The more I read about the kinds of crap that the right is trying to pull this election, and how the right-wing media is playing along, the more they disgust me ... until I remember that this isn't new, at least to the Bush/Rove branch of the GOP.
The argument for this, apparently, is just as a counter to the supposedly liberal media - except the media isn't all that liberal these days - just look at Fox News and the like. I didn't follow politics enough to know back in the days where that rumor was originally born, but I have a theory on why it has such tenacity - if you accept that a big part of the GOP's strategy is to blatantly lie their asses off and treat reality and the truth as a liability (which they pretty much have to do these days), then honest, balanced reporting on the reality of things necessarily has to call out the conservatives as being full of crap. Which looks biased if you're one of the mindless Bush chattel that lives in his fantasy world with him. The fact of the matter: fair and realistic reporting these days has to look liberal these days, because the right-wing of today campaigns in spite of and against truth.
Which also explains why I get depressed about how much it always feels like the right's political spinning is more effective than the left's - if the right side is arguing that the world doesn't exist and the left side counters with the truth, you can see where the prevailing average of the two yields that the world is flat. Average reality with the obscene crap the right spews these days and you still get something slanted to the right. While I can't advocate that the left start spewing all of this same kind of crap, they've somehow got to make the electorate start to realize that Bush isn't just living in a fantasy world, but he's living in Bizarro-land in that fantasy world. Sorry, Bush - sometimes a coffee cup is just a coffee cup.
--Nick
Edit: An interesting analysis from Kevin Drum.
Posted by Nick at October 9, 2004 07:31 PM | TrackBack