The LWM as the Disloyal Opposition

Might as well run their own candidates:

The anti-war, anti-Bush MSM both here and abroad have reached a state of near-rapture. The president's problems, Tom DeLay's indictment, the diminishing support for the war and the growing (and healthy) fight between fiscal conservatives and big government Republicans has enthused them like nothing since the last helo lifted off from the American embassy in Saigon. They're ready to declare conservatism over. But, like the Washington Post's reports that Rep. Mike Pence's "operation offset" was dead, they will be proven wrong if actions take the place of speeches.

A little-noticed role reversal has occurred in American politics. The MSM are performing the service that Heritage, AEI, Cato, and the Hoover Institution provide for conservatives. The media have filled the political and intellectual vacuum that left the Dems entirely bereft of ideas, able to say nothing other than "no." Today the opposition party to the Republicans is not the Dems but the mainstream media itself. They write, they speak, and the Dems follow.

Sometimes it's so obvious it's comical. Before the Roberts confirmation hearings, the CBS News website ran a column by Andrew Cohen that set forth four questions for Judge Roberts. The New York Times went CBS one better on September 12, with five questions for Roberts posed by each of five columnists. If you watched some of the hearings and compared, as I did, the questions asked by Sens. Schumer, Feinstein, Leahy and Biden from the scripts written for them by CBS and the NYT, you'd have concluded that the senators and staffers cribbed them pretty much word for word. Need more proof?

Following the president's New Orleans speech, David Brooks, the NYT's token conservative, wrote on September 18 that the rebuilding of the south would be a "Bushian laboratory," for testing school vouchers and social engineering ideas such as the "urban homesteading" proposal the president made. The next day Vichy John Kerry said in a speech that, "The plan they're designing for the Gulf Coast turns the region into a vast laboratory for right wing ideological experiments. They're already talking about private school vouchers, abandonment of environmental regulations, abolition of wage standards, subsidies for big industries..." If you want more, just look. It's all around. The MSM is busying itself developing campaign themes for the Dems to use next year: incompetence, cronyism, and corruption.

In the UK, this is practiced openly by the Economist. In its lead editorial this week, it admits to "have all sorts of ideological disagreements with Mr. Bush." It then goes on to say that "our main problem with his administration has increasingly become incompetence." It accuses Mr. Bush of cronyism and states, as examples, both former FEMA chief Michael Brown and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. (Confluence of incompetents with political enemies is not even clever.) It says the incompetence is evidenced by the response to Katrina, and the "shambles overseas in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay," and says Mr. Bush's opposition to an independent investigation into what went wrong on Katrina is "heinous." The Economist hyperventilates, "A thousand people have died and the tax payer faces a bill of up to $200 billion. If those two things do not merit independent investigation, then what on earth does?" If you listen to the Economist, NPR, and the rest, the only other thing that merits independent investigation is the repeatedly disproved allegation that prisoner abuse -- at Gitmo, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and everywhere else an American soldier takes a prisoner -- is a Bush policy and a commonplace.

The drumbeat in the media about administration incompetence will be one of the Dems' campaign themes in 2006. You can hear and see the American MSM testing it on its unfocused focus group audiences. David Gregory, the absurdly biased NBC White House correspondent, rehearsed it repeatedly on Chris Matthews' show yesterday.


THERE'S ONLY ONE SOLUTION to this: leadership from the White House that takes the initiative, acts decisively, and pushes a real conservative agenda. Bypassing the media, talking directly to Americans and getting back to core conservative principles, he can provide the leadership the nation, and the conservative movement, need and deserve. The first step is the next Supreme Court nominee.

We're barking up the wrong tree here. Dubya will never use the bully pulpit.