DRIFTGLASS: While there were many, many things David Broder loved — centrism, politics, bi-partisanship, equidistanthood, divarication, bisect-uality, decussation — one thing he really hated was hippies. Those those damn, dirty, disrespectful fucking hippies. He especially hate those fucking imaginary hippies: they were the sawdust and breadcrumb filler he kept heaping into his increasingly inedible journalistic meatloaf; the thumb he pressed down ever harder on the scales of his funny little rambles about America during his declining years (which encompassed all of the 21st Century and a big chunk of the end of the 20th) to artificially “balance out” the clear and horrifying fact that Party of Lincoln and Eisenhower that he had known as a barefoot lad growing up in the swampland of Chicago Heights was devolving into a billionaire-industrialist-funded mob of fundies, racists, imbeciles and sociopaths. In fact, this fetish became so obsessive that, in the end, it became the great, tragic irony of David Broder’s professional life. Because at last he simply could not bear to part with his fantasies about what he wished America to be and face the brutal realities of what America was actually becoming, David Broder — this “Dean of the Washington press corps” — totally missed out on covering the greatest story of his time; the utter collapse of the American news media and the mutation of the GOP from a political party into a dangerously fascistic cesspit of oligarchs, lunatics and rubes. It was a story which his background and years of hard work had almost uniquely prepared him to cover, and one that was literally staring him in the face for much of the last 20 years. And he completely fucking blew it. MORE