Archives
Thursday, October 02, 2008
Bailout Shelter
SOMETHING SOMETHING BORN. I don't want to sound pessimistic, but things are falling apart at an alarming rate right now. As we've noted previously, McCain refuses to place the blame for the financial crisis where it belongs. The highly visible club of snob conservatives have decided to publicly trash Sarah Palin with just a month to go before the election (while even Rush Limbaugh succumbs to a public brain fart, claiming he doesn't know who McCain is talking about when he mentions "so-called conservatives in the Georgetown cocktail set"). The Republican congressional leadership is twisting the arms of house members to commit political suicide by voting for a bailout package the Democrats could pass by themselves if they had any guts to back up their socialist principles. And Republicans generally can't even muster enough spine to be outraged about a PBS debate moderator with a clear financial incentive to help Obama win the election. As one of the few National Review editors who isn't more afraid of dissing Gwen Ifill than speaking truth to the powerless, Peter Kirsanow puts the matter fairly plainly (despite the requisite nod to Ifill's nonexistent professionalism):
The refrain from most of the GOP
talking heads over the last twenty four hours concerning Gwen Ifill's
role during the VP debate is that she's a fine journalist, who, now
that the fact of her book is public knowledge, shouldn't be precluded
from moderating the event. Heck, it may even work to Palin's advantage
because Ifill will be under intense scrutiny to be fair and balanced.
This rationale points to the GOP's ( and, to some extent, conservatives') nearly wholesale capitulation to liberal media dominance and is one of the reasons the GOP base find themselves so frequently dispirited: no objection, no fight, no pushback to a howling conflict of interest....
I concur that Ifill's a professional. That's not the point. Republicans will find themselves losing more and more often if they do not vigorously challenge these media travesties. And it's the right thing to do for the country. A partisan, cheerleading press is not a hallmark of a free and democratic society.
So many times we see Republicans act "gentlemanly" and turn the other cheek —to what end? It simply emboldens the media toward even greater bias. How does that serve the interests of the country? Democrat fingerprints are all over the current financial mess; Dodd and Frank were integral to the debacle, yet the GOP does nothing to counter the prevailing narrative that this is a McCain—House Republican problem—and McCain's poll numbers plummet.
The conclusion of McCain's convention speech exhorting us to "fight, fight, fight" has been quickly forgotten. There's no honor in failing to challenge brazen media bias and distortion. It does the nation no good when voters cast ballots based upon false or misleading information. Right now it looks as if the same politicians who engineered the Fannie Mae/ Freddie Mac train wreck are going to win in November. The most liberal candidate with the most radical associations of any presidential aspirant in history is poised to win because the media, with virtual GOP acquiescence, has portrayed that candidate as mainstream.
This rationale points to the GOP's ( and, to some extent, conservatives') nearly wholesale capitulation to liberal media dominance and is one of the reasons the GOP base find themselves so frequently dispirited: no objection, no fight, no pushback to a howling conflict of interest....
I concur that Ifill's a professional. That's not the point. Republicans will find themselves losing more and more often if they do not vigorously challenge these media travesties. And it's the right thing to do for the country. A partisan, cheerleading press is not a hallmark of a free and democratic society.
So many times we see Republicans act "gentlemanly" and turn the other cheek —to what end? It simply emboldens the media toward even greater bias. How does that serve the interests of the country? Democrat fingerprints are all over the current financial mess; Dodd and Frank were integral to the debacle, yet the GOP does nothing to counter the prevailing narrative that this is a McCain—House Republican problem—and McCain's poll numbers plummet.
The conclusion of McCain's convention speech exhorting us to "fight, fight, fight" has been quickly forgotten. There's no honor in failing to challenge brazen media bias and distortion. It does the nation no good when voters cast ballots based upon false or misleading information. Right now it looks as if the same politicians who engineered the Fannie Mae/ Freddie Mac train wreck are going to win in November. The most liberal candidate with the most radical associations of any presidential aspirant in history is poised to win because the media, with virtual GOP acquiescence, has portrayed that candidate as mainstream.
Has it occurred to anyone else that the word "bailout" applies to a lot more than the $700 billion package that's being rammed through the congress as we speak? It seems as if everyone is bailing out. The mass media have bailed completely on maintaining even the appearance of journalistic objectivity, almost contemptuously refusing to cover such obvious stories as Biden's gaffes, exaggerations, and conflicts of interest, Obama's disturbing associations with radicals and his flagrantly scandalous fundraising activities, and the destruction of the lending industry via Democrat-legislated affirmative action mandates in the mortgage market. McCain has bailed on his party and the congressional candidates who are depending on his good political judgment. The Republican congressional leadership has bailed on its principles and the election prospects of the entire conservative caucus. And even conservative pundits like George Will, Kathleen Parker, and others who have no real career stake in the election have bailed on the Republican ticket at the height of the most despicably vicious and biased media campaign coverage in our lifetimes.
So what do we do? Find or build a bailout shelter in which we can ride out the worst of the disintegration process. Maybe it won't consist of bricks and mortar. But it probably does involve staying away as much as possible from television, radio, newspapers, and the internet. At least for a while. Even sports has ceased to be a solace. Three or four tmes yesterday during the Phillies-Brewers playoff game, I had to go channel-surfing to avoid Obama's inane ad claiming that he is capable of maintaining fiscal discipline while he socializes medicine, converts the power grid to windmills, and bails out every endangered home mortgage. Trying to watch an entertainment show or two last night, I was subjected to repeated promos for David Letterman's Top Ten list of his newest lame Sarah Palin jokes. This morning, attempting to flee the gotta-pass-the-bailout-and-is-Palin-really-stupid segments on Fox & Friends, I sought out the lunkhead sports talk of Mike & Mike on ESPN2 only to have them trumpet their upcoming interview with Obama.
I could bear the saturation media coverage if it weren't all so relentlessly one-sided. A few nights ago, I masochistically checked in on all the late night talk shows. It was a day of spectacular Biden gaffes, but every single one of them -- Leno, Letterman, O'Brien, Ferguson, et al -- were obsessed with continuing the unbroken hatchet job on Palin.
At the moment, that room in the graphic above is looking pretty good to me. Tonight I'll probably try to keep tabs on the playoff games, but only in glimpses. I'm not going anywhere near the rigged arena I'm assured 100 million Americans will be getting their jollies from. Maybe QVC will have a special about survivalist equipment. Lanterns, bedrolls, canned goods, waterproof playing cards, and smokeless space heaters seem enticing to me about now. Wind-up multi-band radios not so much. We'll see.
Maybe I'll feel better tomorrow. But there are times when it's easy to understand why Napoleon sat down on that log at Waterloo.
