Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The 3.141592653589793 Day Edition

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a long-running series published every morning that collects essential political discussion and analysis around the internet.

We begin today with Adam Serwer of The Atlantic criticizing the overall tendency of the Democrats and the media to allow Republicans free rein to “work the refs” at the FBI and the Department of Justice.

For reasons that remain unclear to me, Democrats seem to have internalized the Republican insistence that only Republicans are capable of the fairness and objectivity necessary to investigate or enforce the law. Any lifelong Republican who fails to put partisanship above their duties is instantly and retroactively turned into a left-wing operative by the conservative media. Acting to prevent complaints of bias (as opposed to actually being fair) is ultimately futile: Comey’s last-minute gift to the Trump campaign didn’t prevent Trump from smearing him as a liberal stooge.

These efforts to work the refs pay off. Right-wing criticism of Obama probably influenced him to pick a grandstanding Republican to head the FBI, an agency that has never been run by a Democrat, just as it likely influenced Garland to pick a grandstanding Republican to investigate Biden. Conservative criticism of the mainstream press leads too many journalists to attempt to prove they aren’t liberals, which results in wholesale amplification of right-wing propaganda to deflect criticisms that the media aren’t objective; the facts become a secondary concern.

Fairness, objectivity, and due process are important values, but there is a difference between upholding them and seeking to convince everyone that that’s what you’re doing. Performatively pursuing the latter can easily come at the expense of the former. If you try too hard to convince people you are doing the right thing instead of just doing the right thing, you often end up doing the wrong thing.