The Broder-Bot 9000

November 24, 2007

It was only a matter of time. After decades at the Washington Post, David Broder has apparently succeeded in using 21st-century technology to create the Broder-Bot 9000. It’s quite a handy gizmo — the Broder-Bot 9000 seems to have enabled the WaPo columnist to publish pieces without writing them. He simply feeds the Broder-Bot 9000 all of his previous columns, and then the machine does the rest, churning out columns that rehash the things Broder’s already said.

The latest Broder column was a great example of the Broder-Bot 9000 at work.

Where each party used to have an ideological mixture, each is now more clearly defined in opposition to the other. The result is a Republican Party that is far more universally (and stridently) conservative; and a Democratic Party whose center of gravity has moved equally far to the left.

The center has become lightly populated, and the penalties for politicians who communicate, let alone consort, across party lines have become much stiffer. The incentives are almost all to hunker down and fight, not to compromise and settle.

The congressional divisions have been heightened by President Bush’s strategic decision to govern almost entirely within his own party’s relatively narrow political base. He courted mainly core Republicans to power his two trips to the White House, and he has relied almost exclusively on Republican votes in the House and Senate to sustain his program.

While giving him some notable victories, this strategy also solidified the opposition and stiffened the Democrats’ determination to oppose him at every opportunity, whatever the consequences.

Now, if I were writing a parody of a Broder piece, I’d probably come up with something similar to this — Republicans have gone to the right, Dems have gone to the left, and Americans are craving for moderation. DC is too political, too ideological, blah blah blah.

But therein lies the flaw in the Broder-Bot 9000 — it’s not only churning out predictable cliches, it’s wrong, too.

The Democratic Party’s “center of gravity has moved equally far to the left”? Seriously? One could make a reasonable case that the country has moved slightly to the left in recent years, but most Democratic activists seem to agree that the party clings to the center the way a baby clings to a bottle — afraid of what might happen if they let go. The notion that the Dems’ shift is equal to the GOP’s far-right trend is just silly.

More importantly, I’d love to know how, exactly, the Broder-Bot 9000 concluded that Dems are so dead-set opposed to anything the president wants that they reflexively reject every proposal, regardless of “consequences.”

Since when? Indeed, isn’t the opposite true? Haven’t the Dems caved and/or compromised on most of the major political fights from the past few years? FISA, Patriot Act, five years of Iraq war funding … when was the last time congressional Dems said, “Screw the consequences, we’re going to fight Bush tooth and nail”?

I’m afraid the Broder-Bot 9000 needs an upgrade. Or better yet, a replacement.

Americans have no clue what “left” and “leftist” mean. We are all so far to the right we’re unaware of the wider world.

European “right wingers” believe in, or at least use, such things as socialized medicine. Left wingers put wreathes on Karl Marx’s grave.

We wouldn’t know “left wing” if we fell over it. We are in two camps: (1) the extremely ignorant and willfully stupid, selfish, corporation lovers and (2) the same thing only with slightly more knowledge and compassion (of a mostly Disney-inspired, purely emotional flavor).

  • The production of Broder-Bot 9000 must have been off-shored somewhere where the labour is cheap and inspectors are few and corruptible. It’s full of lead and other crap which diminishes the mental acuity of everyone who comes in contact with it.

  • ***Stephan*** It’s left and right in American politics not world politics and you and I both know the difference. I think most Americans are coming to terms with what has happened, having been driven so far to the right by this administration. But they can only measure it by an American scale of left and right.
    CB is right about the dems, they have caved on all the important issues and remain attached to the ‘center’ of conservative politics. Otherwise this president would have been impeached already and we wouldn’t even be discussing amnesty for the telecoms.

    Broder thinks that if it makes sense to him it must be true. What he considers facts are products of his fantasy. He is always wrong and always blind at this time in his life and doesn’t have the sense to stop writing. He asserts “I’m still credible” but with each piece his insights prove to be just the opposite.

  • Would it be considered “cruel and unusual punishment” to label David Broder as “the Firestone 500 of the DC media circus?” The WaPo owes its readers a discount—or a refund—maybe even a government mandated recall of Broder’s overtly, technologically, and structurally-defective pontifications.

