Centrism

Read Glenn Greenwald on the uselessness (actually, the destructiveness) of the media's continuing tendency to use one arbitrary permutation of the left-to-right political line when labeling American politicians. One should add that McCain in particular gets a centrist Get Out of Jail Free card from the press not just because he's been polite to some Democrats now and again, but also because they have a peculiar and long-standing romance with the character he plays.

In the final analysis, though, I don't think reaxising national pols on a military policy line (from, say, pacifists to liberal internationalits, to realists, to liberal hawks, to neo-conservatives, or something similar) makes any sense either. In reality, the line connecting the most liberal politicians in Washington to the most conservative politicians in Washington really does, on social issues, run relatively smoothly from the left flank of the Democratic party through the right flank of the Republican party with a break between blue and red somewhere close to a "center". That, probably as much as anything else, explains why traditional media uses the system it uses. In effect, of course, this puts a ton of emphasis on party distinctions, placing, for instance, Joe Biden and Joe Lieberman shoulder-to-shoulder on the spectrum even though one's foreign policy views are fairly at odds with the other's.

Switch things around, though, and, sure enough, you get an equally distorted view of things: Pro-choice progressive Democrat Barack Obama, for instance, in the same political cluster as mostly-orthodox conservative Republican Chuck Hagel doesn't actually make much sense, either. What would make sense is for journalists to avoid writing distorting tripe like this:

Fearless and righteous, McCain has long been known to unleash a lacerating anger on those who cross him.... (Lieberman, his fellow centrist, recently seems to have assigned himself the role of McCain's monitor. Just two weeks ago, when McCain mistakenly said Iran was training Al Qaeda in Iraq fighters, it was the Connecticut senator who again pulled him aside, gently reminding him that the Iranian regime has been accused of training fellow Shiite extremists, not Sunni Al Qaeda.)

And instead try categorizing and describing politicians issue by issue. For instance: "Lieberman, his fellow interventionist hawk, recently seems to have assigned himself the role of McCain's remedial tutor on terrorism issues, reminding him that Shiite-led Iran is emphatically not training Sunni Al Qaeda troops in Iraq or anywhere else." Or something.