to the left, but because they've been taken over by corporate interests just like the right, which is actually why just about everyone hates our Congress right now -- not because the "extremes on both sides" have polarized our political debates, or whatever bullshit this hack from Politico was trying to shovel here.

I would be really happy if we saw every political pundit stopped in their tracks when they try to play this game as we saw here, but have little to no hope of this being the norm any time soon, or ever for that matter.

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