On Friday's PBS NewsHour, liberal pundit Mark Shields raged at Republican senators for universally rejecting a beating on NBC's Meet the Press. Shields compared this to "Dante's great quote that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a time of moral crisis, remain neutral."
Shields described the NBC show as an "important forum," and avoided the obvious notion that under Chuck Todd, Republican Senators get yelled at for bringing "Fox News conspiracy propaganda" into their answers. Any Republican who showed up was going to be browbeaten into condemning the president's failure to concede defeat.
MARK SHIELDS: The most amazing moment of the week to me politically was to find out that Meet the Press last Sunday called every single Republican senator and invited him or her to be on the show that Sunday, and every one of them turned Meet the Press down. Now, I mean, that is unheard of, to be invited to an important forum like that. Senators jump at that opportunity historically.
And what you're back to his Dante's great quote that the hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in a time of moral crisis, remain neutral. I mean, that's what they have done. They have taken this vow of silence, with conspicuous consumptions. They are enabling him.
And they are undoing democracy. And they're doing enormous damage, I mean, saying, well, just humor him. Humor him along a little while.
We're facing the greatest public health crisis we have had in 100 years. We're facing an economic crisis of dramatic and historic proportions and dimensions. People's lives are really at risk.
It's expected that PBS will echo everyone in being disgusted there's no concession yet. But this entire pretense that the failure to give Joe Biden a briefing of some sort is "doing enormous damage" and going to cause thousands of people to die is more than a bit over the top.
It's also comical for Trump-haters like Shields and his echoing partner David Brooks to stand up for nonpartisan transitions. Shields complained Trump "is sowing doubt and mistrust. Americans historically, Judy, have given the benefit of the doubt to every new president. It's a wonderful quality of ours. We swallow partisanship."
Baloney. Shields and Brooks said exactly the same things four years ago, of how Washington feared a "descent into fascism" and all that rot.
