Republicans started a massive campaign of obstructionism against the newly elected Barack Obama in 2008, even before the president was inaugurated the machinery was already in place not just to make Obama a one term president but to make him such a failure, his record would be a dis-qualifier to all other African-American upstarts who ever got the grand idea they wanted to be president.
Like everything else which has its Genesis in bad faith, this mentality became a monster; the more they hated Obama the more far right they lurched. That condition I characterized as Barack Obama derangement syndrome. As it got bigger and bigger it forced the party farther and farther to the right, those within its ranks who were not true believers were summarily discarded.
Former Governor Charlie Crist of Florida, Long time Senator Richard Luger of Indiana, The late Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, and a litany of others were routinely driven from the party. Others kept quite or prostituted themselves on the altar of right-wing conservatism to avoid having to face primary opponents from their right flank, chief among them Arizona John McCain, and South Carolina’s Lindsay Graham.
McCain and Graham, two senators who were once thought to be voices of reason within an increasingly unreasonable reactionary Republican party, have become two of the most strident and bellicose with Obama derangement syndrome, often times raising eyebrows as to the reasoning behind their stance.
As the party moved farther to the right on the issues the party became swallowed up to the point it is now almost impossible to differentiate the difference between the lunatic fringe and the party, some have concluded there are no differences between the two, they are one and the same.
As an outsider I have long argued that the Press has failed dismally in its duties to point decisively at the radicalization and obstructionism of the republican party, but even more that than that, he press has failed to speak clearly and decisively about the harm the republican party is causing the country ‚because of its radical far right agenda .
What the Press has done is to use it’s time instead to conflate the two parties into a dysfunctional mush of what is wrong with Washington DC.
The main stream media has long been labeled pro-left, pro-democratic or more recently the elitist left media, of course the source of this labeling is the radical lunatics on the right who have fought this psychological warfare with the press, cowing the vast majority of what would have been object media entities into creating a false equivalence between what they do and those on the other side who chose to point to their dysfunction.
At the center of that fear may very well be found the reason that the Press, or what I prefer to call, the lame-stream Media is reluctant to stridently call out the Republican Party on its ideological lunacy.
Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann have made careers as political scientists who focused on non-partisan analysis and eschewed singling out either party for bad behavior. That changed with the publication of their book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, which lamented that American politics had become more dysfunctional and that the Republican Party bore the brunt of the blame for the most recent offenses.
And after they made this argument, no one treated the news very seriously. Francis Wilkinson writes in Bloomberg about possible reasons why their theory failed to catch on:
It’s hard to imagine a more wholesale indictment from two eminent political scientists, each with a decades-long track record of nonpartisan analysis. It’s equally hard to imagine the press quietly absorbing a similarly pedigreed indictment of the Democratic Party; the élite press, in particular, would likely talk of nothing else. Yet mainstream news outlets, while giving the authors fairly prominent play, seem to treat the their thesis as neither new nor news.
What gives?
Perhaps it’s the soft bigotry of low expectations. The most anguish over the state of the Republican Party seems to flow from conservatives in varied states of excommunication, such as David Frum, Bruce Bartlett and a cadre of smart, young writers who object to the empowered-state vision of Democrats but can’t abide the devolution of the Republicans. Many liberals, having perhaps never given sufficient credence to conservative thought in the first place, regard the book’s premise with a knowing shrug. Elected Republicans, naturally, dismiss the book as partisan hackery (though former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel gave it an enthusiastic blurb). Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, with characteristic deference to facts, denounced the authors as “ultra, ultra liberal.” But the authors – and their centrist disposition — are well-known. Perhaps their thesis is, too. It’s just that no one knows what can be done about it, or by whom.http://http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/26/ornstein-mann.html
There are no surprises in the fact that the Neanderthal minority leader from Kentucky would ignorantly dismiss these two men as liberal extremists, after all what Mitch McConnell cannot understand he labels and hates.
Conversely former senator Chuck Hagel has always been a sane and reasonable senator and human being.
On issue after issue the American media has fallen short of its obligations, maybe the mission statement have changed, if this is so, then it is only proper that the media tell the American people it no longer seek truth irrespective of where it leads,or that it no longer is the guardian of our democracy.
It appears that the media houses that are not in the pockets of the far right are petrified of being labeled leftist that they acquiesce with the talking points of the far right and in too many cases find comfort in the moral dishonesty of false equivocation.
Fox News is a propaganda tool of the far right , it propagates and disseminates false-hoods, smear and propaganda, conversely MSNBC built their following on literally fact checking and ridiculing FOX and Republicans in general, this actually started with former host Keith Olberman who had beef with FOX’s blow-hard Bill O’Reilly.
Yet there is a concerted effort within the media fraternity to make the false parallel that FOX and MSNBC are basically doing the same thing. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Even those who fancy themselves media-critics like CNN’s Howard Kurtz has fallen victim to making that disingenuous parallel.
That moral cowardice on the part of the media, has literally emboldened the forces of the far right into adopting much more authoritarian principles into their platform.
No one challenged the Bush Administration when Cheney clearly was manufacturing evidence to launch America into an illegitimate war of choice, and after it was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Iraq war was carried out on fabrication and lies, no one was held accountable to this day, despite the tens of thousands of dead and maimed Iraqi’s and Americans.
The war on women:
The war on Immigrants:
Voter Suppression:
The war against Organized Labor:
The war against Gays and Lesbians:
The war against the poor and most vulnerable:
On issue after issue, what now obtains as the Republican party has been clear and unequivocally radical policies against the masses, and toward a chosen sub sector, yet the Media have remained impotently silent.
As I write this people in the State of Wisconsin have had their rights to collective bargaining stripped away from them, workers in Michigan just saw their Republican Governor sign away their rights under what is called (right to work) which is Union busting in a nut-shell .
Thus far 28 States have adopted so-called right to work laws, which strips away workers rights to collectively bargain for better pay and working conditions, those rights were the cornerstones which built the middle class in this country.
At the center of these draconian anti-Union laws are rich Billionaires, who are funneling huge sums of money into what appear at first glance to be legitimate grass-roots organisations, but are nothing more than shell groups designed to distort the truth and deny workers their rights.
On this and other matters of grave National interest the media is complicit in its silence.
When the Unions are castrated there will be no buffer between the dirty money of Charles and David Koch Sheldon Adelson and average Americans.
These aforementioned Billionaires and others have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the elections of 2012 trying to turn back the rights of ordinary people to vote, to organize and join Unions, and to have a say in their democracy.
On the occasion of the last election they were defeated but not deterred, they are even more determined to buy this democracy, strengthened and buoyed by the Supreme Court Citizens United Decision, which allows huge sums of money to flood the political system under the guise of free speech.
Labor organizes, supports workers and ordinary Americans, they get out their members to vote, this makes organized labor the mortal enemy of billionaire Industrialists like Charles and David Koch, who shroud their nefarious activities with legitimate philanthropic donations.
The challenge to ordinary Americans are their inability to understood the seriousness of these issues, and their inclination to vote and support causes and legislation that are diametrically opposed to their own self-interest.
And yes on these critically relevant issues the lame-stream media(Press) is silent.