Jonathan Chait guts Gerald Seib of the Wall Street Journal‘s opinion piece trying to be “even-handed” in assessing who is to blame for the current enormous deficits:
[O]ne party has made the probably massively, overwhelmingly worse. And the other party has only taken limited steps toward solving the problem the first party created. They’re both guilty!
…
One standard to judge the two parties guilt here would be whether they made the problem better or worse. But that would lead to an unacceptable partisan conclusion. So instead the question is changed to, Has either party reduced the deficit as much as would be ideal in a world without political constraints? Thus we can arrive at the comforting, non-partisan answer that both parties have fallen short.
Seib, like Jeffrey Dahmer, is an imperfect human being.
Zing!