So, a few things have happened in the last week that are pretty extraordinary.
First, Andrew Breitbart died. Far be it from me to badmouth a cat before he's even lowered into his grave, but some of the hypocrisy since last Thursday has been nothing short of breathtaking.
The guy was a hack, at
best. More importantly, a steadily increasing number of conservative voices were willing to publicly say so over the last couple of years. No more. Once sensible folks are now prostrating themselves over his casket and rending their fucking garments, just because they figure it'll annoy the left. It's embarrassing and it's not helping their cause.
From everything I heard about him, even before his death, Breitbart was personally a good guy, and even his political enemies had nice things to say about their one-on-one interactions with him. That, however, is entirely beside the point. It's his public record that will ultimately form his legacy, and no amount of post-mortem revisionism is going to change that.
When you get down to it, Andrew Breitbart was a guy who defamed a lady and trafficked in congressional cock shots. Those are the things that he was most famous for, and likely the things that he was proudest of.
He was hardly a champion of conservatism, as evidenced by the fact that he almost never talked about its virtues. To be sure, he devoted the last years of his life to berating and humiliating liberals but that, in and of itself, is hardly championing anything, let alone a political philosophy. Having said that, Breitbart's well-documented fascination with Hebrew beef -
and he did carry the only known picture of the fully exposed Weiner weiner on his phone to show off to disc jockeys - displayed an underlying support of Israel. So there is that, I guess.
Indeed, his taking the likes of James O'Keefe to his bosom, engaging in highly selective editing to make some kind of a point, and calling entire popular movements rapists probably hurt conservatism far more than it helped. As each of his stunts were ultimately discredited, he became harder and harder for serious people to defend. And because he identified himself so closely with the movement brand, the brand itself became identified with him when it refused to denounce those stunts.
It doesn't matter if what he did was pioneered by the "mainstream media" or the left, and that's a highly debatable point. Adopting the other side's deplorable tactics doesn't make one better than one's opponents, it merely levels the playing field in tawdriness. You can't portray yourself or your political movement as a moral example - itself a silly thing to expect government to do, when you also argue that the government can't deliver the mail - while carrying someone so fast and loose with the facts upon your shoulders.
As much as Breitbart and Glenn Beck loved creating a fake boogeyman out of the long-dead Saul Alinsky, their own careers seem far more reflective of
Rules for Radicals than anything we've seen from the elected ranks of the left in decades. And God knows, those two are probably the only people that have actually read that book in the last forty years.
The Republican party didn't win seven out ten presidential elections between 1968 and 2004 because of people like Andrew Breitbart. At the end of the day, Andrew Breitbart wasn't championing conservatism as much as he was championing Andrew Breitbart. And that's
fine. We live in a market society where such things should be admired. But let us not pretend that it was anything other than what it was. He was Snooki.
When it comes to media-baiting nonsense, it's hard to top Newt Gingrich. The former Speaker has a long and storied history of exploiting the ignorance of his followers that some think actually makes him smart. I would argue that it doesn't, and his third-grade understanding of American history and his non-existent knowledge of how international commodities markets work is nothing short of laughable. His dismal showing in the primaries tends to reinforce that. After all, who thought that Rick Santorum would be beating anyone on the national stage, let alone the self-described Smartest Guy in the Room?
The only reason that he's attracting any attention at all at this point in the campaign is because of his incessant attacks on the media types asking him questions. You'll notice that he never actually
answers the questions, or anything like that. It might get in the way of his pointless, meandering diatribes.
Yesterday, Gingrich did almost the full round of Sunday morning shows. And in each of them, he came right out of the gate with "You know, (insert host's name here), I am astonished at the desperation of the elite media to avoid rising gas prices, to avoid the president's apology to religious fanatics in Afghanistan, to avoid a trillion dollar deficit, to avoid the longest period of unemployment since the Great Depression and to suddenly decide that Rush Limbaugh is the great national crisis of this week."
Abject fucking nonsense, all of it. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that Gingrich would like to avoid talking about the freakshow that the Republican presidential primary has become. But the fact that it's a freakshow is hardly the fault of the media, elite or otherwise.
When you can't put away an abject loser like Santorum, he tends to dominate the debate, simply because he's genetically incapable of not spouting lunacy into any microphone that's put in front of him. And lunacy is always newsworthy, particularly when the person spouting it would like to be given nuclear launch codes and might yet have one of the two major political parties endorse his getting them.
That's not the fault of David Gregory, George Stephanopolous, Bob Schieffer or Chris Wallace. The fact that Rick Santorum is dominating the GOP's message with his fully crazed and only half religious (ever notice, for example, that Rick's positions on abortion and contraception are his "reflecting the beliefs of his Church", while his positions on, say, the death penalty and bombing Muslims decidedly aren't? Santorum, like most Catholics, is awfully selective in his piety.) rhetoric is entirely due to the fact that Gingrich and Romney are singularly unequal to the task of him putting him down once and for all. Take Santorum out, and the contraception issue disappears - assuming the Republican congressional caucus lets it.
In fact, the media has been noteworthy in it's incompetence in dealing with an asshole like Gingrich. Here's an example of that. Over the last few weeks, Gingrich accused Romney of "unprecedented dishonesty." Yet, on
Meet the Press yesterday, Gingrich said that he would support Romney as the nominee.
Wow! Is the person you've described as the most dishonest person in the history of presidential elections really preferable to Barack Obama?
Really? Is so, in what way? Don't expect David Gregory to ask him that. We just have to take it on faith that unashamedly lying to the American people about pretty much everything, as Gingrich regularly accuses Romney of doing, is preferable to corporatist liberalism. Unless, of course, Romney is lying about that, too. And there's at least an even chance that he is, given the Governor's record.
