Right Wing Pillow Fight: Fisking the Blogfather

The disgraceful Democrat performance last night proved that the Left has nothing to say regarding the great issues of the day. They are completely irrelevant.

As such, we Righties will need to find some other whetstone on which to sharpen our arguments and our rhetoric. There's no mileage in debating mimes, so we might as well debate each other.

So, in the spirit of helping conservatives to maintain our fighting trim for the day when a worthy foe should arise, I'll begin with Hugh Hewitt's latest Weekly Standard Online piece.

BECAUSE I HAD TO FILE this column before President Bush gave his State of the Union address, I can only hope he called Democrats on their indifference to the medium- and long-term threats to Social Security. The decision by Democrats and their friends in media and blogosphere to downplay the obvious problems with the program is the fiscal equivalent of having a healthcare policy that is indifferent to teenage smoking because the consequences of such a habit are far down the road. The harsh truth is that Democrats prefer to fix the Social Security shortfall with tax hikes--which they cannot obtain from this Congress or president, so kicking the can down the road is their preference. Pretending that there is no problem buys time for the left to try and gain the congressional seats they need to hike payroll taxes.

Calling Joe Camel: There's work for you with the left.

Are the Democrats indifferent to threats to Social Security, or are they reacting forcefully to the President's anticipated changes in a way they feel will minimize the negative impact of those changes? After all, the Democrats have tried to stir up fervor over Social Security several times during the Clinton years. Their favorite "solution" is jacking up taxes, preferably on the hated "rich". Democrats are either indifferent or passionately obstructing the Bush plan---they can hardly be both.

Are the problems with Social Security so obvious? Young workers certainly seem skeptical of the program, but perhaps they're skeptical about problems which are 30 years away as well. If the problems are obvious, wouldn't there be a larger call from the grassroots to fix them?

Finally, what good would hiking the payroll tax do Democrats? Wouldn't they be more likely to seek increases in capital gains or income taxes to shore up Social Security, perhaps with some protectionist tariffs to boot?

Even though attention will turn today to the president's speech to the exclusion of almost everything else, let me underline two recent media events which deserve more scrutiny than they have thus far received.

The first is the genuinely scandalous assertion by CNN's Eason Jordan, made at the World Economic Forum, that the United States military has targeted and killed a dozen journalists. The account of Jordan's remarks -including his backpedaling and the crowd's reactions--is available at ForumBlog. Thus far no major media outlet has demanded an accounting of Jordan, but the idea that a major figure from American media traffics in such outlandish and outrageous slanders on the American military deserves attention and criticism, not indifference. It is no wonder that anti-American propaganda gains traction in the world when American news executives set fantasies such as this one in motion. If Jordan had no grounds for peddling this grassy-knoll garbage, he should be fired. If he did have even the flimsiest of grounds, he ought to share his evidence and let the public decide whether his judgment is as flawed as it was when he covered for Saddam all those years.

But is Jordan really a major media figure? Sure, he's got some prestige as head of CNN, but does that really translate to influence? After all, he's said plenty of outrageous things before, though certainly not as many as Ted Turner. CNN's in a ratings nosedive. The MSM's shrinking in influence daily. Had Eason made his comments 10 or 15 years ago, perhaps a good number of unsuspecting Americans might have believed him. I doubt many would make that mistake today.

As for the EUnuchs, they engage in conspiracy mongering because it offers them comfort in their impotence.

You sound almost disappointed that the MSM isn't addressing this issue boldly, with frontpage coverage. If they did, there would be more danger that more Americans might believe the bogus allegations to be true. It would also be a sign that they took media bias seriously, which they clearly do not. Either way, it would not necessarily be a good thing.

Better still a nakedly biased and deceitful MSM lopping off chunks of its former credibility by the day. Not all Americans have woken up to the notion that the MSM is in bed with the political Left and the Democratic Party. Let the implosion continue for a bit, I say.

THE SECOND SUBJECT for mulling is John Kerry's extraordinary interview with Tim Russert last Sunday. There's a lot to absorb here, including Kerry's assertion that he did indeed run guns and CIA men into Cambodia on secret missions--and to aid the Khmer Rouge no less!

