Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Shame on the media for mistaking a stunted Uriah Heep for a real man; all hail Rush Limbaugh's cultural indispensability!
Mar 15, 2000 | Having blessedly spent last week out of the country on spring break, I followed the delirious climax of Super Tuesday's primaries by newspapers rather than TV, which is normally the All-Seeing Eye of my daily life. Yes, I would have enjoyed watching the ham and eggs spread across various pundits' faces as their anointed favorite, that weaselly mini-martinet, Sen. John McCain, went crashing down to defeat.
But the big event I missed appears to have been reporter Maria ("The Hair") Shriver nearly getting into a scratch fest with Cindy ("Stepford Sally") McCain as the NBC cameraman trampled over a random daughter -- a tacky scene reminiscent of the paparazzi frenzies of Fellini's "La Dolce Vita," where hunted children glimpse the Madonna in a rainy meadow and where Anita Ekberg gets slapped around by her lush of a boyfriend in front of a Rome hotel.
Most of those who cast their ballots for McCain did so, I maintain, with little sense of his flawed character and thin legislative record. Thanks to the manipulations of the Northeastern press corps, McCain's brittleness, evasions, inconsistencies and hypocrisies were concealed from an electorate that had barely if ever heard of him before the publication last fall of his ghostwritten autobiography, which implicitly offered his early experiences in a Vietnamese prison camp as a credential for the presidency.
I have consistently argued in this column, which has opposed McCain from the start, that there is no necessary connection between being a prisoner of war and governing the nation and, furthermore, that McCain completely lacks the administrative and managerial skills of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who served as military commander of the fractious Allies during World War II.
If there were any principles left in journalism, at least a dozen high-profile print, Web and TV reporters would have been fired outright or put on probation by now because of their gross mishandling of the McCain boomlet, which they effectively created to disrupt the campaign of Gov. George W. Bush.
The strategy succeeded because of Bush's own weaknesses and immaturity as a candidate. If reporters actually believed McCain was ever shooting "straight talk" at them, they're fools and patsies. But if they were playing a cunning game to help the Clinton-tarred Democratic Party, they're amoral goons who have corrupted democracy and compromised their own profession.
When the strutting McCain started shrilly proclaiming, "I'm Luke Skywalker trying to get out of the Death Star!" every rise-of-Hitler red light should have gone on in the dull media mind. It's frightening in national security terms to think how easily a seething megalomaniac like McCain could gain credibility through the collusion of the press corps. The TV camera has always shown that McCain's still stuck in adolescence, sulking in the shadow of his dictatorial Darth Vader father, whom he has delusively projected into the scowling faces of the big, bad Republican establishment.
Only the pussy-whipped princelings of a press terrain soaked with feminist cant could mistake a stunted Uriah Heep like McCain for a "real" man. Ironically, liberal journalists' blindness or malice has enormously strengthened their arch foe, Rush Limbaugh -- whose radio show was the one reliable place, day by day amid the saccharine swill, to hear the refreshingly tart truth about McCain. After the McCain fiasco, Limbaugh's cultural indispensability as an ideological counterweight should be acknowledged by every honest observer across the political spectrum.
The shocking ineptitude of Bill Bradley's campaign has mortified many Democrats like myself who were praying that he could and would tap the intense anti-Washington sentiment in the country and win the presidency with rousing bipartisan support. Bradley's humiliating withdrawal from the race last week will not change my vote for him (partly motivated by distrust of Al Gore) in next month's Pennsylvania primary.
But it's pretty clear that a basketball player will never make it to the White House until he or she takes time out to study football, the pagan language of modern American warfare. Didn't Bradley even learn chess, for heaven's sake? Gore knocked Bradley's pieces right off the board. Whether Gore the epicene lie-monger can mobilize the disaffected Bradley Democrats remains to be seen, particularly if alternative candidates get on the ballot this fall.
There's not much to report on the Hillary Rodham Clinton front this week, except for two intriguing letters from Salon readers. Roy Hill responds from Fort Smith, Ark., to my puzzlement at the odd silence of his fellow native Arkansans about Hillary's touted achievements in that state:
In Arkansas, Hillary was always seen as a bit of a carpetbagging Yankee albatross around ole Billy's neck. In fact, public dislike of her was an issue in more than one gubernatorial campaign, and she started calling herself Rodham-Clinton, instead of just plain Rodham, in a deliberate effort to soften her image more to the liking of traditional, Junior League, tea-and-cake types who held positions of power and influence in the state.Hillary seemed to stay out of the spotlight and away from taking credit for policy decisions, which does not mean that she was not involved. She took steps to stay in Bill's shadow and to soften and magnolia-ify her image, especially when he lost the governor's office to Republican Frank White.
And as for the "Silence of the Hams" down in Razorback land, let's just say that Hillary was never really "one of ours" to begin with, and as a group, we don't really much care where she lands, just as long as it is far away.
Oh, dear, I couldn't help visualizing Hillary here as a giant pterodactyl menacing Manhattan (see "One Million Years B.C.," starring Raquel Welch in her famous fur bikini). Get out the umbrellas, you native New Yorkers! Peter Borregard, writing from El Cerrito, Calif., sharply observes about Hillary's diner dust-up:
Actually, when H.C. stiffed the waitress, she was displaying that she is a woman of iron principle. When H.C. was pushing her notorious health care initiative, she said she opposed medical savings accounts because if people had control over their own health care dollars, they wouldn't spend the money wisely.This is consistent with her idea that the government should get and spend all the money, except of course for H.C. and her friends. Thus, when she didn't tip the waitress, she was actually doing the waitress a "favor" and preventing this working class ignoramus from having money to spend unwisely.
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