The American Spectator

p> There's no rest for the politically weary. We'll have to keep a weather eye on '06 and '08, but there's a lot to do long before they arrive. There will be no respite while Nurse Ratched builds her campaign for the White House, and there's enough SGO this week to keep us busy. The RINOs are rampaging, the legacy news media are wounded but not dead, Yassir Arafat is dying, and the next most important election — the January election in Iraq — is fast approaching. p>We never should have left it to 007 to deal with SPECTRE. Despite his guile, good looks and all the cool stuff Q gave him, Commander Bond blew it. We should have given the job to Pat Toomey. Sen. Snarlin' Arlen Specter (RINO-Pa.) survived a primary challenge by real Republican Toomey only because the White House helped him. Spectre is repaying the President's generosity in a manner that Gen. Omar Bradley would have characterized as French. Bradley once said that the French never forgive a favor. Apparently, neither can Specter He's made it quite clear — in an October interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and again in a statement last week — that if he becomes chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee he won't allow any conservative Supreme Court justices to be confirmed. If this awful man is allowed to take the Senate Judiciary chairmanship, one of the main opportunities of Mr. Bush's second term will be lost. While there is hope that Spectre will not be allowed to take the Judiciary chairmanship, there is no hope that the media will learn the lesson of 2004. p>Among the legacy media, the mood is what it must have been inside the Kremlin the day after the Berlin Wall fell. Lost power, diminished influence, and the sinking feeling that a lot of people can now ignore you. The term “legacy media” is a precise one. In the computer biz, “legacy systems” are old, outdated, and must be replaced if their purpose is to be served. It's happening in the media, and the process is accelerating. The legacy media — CBS, the New York Times , and the rest — are rapidly losing their Red State market share to Fox , the Washington Times , and the Internet. Advertisers will cling to some of the legacy media because their audiences remain large. But their power to sway opinion has become so small that the migration of audiences to alternate media will soon deprive them of their financial strength. It's hard to keep your market share when you forfeit peoples' trust, when you look down on your audience, and when you hate a large number of your audience and the pols for whom they vote. p>Hate? Can we dare apply such a strong and unqualified term to the media? In short, yes. The legacy media — both here and abroad — hate Mr. Bush and all who support him. Throughout the campaign, they used terms of utter contempt to describe the President, accused him and his advisers of every form of deceit and dishonesty, and gave his opponent immunity from investigation and criticism that is unparalleled in American electoral history. (I hope the RNC polls on the effect of the media bias. My hunch is that it backfired big time, and incidents such Gunga Dan's “forged-but-accurate” docudrama helped Mr. Bush.) Now — having failed utterly to change America's mind — they're still at it. p>Exhibit 1 (as usual) is anti-testosterone NYT