tarzie on chris hayes, although he could just as well have been talking about john oliver:

Hayes looks out at a burning house and with true moral conviction and unsparing vision, describes it. He then proposes solutions that amount to washing the windows while the building is engulfed in flames…his prescriptions for solving the massive problems he identifies in the book are the typical incrementalism that has constrained the American left for over 30 years.

Regular readers of this blog will know instantly that what DeBoer is describing here is what I call ‘heat vampire’ liberalism. Rather than quote myself again on what that is, I’ll borrow a nicely concise phrase DeBoer uses for Hayes: “all Karl Marx in description, all Tom Daschle in prescription.” [...]

This is basically what DeBoer’s Marx/Daschle formulation describes: a clear eyed, even radical, assessment of all that’s wrong in the world coexisting with acquiescence in oligarch-approved methods for putting things right, no matter how often and resoundingly these methods fail. So constituted, heat vampire liberals act as role models for the rest of us, reconciling things that aren’t logically reconcilable, successfully wrestling themselves into compliance with status quo fundamentals while bemoaning the particulars.