The important thing to realize is that these themes have been completely internalized by the villagers. They really don't even question it anymore, it's completely natural to them. When you see George Stephanopoulos essentially explain that Democratic voters are choosing between an flaccid, unpatriotic "metrosexual" and a lying, delusional succubus, and it's simply his job to help them sort that out, you know that he's completely lost touch with what people actually need politics and government for. Digby.
***
Things would actually be simpler if the American commentariat was composed merely of corporate shills. Instead, it's composed also of pathological, Chris Matthewsian misogynists, rabid foaming Glenn Becks, Tim Russert the Terrible Trivium, and, of course, David "Red Man Tobacco and Pabst Blue Ribbon" Brooks, who loved last night's debate and warns us today, no whining about the media.
Well, Blue Ribbon, ol' boy, this isn't a whine. Think of it instead as a barbaric yawp. When you write, "We may not like it, but issues like Jeremiah Wright, flag lapels and the Tuzla airport will be important in the fall," we know you're telling the truth, because you'll be around in the fall telling us precisely how important these things are. After all, as you note, we should "remember how George H.W. Bush toured flag factories to expose Michael Dukakis."
Hold the phone, Red Man--did you say "expose Michael Dukakis"? As what, pray tell? As the flag-burning, hemp-wearing, Amerikkka-hating card-carrying member of the ACLU he really was? I seem to recall 1988 as the year George H. W. Bush was exposed as a craven slimeball who would use the phrase "card-carrying member of the ACLU" as an epithet. But then, I don't read the newspapers.
The point is that we are not dealing merely with a "corporate" media. That would be bad enough. We are dealing instead with a deeply decadent and deeply entrenched class of courtiers in the late stages of Bloated Beltway Media Empire, one of whose pastimes is chattering on about the folkways of the salt of the earth (bowling, shots-and-beer, guns, God). The level of chattering is directly proportional to the decadence of the commentator, which is why you hear so much about small-town values from people who last caught glimpses of my neighbors when they watched the opening thirty minutes of Deer Hunter in their suite at the Willard Hotel. The appropriate text for our situation is not so much Manufacturing Consent as the film Ridicule. Not a great movie, by any means, but a reasonable approximation of a situation in which we can find lunatics like Glenn Beck and congenital liars like William Kristol among our most powerful courtiers. Berube
***
...it occurred to me that we have now crossed an important threshold where the Republican operative cadre has sufficiently disciplined and trained the press (and more than a few Democrats) that their own role may simply be redundant.
Think about it. Organized campaigns of falsehoods, distortions and smears used to be something most people thought of as a bad thing, if not something that's ever been too far removed from American politics. Now, however, members of the prestige press appear to see it not as a matter of guilty slumming but rather a positive journalistic obligation to engage in their own organized campaign of falsehood, distortion and smear on the reasoning that it anticipates the eventual one to be mounted by Republicans. In other words, we've gotten past the debatable rationale that journalists have no choice but to cover smears and distortions once they're floated into the mainstream debate to thinking that journalists need to seek out and air smears and distortions on the grounds of electability, as though the mid-summer GOP Swiftboating was another de facto part of the election process like primaries, conventions and debates. Marshall