McCain used to be a relatively sane conservative capable of discriminating between reality and unreality, but to the degree that he has sought the GOP nomination, to that degree has he lost his grip on reality. He's living off a reputation based on what he was, not on what he has become. It's hard to understand how any objective observer can take what he is now seriously. Nevertheless he is, especially by a fawning MSM. Greenwald this morning reminds us why:
The central paradox of our political life is that the right-wing faction that continues to dominate our political institutions and win elections embraces fringe beliefs which have little popular support. That's why their overarching objective is to remove substantive considerations from our political debates -- the more consequential the issue, the less establishment media attention it receives, the less real public debate there is over it. Instead, our elections are determined by the barren, petty personality-based distractions and mindless chatter that define the lowly Drudgian Freak Show, where our political life now almost exclusively resides.
For instance, did the FISA/telecom amnesty issue even come up once during the Dem debates? Did the issue of the unitary executive and the loss of habeas corpus come up? I didn't watch them all, but these issues did not come up in any I watched, and they should have been front and center in the discussion. Why wouldn't it I wonder.
The Right has perfected the art of creating mythical cults of personality around their leaders. They are strong, courageous, honor-bound, protective, morally upstanding salt-of-the earth Everyman-warriors -- contemptuous of elitist prerogatives, and oozing traditional masculine virtues and cultural normalcy. As important, if not more so, is the corresponding character demonization of liberals, Democrats and a growing group of miscellaneous right-wing opponents -- those weak, subversive, conniving, appeasing, gender-confused, elitist freaks, whose men are as effeminate and cowardly as their women are angry, threatening and emasculating.
These election-determinant themes are not merely petty and completely removed from what actually matters. That would be bad enough. Far worse is that they are complete fabrications. Virtually the entire leadership of the right-wing GOP is the complete opposite of these cartoon icons they are held out to be. Their lives are almost completely devoid of the virtues in which they are packaged. After all, their leaders are Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Dick Cheney, George Bush, Ann Coulter, Bill Kristol and the whole slew of tough guy pundits from Fox News and National Review, cheering on wars while imputing to themselves the courage and virtue of those they endlessly send off to fight and prancing around as moral guardians and defenders of individual freedom while, in reality, living lives that rapidly destroy those very values.
These are the same tactics that have been used again and again -- from the era when Ronald Reagan was transformed into the wholesome, horse-riding, freedom-defending cowboy to the current incarnation, George W. Bush, dressed up in ranch hats and fighter pilot costumes and transformed into the swaggering, brush-clearing warrior. And one Democrat after the next -- Walter Mondale, Mike Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry -- was swiftly turned into the same, now-familiar loser archetype: the overly earnest, sniveling, dishonest, elitist, subversive weakling, who bore political journalists and provided an easy target for their adolescent derision.
That the right wing has been so successful in this kind of distorting branding has been the mystery for me, and a lot of what I have written here has been by attempt to understand why it works so well on swaths of the electorate that are otherwise sane and decent. Kerry was a poor candidate in '04, but it nevertheless astonished me that George Bush could be taken seriously by sane, decent Americans after everything we learned about him by 2004. The only conclusion one can draw from that is that people simply didn't see George Bush for what he is. They weren't paying attention enough to see past the propaganda.
They bought into the way he was represented by the establishment media that operates within the Beltway bubble because "reality" and "sanity" are something that the people in the media lost touch with long ago. They only report on reality as it appears within the bubble. That's why they think they're honest brokers just doing their job. The unreality they report on is all they are exposed to. Some like Bill Kristol are conscious propagandists and as such creators of the unreality. Others like Coulter and Limbaugh are consciously over-the-top entertainers who play with these distortions as their schtick. But most in the media are earnest, sincere types who think they are doing a fair job of reporting "reality." Reality is the world shaped by the interests of those in power.
So for this reason, if you don't live inside the right leaning Beltway/media bubble, and you're active enough to get your information from sources outside of it, it's hard to take almost anything you learn from the people within it seriously. Their concerns and chatter defy common sense. And so when some one like Obama comes on the scene who actually talks sense, it's easy to forget about or dismiss the insane reality to which he offers an alternative. I, at least, find myself doing so
Kerry was an empty suit and easy for the right/media to brand along the lines Greenwald describes above , but Obama is not. I am cautiously optimistic that this time it will be different. The right/media will try to do to Obama what they did to Kerry, but the American electorate has caught on to the fact that the world as represented by Limbaugh, Kristol, and even so-called reasonable types like David Brooks is like a carnival hall of mirrors. There is always some element of objective truth in their representation of reality, but they distort it to such a degree as to make it hardly recognizable to anyone who sees clearly.
A word about Olbermann. He can be annoying. He has an ego the size of Rhode Island. He often over-reaches. I think he's frequently wrong or at least off base in some of his perceptions and comments. But he's the one high-profile person in the MSM who seems capable to sometimes (not always, but more often than not) speak outside the bubble Greenwald describes above. He can be dismissed as partisan, but I would argue that he is a partisan of "reality" as opposed to bubble-enclosed unreality.