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Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Pssst. Landslide?
AS THE DAYS DWINDLE DOWN.... No, I'm not predicting. Just suggesting a possibility that can't be ruled out. McCain by a landslide. It's a way of realizing just how aberrant the current situation is with regard to the press and the polls.
With the mainstream media openly rooting for Barack Obama, we can't trust the usual media outlets -- meaning the only ones who are capable of doing actual reporting, whether they do it or not -- which also means that we would have no way of knowing it if this race had turned dramatically around since the advent of Joe the Plumber, voter registration fraud, Biden's curious and reckless moment of honesty about the risk of electing a neophyte to the presidency, and the rumblings from Pelosi, Frank et al about the tax-and-spend agenda of a congressional supermajority. All of these constitute what would, in other years, be called damaging 'October Surprises'. But not this year. Unless they are and we just don't know it. How could we?
Well, we'd have no way of knowing it without the polls. But here's the most, maybe the only, interesting statistic about the polls:
[T]he rising number of refusals — those
who refuse to
participate in telephone polling — make the predictive value of
electoral polling more questionable than ever before. Michael Medved
said that some pollsters report refusal levels as high as 80%.
80 percent? 80 percent???
Who is it that's refusing? People who have figured out that the MSM has replaced all actual reporting on Obama with space-fillers and propaganda about how McCain has already lost the election? Maybe. Refusing to participate in the creation of poll stories that have obviously become a camouflage for the absence of stories about Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, criminal campaign fund-raising schemes, and Obama's clearly Marxist bent may represent the only form of resistance left to an electorate that's learned even speaking out against the One is to court the smear of racism -- and worse, if Joe the Plumber's experience is any indication.
Various political experts, including conservative bloggers, have been pooh-poohing the McCain campaign's Joe the Plumber fixation, specifically the "I'm Joe the Plumber" spots the McCain camp doesn't really have enough money to blanket the country with.
But what if ordinary Americans don't even need those ads to feel such a sentiment? What if this whole episode represents such a basic transgression of the American ethos that it was internalized by millions within hours of the first MSM attempts to eviscerate a man who dared to ask the messiah a question from his own front lawn? What if?
How would we know that? We wouldn't. The MSM wouldn't track down the signs that such a sea change had occurred. It doesn't fit their narrative. The pollsters wouldn't necessarily pick it up, either. By definition, a hang-up on a pollster doesn't feed into poll results except as an asterisk.
When the press stops reporting to engage in pure propaganda, they cut themselves off from the information that might otherwise prevent them from making a horrendous mistake. That's exactly where we are as a nation right now. We don't have a free press at this moment in time. Which means the truth could be absolutely anything and they wouldn't know it. And we wouldn't know it.
As I said, I'm not predicting a McCain landslide. But I am saying there's at least reason to hope for it. And there's nothing in any of the media coverage that can refute me.
