Digby is justifiably angry that the US news media has slipperily flipped the story of the Democrats’ victory into a narrative that paints the Republicans as poor put-upon victims being targeted by evil far-left partisans.
Again.
I understand the anger but I really don’t think that the media could have done anything else, given how much they have invested in Bush and the Republicans.
Unfortunately the reversal of power in Congress has not been replicated in the DC government and media infrastructure, which remains defiantly and unashamedly right wing. This is an arena where someone as patently batshit crazy as Pat Robertson can be described, straight-faced, as moderate.
The Republicans may no longer be officially in power in Congress, but sensibly and foresightedly, during their tenure as supreme rulers over all three branches of government they installed a whole machinery of loyal placemen and women to carry on the good work should they fall out of public political favour. The formerly Trotskyist neoconerati know all about entryism.
Margaret Thatcher also knew about this tactic: she used to ask meaningly of her aides about any new civil servant she encountered, “Is he one of us?”. Thus she ensured that a whole generation of government administrators would be an impediment to any government that came after.
The news industry has been deeply politicised in the same way. Media owners and ambitious industry media types alike saw in the nineties which way the political and financial wind was blowing , quickly realised that a mix of rightwing ranting, jingoism, god and advertising made the moneymen happy and set about hiring their staff from the Republican pod-farms thinktanks magazines and schools. or from the children of influential GOP figures.
These unapolagetically partisan pundits have edged out the Nixon/Ford/Carter/Reagan era reporters and news anchors and have acted as unquestioning cheerleaders for the Bush government, right across all major US news media platforms, promoting as holy writ the President’s cruel and stupid policies. You might almost think their jobs depended on parotting the party line.
Even with those journalists who started out at the beginning of Bush’s tenure trying to objective, well you know how it is with spin: one small lie goes unchallenged so as not to offend someone who can do you some good ( maybe get you invited to a WH dinner or help your child get into a good school) that lie begets another and another and another and before you know it you’re describing waterboarding as humane and the mother of a dead US soldier as a traitor.
So having constructed this floating world in which Bush is a hero, freedom reigns and the Democrats are meanies who want to spoil everyone’s fun and where they rather than the voters are the sole arbiters of anyone’s fitness to govern its understandable the punditocracy want to keep their cosy, privileged, well paid and influential positions and they’ll go to some lengths to do it.
A lot of people have a lot to lose if exposed as the incompetent political hacks they are.
The Right’s mode of attack is quite clever though : as Digby says, Ford’s death provided the perfect pretext for Republicans and their media enablers to make what appears to be a perfectly reasonable plea for moderation and civility. In reality it’s a demand that all their former trangressions be swept under the rug, with the implied threat that if the Democrats insist on doing what they were elected to do and uncovering misdeeds then the media, egged on by the even more rabid wingnutosphere, could get very uncivil indeed.
In short- don’t fuck with us or we’ll fuck you over first.
Back before the last Presidential election (though ‘election’ is hardly the right word) when it looked as though Kerry might just make it to the White House, there was much discussion on the blogs about the necessity for a purge in Washington. It didn’t happen then, for obvious reasons, but it needs to happen now, and soon.
George Bush and his strategists have threatened to fight the Democratic congress to the death if they issue investigative subpoenas: In fact, when it comes to deploying its Executive power, which is dear to Bush’s understanding of the presidency, the President’s team has been planning for what one strategist describes as “a cataclysmic fight to the death” over the balance between Congress and the White House if confronted with congressional subpoenas it deems inappropriate. The strategist says the Bush team is “going to assert that power, and they’re going to fight it all the way to the Supreme Court on every issue, every time, no compromise, no discussion, no negotiation.”
And all the loyal footsoldiers of the press corps, beltway and the lobby firms will be marching lockstep into battle with him, despite everything – because far too many of the rightwing establishment have too much invested in the precarious construction of outright lies, propaganda and half-truths of the past few years to even consider letting go of it. The cognitive dissonance alone would kill them, not to mention the well-deserved years in the slammer some are well overdue.
A cataclysmic fight to the death, Bush said: this is going to get a lot uglier yet before it gets better.
Read more: US politics, US Media, Framing , Democrats