What is really remarkable is not Kerry's whoppers--he couldn't have meant the Khmer Rouge, right?--or his almost certain not-to-be-fulfilled pledge to sign the form 180. It is the set of questions Tim Russert posed.

Russert is generally regarded as the toughest interview in television, and he did bleed Kerry a bit during the campaign; afterwards Kerry never again came close to Russert's set before November 2.

But if the questions posed by Russert on January 30, 2005--on Kerry's fantasy life in Cambodia, on the sequestered records, etc.--were legitimate and useful inquiries after the votes have been cast, why then did no one pose them to candidate Kerry when they might have made a difference in the election? The blogosphere and the center-right media were full of such demands from August 1 forward, but not a single reporter from mainstream media bothered to pose even one of the Russert questions prior to the vote.

Okay, but are we criticizing or praising Russert?

Russert, like most of the MSM bigwigs, was a Democrat operative. He wrote speeches for Pat Moynihan. Now, a lot of people view that as a less partisan job than, say, campaign press spokesman, but in reality, speechwriters channel their party's aspirations through their candidate's voice. Russert's a Democrat. Always has been.

As such, it is certainly commendable that he asks tougher questions more frequently than the other members of the Hair Helmet Hamas. That's not a very high standard to beat.

Does he approach both the Left and the Right with equally tough questions, posed through the lens of their ideological opposite? No, he doesn't. Every time a Republican proposes some new initiative, Russert will ask if they will raise taxes to pay for it. If a Democrat does the same, he will not ask them to cut spending elsewhere to pay for it. Russert is pro-tax, period. He's a Democrat.

We know this going in. John Kerry's handlers booked him on Russert's program because he needed to look willing to answer tough questions, but do so in a safe environment. That's what Russert offers.

How does that help Democrats?

It doesn't. They get to pull a fig leaf over their unwillingness to do truly tough interviews, but ultimately, not engaging on these issues make their arguments brittle and weak. When their opponents confront them, they look like fools.

MSM support of the Democrats has been very much a double-edged sword. The MSM is, after all, its own interest group under the DNC umbrella, and their propaganda mill exacts a price of Democrats for using it. As the public's perception of journalism declines, so too does the benefit Democrats get from their close alliance with the media.

I'm not disappointed in Russert. He does what he always does, and he's smart enough to do it intentionally. He knows who the Khmer Rouge were. He let it go. Good. That means we get more posts not only about what a fool Kerry is, but how in the tank for Kerry Russert has been. Works for me.

Why was that?

If the country's most respected television journalist asks a series of questions after the election that no one asked during the contest, doesn't that tell us all we need to know about the mainstream media's coverage of Kerry? Doesn't that conclusively answer the question of whether the debate moderators really came to the stage prepared to ask the questions that mattered most?

But we knew that, didn't we? Tim Russert just provided the proof.

Very true. But demonstrating media bias is important only in so much as it leads to methods to counter it. The MSM has done a nice job killing its own credibility in ways that Brent Bozell wishes he could. Americans see the bias, and are actively seeking alternative outlets for their information. These outlets are opened up as people seek them. Fox News never would have happened in the 80s---there just weren't enough people actively seeking escape from Tom, Dan, and Peter yet. Developing alternate media is a far more effective antidote to media bias than some sort of reform from within. Tear that crumbling edifice down and build something new in its place, I say.

The pathetic effort to avoid posing tough questions to Kerry (and by contrast the Mapes-like fanaticism against Bush) highlights the almost lunatic imbalance of ideologies within mainstream media. Tim Russert may have taken aim at Kerry's Walter Mittyisms, but he hit his journalistic colleagues instead.

Sure he did. But it only matters insomuch as it pulls more blocks out of the gutted structure of the MSM.

What we're seeing now are the last, desperate, grasping efforts to turn back the clock and hold onto the post-Watergate power of the media. We'll see more of this in the years to come. It is interesting, but irrelevant.

The MSM is dead. The parasites have already begun to flee its corpse. Nothing will bring it back.