Why Liberals Cry For John McCain

David Brooks on The Mainstream Media's favorite Republican Great Hope: John McCain.

AMAZING NYT's TWOFER!

Conservative voters are acting like liberals!

David Brooks spins a tale about conservative leaders not being nice to John McCain.
And an equally amusing tale of conservatives revolting against their principles.

David Brooks of the New York Times pens a liberal Mainstream Media member's wet dream of the opposition in today's MSM flagship.

It's hard to know where to begin on this one. Brooks' take on McCain is a MSM equivalent of a sloppy kiss. No tongue this time; but there's plenty time for that later.

Brooks' talks yet again of the splintering of the conservative movement. To the David Brooks in the MSM, conservatism is just like the flip side of liberalism: just a bunch of people trying to get their hands on the levers of powers, no principles needed.

An oppositional mentality set in: if the liberals worried about global warming, it was necessary to regard it as a hoax. If The New York Times editorial page worried about waterboarding, then the code of conservative correctness required one to think it O.K.

Apostates and deviationists were expelled or found wanting, and the boundaries of acceptable thought narrowed. Moderate Republicans were expelled for squishiness. Millions of coastal suburbanites left the party in disgust.

Ah, to be David Brooks.

Ah, to write for the Times.

Where everyone who disagrees with your opinion of the world doing it for the sheer joy derived from opposing a liberal viewpoint.

That, of course, is just an interesting side benefit of thinking independently of the New York Times' party line.

Just because liberals can shift in the course of years from believing the Earth is threatened with Global Cooling to their latest fad, Global Warming, doesn't mean that those who take a more reasoned, longer look at the cycles of climate are of similar bent.

Conservatives have heard the Global Warming sideshow before: when it was Global Cooling. Because we don't want the liberal's favorite fix for everyting--more taxes, more government, more regulation--we are, in David Brooks' eyes, opposing Global Warming for the sheer contrariness of it.

"Conservatives are being mean to John McCain!"

But this article is more. It's also about the favorite Republican of the Moment for the MSM: John McCain.

David Brooks sees hope for conservatives because--surprise!--they aren't acting like conservatives!?!?

Yet a funny thing has happened this primary season. Conservative voters have not followed their conservative leaders. Conservative voters are much more diverse than the image you’d get from conservative officialdom.

David Brooks' fondest dream: that conservatives re-invent themselves as liberals!

Who to lead this exciting Renaissance?

Time for The New York Times' favorite, John McCain, to step up to the plate.

McCain’s winning coalition in South Carolina was pretty broad. He lost among the extremely conservative but won among the somewhat conservative and the moderates. He lost among those who go to church more than once a week, but won among weekly churchgoers. He won among those who strongly support the Bush administration and among those who are angry at the Bush administration, among those who strongly support the war and among those who strongly oppose it. He won every income group over $30,000.

McCain's winning coalition in South Carolina was pretty broad, for sure. It included Independents and Democrats.

It's a quiet secret that the MSM hasn't reported that no Republican primary yet has featured voters of only the Republican persuasion.

McCain is David Brooks' favorite Republican because so many of McCain's positions echo those of David Brooks.

Imagine that.

Brooks takes to task conservative leaders (Rush Limbaugh) that supposedly are irrelevant now. Of course, Brooks doesn't cite Limbaugh's ratings numbers versus the continually-declining circulation numbers of the New York Times.

If all conservatives aren't listening to Limbaugh in Brooks' view, it's hard to see just who is listening to David Brooks, outside of the NY metro area and some Washington insider subscribers.

Brooks finishes up with a liberal's fondest wish: "And McCain’s success has raised an astonishing specter: Republicans may actually have a shot at winning this year."

David Brooks is right. If the the election were held today, John McCain might surely be the winner.

If the only voters were the New York Times' Editorial writers.

And that's another liberal wet dream.

by Mondoreb

[images: healthinaction; NYTimes;
Sources:
* The Voters Revolt



Death by 1000 Papercuts Front Page

New Right Wing Smear Machine: Check the Oil

As a card-carrying member of the New Right Wing Smear Machine, I read the recent story by The Nation with interest. I thought the Nation would have probably packed up and moved to Nicaragua by now, but apparently it hasn't. It's alive and well and documenting what it sees as the problems of the Republic from a domestic location.

Although headline smacks of yellow journalism, the story itself is fairly reasonable in tone, although slanted like nobody's business to the left, as one would naturally expect from such a bastion of the Left.

The last couple weeks there've been treatments of the New Right Wing Smear Machine for a variety of offenses. First, there was the offense of questioning someone, the "smear" against Graeme Frost. Michelle Malkin and Mark Steyn, hold up your hands.

Then an aide to Mitch McConnell asked some reporters if they might--gasp!--do some reporting. That was a second Right Wing "smear". Now the culprits are forwarding emails. That's got The Nation fired up.

As they put it:

Such is the power of the right-wing smear forward, a vehicle for the dissemination of character assassination that has escaped the scrutiny directed at the Limbaughs and Coulters and O'Reillys but one that is as potent as it is invisible. In 2004 putative firsthand accounts of Kerry's performance in Vietnam traveled through e-mail in right-wing circles, presaging the Swift Boat attacks. Last winter a forward began circulating accusing Barack Obama of being a secret Muslim schooled in a radical madrassa (about which more later). While the story was later fed through familiar right-wing megaphones, even making it onto Fox, it has continued to circulate via e-mail long after being definitively debunked by CNN. In other words, the few weeks the smear spent in the glare of the mainstream media was just a tiny portion of a long life cycle, most of which has been spent darting from inbox to inbox.

Mentioning Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News in the same paragraph without the writer collapsing into spasms must have taken an act of self-control not seen since the last pretty girl passed Bill Clinton without the former president groping her. The history of this insidious tool of conservative knuckle-draggers is fleshed out a bit.

The smear forward has its roots in two distinct forms of Internet-age communication. First, there's the electronically disseminated urban legend ("Help find this missing child!"; "Bill Gates is going to pay people for every e-mail they send!"), which has been a staple of the Internet since the mid- '90s. Then there's the surreal genre of right-wing e-mail forwards. These range from creepy rage-filled quasi-fascist invocations ("The next time you see an adult talking...during the playing of the National Anthem--kick their ass") to treacly aphorisms of patriotic/religious uplift ("remember only two defining forces have ever offered to die for you, Jesus Christ...and the American Soldier").

Now, sad to say, even though laboring daily for conservative causes, the only forwards my email in-box seems to see are those from Media(aboutHilliary)Matters and Bill Richardson. This is an affront I want to see corrected. Who's the person in charge of this "smear machine"?

As a conservative writer who's prone to ask questions, I'm proud to be a pawn, a tool of the oppressor, a running jackal and a smear artist. I just wish the head smear merchants would show a little love and put me on their list. If I'm going to be in a conspiracy, I'd like to get in on the conspiring.

by Mondoreb
[image: fadinghope]



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