There are a couple of points that I'd like to make about the GOP and the "elite media."
First, Republicans running against the media is hardly new. In fact, Richard Nixon invented it, which is, in large part, how Spiro Agnew came to be. The last Republican to take a halfway sane position on the media was Dwight Eisenhower.
During his last press conference, Eisenhower was asked if he thought he was treated fairly by the press. Ike just looked down from his podium, smiled, and said "I don't see what a reporter can do to a president, do you?"
Smart Republicans have even been able to use supposed media bias against them and to their own advantage. Lesley Stahl of CBS tells a particularly gripping story about a conversation that she had with President Reagan's image manager, Mike Deaver.
Stahl ran a particularly nasty story about Reagan's budget cuts, which the story implied, would disproportionately hurt the poor. Her voice over ran over beautiful video of the President getting off of Marine One on the South Lawn and walking into the Oval Office with a bright smile on his face.
When Stahl called Deaver the next morning, he
thanked her for what she thought was a brutal piece that should have angered him to no end. Almost no one was paying attention to what her voice over was saying, Deaver explained to Stahl. But they were seeing the most flattering pictures of Reagan imaginable. The images wre serving the overall Reagan narrative. That's why you never saw Reagan go all sputtering stupid about the "elite media" at presidential press conferences,
Second, conservative media outlets condemn the elite media, even though they
are the elite media.
Sure, you see any number of assholes, like Bernie Goldberg, Bill O'Reilly Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh scream to the heavens about media bias as a means of furthering their careers on Fox News and syndicated talk radio, all of which are presumably cottage industries and in no way reflective of the "mainstream media", even though they happen to dominate it.
You can't, like O'Reilly and Limbaugh routinely do, tout your own ratings and domination of the mainstream, while still pretending to be outsiders. Well, I guess that you
can, but you have to credit your audience with an almost awesome level of stupidity to do it with a straight face. Thankfully for them, their audiences actually are awesomely stupid and incapable of seeing the dissonance of that position. Those folks actually do manage to work the ideas of "WE'RE A PERSECUTED MINORITY" and "WE'RE NUMBER ONE!" into the same fucking paragraph, and that might be the most goddamned astounding thing I've ever seen.
Third, and finally, there is no mainstream media. What has been put into GOP shorthand as "The MSM" barely exists anymore.
The Big Three Networks are all owned by conglomerates like Comcast/Universial, Viacom and Disney. Their news divisions are all loss-leaders. You knows what happens to loss-leaders? They get gutted, which is pretty much what has happened.
The New York Times would be in receivership today, were it not for the benevolence of the improbably named Mexican zillionaire, Carlos Slim. The Washington Post Company was forced to sell
Newsweek to a frigging blog for the financial equivalent of a few empty beer cans. It used to be that bloggers used the resources of the mainstream media to draw their audience. Increasingly, the reverse is true, as we saw when hucksters like Andrew Breitbart were able to drive so much of the news agenda.
Is
that what people like Newt Gingrich are so intimidated by? If so, they're even more pathetic than I thought they were.
You almost never saw Eisenhower or Reagan getting publicly angry at the press. Instead, they almost playfully condescended to them. When was the last time you saw a Republican do that? More often, you have chronic losers like Newt Gingrich scowlingly berate an imaginary foe with almost zero real power.
Let's face it, liberalism has been dying an agonizing death since Hubert Humphrey accepted his party's presidential nomination, almost two years before I was born. The last committed liberal elected to the presidency was Lyndon Johnson. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were old-style Southern Democrats, and Barack Obama is described by even the
right as a "crony capitalist."
What you're seeing today is modern conservatism adopting the worst aspects of New Deal - Great Society liberalism. These assholes simply aren't happy if they aren't victims of
something. In the last four years, you've heard Republicans screaming about sexism as much (or more) than you do Democrats. Granted, they only discovered sexism in September of 2008, when Sarah Palin was invented. If you thought that Herman Cain was a delusional pussyhound, you were of course branded a racist by the right. Ann Coulter and Breitbart didn't so much repudiate Jesse Jackson as they
became him.
But blacks and women actually do enjoy equal rights these days, unlike during the Great Society days. Shit, Herman Cain was the CEO of a successful company and the head of a national lobby. Sarah Palin was the elected governor of a state and vice-presidential nominee. It isn't like Bull Connor was turning Dobermans and firehoses on either one of them. Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh just like to pretend that it's the same thing, regardless of whatever statements they've made about Jackson and Hillary Clinton. Or Chelsea Clinton. Or Michelle Obama's ass. But god help anyone that suggests that they'd like to to be in the middle of a physcopathic Sarah Palin - Christine O'Donnell sexual sandwich!
Racism! Sexism! Persecution by the Media! It's a blessed fucking miracle that Republicans get elected to anything anymore.It's worse than childish and retarded, it's outright atavistic. But the single most hilarious thing about this sick and stupid phenomenon isn't that otherwise intelligent conservatives buy into the narrative. It's that they still pretend to uphold individual responsibility when they do it.
When a political media presence holds that many intellectual and ideological inconsistencies, it seems to me that the truly
conservative thing to do is not trust it. I spent the first half of my life opposing this nonsense from liberals. I can't tell you how disspriting it is opposing it from people who actually pass for conservatives.
Just over two years ago, I wrote about What it Takes: The Way to the White House and what it meant to political writing, especially campaign books. I was of the opinion then that it was the high water mark of such books and with its commercial failure, it marked the death of proper political journalism.
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