  • The Democratic Party has still been saying/doing all the same stuff it’s said/done all along. As a result, recently we’ve got richer corporate execs, poorer regular folks and weaker labor unions and legal protections for regular people- whether they be soldiers who volunteer for extra duty, consumers who are injured by faulty products or poor public service, whistle-blowers who put their careers on the line to expose mismanagement and corruption, people who are injured by medical malpractice, or people who are injured by sloppy or abusive military or law enforcement operations or investigations.

    I wish we had more of our old protections back that liberals fought for generations to achieve years ago, through labor / social movement organizing, establishing rights through lawsuits, and advocating for the people as elected public officials.

  • We need a new reality show waterboarding second rate pundits that have nothing, absent their second rate MSM fading newspapers for their distribution.

    Season One: Friedman/Broder… you chose– are they that stupid, or paid whores, or both…. call in for your vote!

    LOSERS!!!

  • CB’s analogy is both humorous and dead-on: Broder is a caricature of himself anymore. He’s written himself into irrelevance and the only thing he can think of doing is to write louder to get attention.

    If Broder wrote about how mindlessly the GOP follow in lock-step on very nearly every single vote and condemned that, then I could agree with his premise. But his pox on both houses is a rube because getting the Dems to all vote in the same partisan unity is like herding cats — and that’s not a bad thing for a democracy.

    Broder should ask his Republican buddies why dissent is nearly non-existent in their party. Chances are the Broder-bot will finally recognize that Washington’s been the domain of the Republi-bot for a very long time. Both machines need to go in the best interests of this republic.

  • Broder is becoming to the WaPo what David Brooks is to the NYT: an embarrassment. What rubbish. The two of them should be condemned for eternity to a room and forced to read only each other’s drivel, interrupted only by sessions of mutual masturbation.

    The Dems, if anything, have split into two very discernable wings, one somewhat left, but no further left than it ever was, the other Rethug-lite, what used to be known as ‘Rockefeller Republicans’, of which Bill Clinton was the leader with Madame Hillary waitng in the wings. There hasn’t been a far-left entity in this country in over 30 years, and most of that movement was either killed outright, hounded out of the country, gone underground, or jailed. Most of our political discussion, if such there is, is between the near-right and the far-right. The Repuglicans have moved so far to the right so fast they have sucked the centrist Dems along behind them, leaving the more progressive component of the party looking radical by comparison.

    There hasn’t been any real leftward movement either in the country or in the Democratic party. The populace has always been more liberal than the corporate controlled political establishment, and a bit more of that populism and liberal inclination is showing at the moment, in stark contrast to the bellicose, hate-mongering, fear-mongering, militarism of the fascist right. What we have now are admitted fascists, like Guiliani, who are no longer afraid to admit what they are, indeed, they brag. We don’t have a left-wing, socialist, anti-capitalism element that you can find without a microscope.

    The real gap is between the two wings of the Dems. That’s the one that has to be healed before there is a chance of an effective opposion. There is no opportunity to reach out to the ever-shrinking core of neocon Repugs, i.e., the Nazis, the theocrats, the Kristian white supremacists, who really do want to tear up the Constitution for good and install a lockstep military dictatorship.

    Shouldn’t columnists have a mandatory retirement clause? The man has gone soft in the head. Why would anyone with an ounce of political awareness take him seriously.

  • All that matters is that the readers of those papers still read his garbage… the 30%’s really believe what he writes, it’s part of the addiction to the White House cool aid.

    So what…. I don’t like the cool aid, so I disagree with what he says… That doesn’t mean a thing to the ones who really do like the cool aid. If anything else, they’ll just chuckle, smirking that I don’t know what I’m missing.. I must not be a true connoisseur, I must be part of the ‘lower class’ that doesn’t know the difference between a ‘bordeaux’ and a ‘pinot’, and therefor I must be made fun of. Isn’t that what the right wingers have been doing all along: making fun of the Democratic Party?

    As long as the Democrats keep ‘defending’ their stance and ‘argue’ the Bush meme; they are not offering anything new. They’re just staying on the Bush page, even when you supposedly disagree with Bush. When you disagree, you’re allowing Bush to claim that we live in a true democracy. Use emotions and fear and Democrats cower; the neo-cons know exactly what they’re doing. Is it right? Absolutely not, but as long as the Democrats keep playing from the Bush page, nothing is going to change.

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