Canadian Cincinnatus

The alternate media wins the Rush Limbaugh – Sandra Fluke skirmish

It is said by political strategists that he who frames the debate, wins the debate. Therefore, the ability to reframe the debate when you have been ambushed is a critical survival strategy.

Back in the old days,  it would have been a slam-dunk: Rush Limbaugh would have lost and the left, backing their agent Sandra Fluke, would have won. The debate was framed by them and it would have been won by them.

But, unfortunately, it no longer is the good ol’ days. Enough people in the alternate media get politics. That is, they understand how political battles are fought and won. More importantly they understand how they are not won: with apologies and appeasement. 

They took the Malia and Sasha standard that President Obama applied to Rush (i.e. don’t say anything in public discourse that would offend his daughters) and threw it back in his face.

Alinsky’s fourth rule states: “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.” As an old community organizer, Obama knows this, or should. But he was wholly unprepared when conservatives started demanding that he return the $1 million that Bill Maher donated to Obama’s super-PAC, because Maher has repeatedly and publically called Sarah Palin “a boob”, “a bimbo”, “a twat” and “a cunt”. Remember the Malia and Sasha rule, Barry, and hand back the loot. You hypocrite.

Debate reframed. 

Way to go, alt media!

 

How President Obama could have beaten Glenn Beck at his own game

While I am not normally in the habit of giving political advice to Barack Obama, the political strategy wonk in me can’t resist.

Instead of continuing to enjoy the high life in Martha’s Vineyard and pretending that he hadn’t paid any attention to a gathering of 300,000 to 1 million people in Washington DC, Obama should have joined Glenn Beck at the Lincoln Memorial.

Because the Restoring Honor rally was billed as non-partisan (which I can attest to since I listened to most of it on satellite radio) with the goal of raising money for the Special Operations Warrior Foundation ($5 million has been raised so far), it would have been reasonable for Obama to have politely and publicly asked ahead of time to attend, stating that, as Commander-in-Chief, he is keenly interested in helping out a charity that supports the widows and orphans of Special Forces soldiers. Beck would have then been morally obligated to invite him. If Beck had refused him, he would have looked like a hypocrite and a fool.

Then, if the President had confidently strode into the lion’s den and given a non-partisan speech stressing the importance of honour while praising the military that he leads, he would have dramatically demonstrated courage and fair-mindedness – two particularly attractive qualities in a leader. He would have hit a political home run right out of the field. 

But by staying away, Obama implicitly sided with the arrogant and increasingly vicious media whose hysterical and condescending reaction to the Restoring Honor rally is a reflection of their own dawning realization that they are on the wrong side of the American people and therefore history. (Here is a particularly egregious example.) A smart politician would be looking for opportunities to distance himself from the losers who have declared war on ordinary Americans. But I guess, he isn’t that smart a politician.

Another million-man march nobody ever heard of

I am of course speaking about the Glenn Beck rally this Saturday at the Lincoln Memorial. The best estimate I could find pegged the crowd at 330,000 people. What was the media reaction? Chirping crickets - with smatterings of haughty condescension intermingled with empty charges of racism they don’t even bother trying to justify.

Let’s take another case: the 9/12 Taxpayer March on Washington, DC last year. Crowd estimates for that event varied from 300,000 to 2 million but the whole thing has vanished entirely down the mainstream media memory hole as if it never happened. Think about it! A million people or more marched down Washington in I’m-as-mad-as-hell-and-I’m-not-going-to-take-it-anymore mode and its not deemed significant.

 If the media really were in the news reporting business, you would think they would make as big a hullabaloo over these events as they did over Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March (with about 300,000 participants) or Woodstock (450,000 attendees). But they are increasingly not in the news reporting business so they don’t.

Conservatives love to commiserate among themselves about the ratchet effect – that is, that big government always expands, sometimes fast and sometimes slow, but that there is nothing that can be done to stop it. Every expansion is permanent. According to this theory, the best a determined conservative leader can do is to keep the government at bay. He can’t push it back, but once he’s gone and the liberals are back in charge, the onward march resumes again.

Well, the media treatment of these rallies reveals another ratchet effect, one pushing in the other direction. Every time the media buries a story – the expansion of shall-issue concealed carry laws across the US in the 90’s, the Duke rape case acquittal, the Americorp Inspector General scandal, the New Black Panther voting rights scandal, etc. – they may succeed somewhat in burying an inconvenient fact, but each time they do, their credibility diminishes a little bit. The news leaks out and more eyes get opened, the mainstream media ratings incrementally drop, Fox News ratings incrementally rise, and Rush Limbaugh’s gets a few more listeners.

This effect has been going on since the mid 90’s and the evidence for its existence is now overwhelming. The news departments of the big three broadcast networks are at historic lows and all are heavily in the red; the New York Times and Washington Post are almost bankrupt; Newsweek was just sold for $1 (the buyer overpaid).

The case of Rush Limbaugh is very instructive. With regard to his ratings, every month in the past two decades has been his best month ever. He recently signed a $400 million renewal deal. Yet his negative ratings in public opinion polls are consistently among the highest of any public figure ever. How to explain the discrepancy?

Easy. He has about 25 million listeners. America has 310 million people. Even in its debased state, the mainstream media still reaches significantly more people than he does. And the media hate Rush and never pass up an opportunity to slag him. Their favourite technique is to take something he said out of context. If the MSM is your only exposure to him, you hate him too. But the truth gets out. People chance upon Rush on the radio. They discover that they agree with his views a whole lot more than they do with Katie Couric’s.  Each time this happens, Katie’s ratings go down incrementally and Rush’s go up. The key point here is that once people switch, they don’t switch back - ever. This is the reverse ratchet effect. 

It has been said that the mainstream media is really the gatekeeper media because an increasing part of what they do is to keep the gate shut. But they can’t keep it completely shut all the time. There is leakage. Over time, the leakage compounds. Until we reach the situation we find in 2010 when the MSM is almost completely under water.

I believe that the foundations of the mainstream media in the US have been eroded so much that the entire US media world is ripe for a gestalt switch. I predict that in the next two to four years, the conservative media will become the mainstream media - the default media. And the current mainstream media will become the fringe media.

The only thing holding that back right now is fear in the corporate world of consequences from the Obama administration. But if Obama’s popularity continues to tank and the right takes over Congress and President Obama increasingly looks like a lame-duck, one-term President, that fear will evaporate by early 2012.

That’s when it will happen.

The significance of the journolist scandal

In case you were living in a cocoon, or only got your news from the Globe and Mail, you know all about the journolist scandal, whereby Tucker Carlson’s The Daily Caller got a hold of many e-mails that had passed back and forth between 400 top mainstream American journalists. E-mails that graphically illustrate what many conservatives have long suspected, that the mainstream media is left-wing and biased against conservatives. The journolist scandal is to journalism what Climategate is to global warming. For instance, the e-mails show journalists from top-ranked news organizations like the Guardian and the Washington Post openly discussing how to hide issues to help Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and to demonize his critics. For instance, to get Obama out of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright pickle, David Ackerman of the Washington Independent advised those on the list:

“Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

Obviously this is more than bias, more than advocacy - it is downright slander. But most of it wasn’t this bad. A lot of it was simply like-minded journalists coordinating ‘their message’. A defender of the mainstream media might ask, so what? While wilder excesses like slandering Karl Rove with baseless charges of racism is inexcusable, what’s wrong with journalists having a point of view? Rush Limbaugh has a point of view. Why can’t they?

In my opinion this is a very good question and one that is worth pondering carefully before responding with a spittle-spewing partisan retort. What is wrong with journalists having a point of view?

The short answer is nothing at all, if you are honest about it. What elevates Rush Limbaugh morally above the scheming sneaks over at journolist is that Limbaugh is honest about who he is. He tells you right out that he is a conservative and that he is presenting a conservative point of view. The mainstream media does not do this. They present a sort of ‘faux objectivity’ where they push their agenda just as hard but pretend that they are merely presenting the facts in a disinterested way. And this is bad.

And this is why don’t have as much of a problem with left-wing journalists like Chris Mathews or Keith Olberman as other conservatives do. I disagree with their politics of course, but at least they are up front with who they. The people in journalism I really can’t stand are the Walter Cronkite types, who are just as left-wing as Olberman and Mathews but hide it with phony ‘gravitas’. During the Tet Offensive, he pronounced the war in Vietnam lost and LBJ famously remarked at this, “If I have lost Walter Cronkite, I have lost America.” This is a shame because Tet was a spectacular American victory that really turned the Vietnam War around. LBJ would have never lost America if America knew how left-wing Cronkite was, but Cronkite carefully hid who he was in order to be able to wield the kind of influence a left-wing crank usually can’t.

So what does all this mean? I think the almost always insightful Jay Cost hits the nail right on the head:

JournoList looks to me to be yet another mile-marker on this country's return to a partisan press. This does not upset me very much at all. I think American democracy is unthinkable without the political parties, so I do not think that a partisan press is all that bad. And it might finally stop journalists and academics from acquiring the inherently political authority that comes with monikers like "objective news" or "social science" when they are in fact promoting subjective values. That would be a good thing. All in all, a partisan press is, weirdly enough, a very honest one in that you know fully where everybody is coming from, and nobody can claim for him- or herself the epistemologically ridiculous "God's eye view."

 This strikes me about right. America is returning to the partisan press that it enjoyed in the 19^th century and good for them! The veneer of bogus ‘objectivity’ has been stifling honest debate for too long. 

Why would Maj. Hassan go on a killing spree in Fort Hood?

Maj. Nadil Malik Hassan, a psychologist with the US Army, and scheduled for deployment in Iraq, went on a shooting spree in Fort Hood, Texas yesterday, killing 11 and wounding 30. At the time of this writing, the reason why he would do such a thing remains an inscrutable mystery.

One possible clue is that he yelled, “Allah Akbar” during the attack. Allah Akbar means God is Great and is a popular thing for jihadists to scream when they attack infidels. The easy conclusion from this is that he is an Islamic terrorist, but since Islam is the religion of peace, this explanation is improbable.

There are also reports that Hassan had previously made “outlandish” comments condemning US foreign policy, claiming that Iraqis and Afghanis “should stand up and fight their aggressor”, i.e. the US Army that he serves. However, since these reports are unverified, the prudent thing to do at this point is to discount them completely and assume they never happened.

There are also reports, again unconfirmed, that when he was stationed at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, he got poor performance evaluations that may have resulted in his transfer to Fort Hood. Since the likeliest explanation for his poor evaluations is that he is a level headed man with a deeply spiritual side (which kept him serene), and that the bad appraisals were only the result of spontaneous and unprovoked racism on the part of the white Christians he worked with, this doesn’t shed any more light on the matter.

I don’t know. I’ve got to say, this whole thing has got me stumped. A real mystery.

UPDATE: New York Post's Ralph Peters seems to have solved the riddle.