The American Spectator

A Surge of Confidence

WASHINGTON

In this election year, “change” has been the catnip of the liberals. It renders them blissful. Change will put an end to the dominance of American politics by the “Washington insiders.”

And the instrumentality of that “change” will be a first-term senator of unassailable probity, Senator Barack H. Obama, who curiously enough began his career a decade ago in Chicago as a cog in the political machine of Mayor Richard Daley. To the critics’ charges that the Prophet Obama is short on experience his supporters respond that he has enormous experience, which is obviously untrue. Also he has chosen as his running mate Senator Joe Biden, a six-term Washington insider, who is a rough-and-tough Irish guy from the hell’s kitchen of Scranton, Pennsylvania, which is about the first time that the public has heard that stretcher.

Yet these palpably absurd claims have taken on the dimension of commonplace truth in the political media. A presidential candidate running on the claim that he is new to the dirty game of politics can claim he is sufficiently experienced to hold the highest office in the land. What is more, he can claim that he is unencumbered by Washington insiders, while boasting of his Washington insider running mate, whose record, by the way, as an airhead and occasional plagiarist is apparently going to be officially overlooked. All these contradictions trouble not at all, that institution columnist Tony Blankley calls the mainstream moron media. What does trouble the morons is Senator John McCain’s choice of a running mate.

The liberals’ complaint is that she, Governor Sarah Palin, is inexperienced. Further, with five children—one a pregnant teenager, another a child with Down’s syndrome—she has too many domestic responsibilities to be in government. She also has a son who is going off to war, and frankly I am curious as to how this young man will be held against her.

Now you might recall that of the last five presidents four became presidents after serving as governors. Until just the other day, Washington’s political experts would tell you that it has been a governor’s mansion, not the United States Senate, that has served as the training ground of the modern president. Further, you might recall that feminists were exhorting their sisters to “have it all.” Have a career and a family. Domestic chores were to be shared with one’s husband. Governor Palin has a husband. So why can she not serve as vice president? Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro had children and actually got to be a Washington insider before running for vice president. The feminists never ordered her back to the house and hearth. Well, maybe the problem for Governor Palin is that troubling matter raised by the investigative reporters of the New York Times, to wit, her husband was arrested on a DUI charge 22 years ago. If any of you ever runs for public office, be sure you know your spouse’s police record going back, presumably, to the age of reason—that would be age seven.

There is a huge whiff of hypocrisy here. That it comes from practically every outlet of media should remind us of our insistence at The American Spectator that so polluted with liberal politics is the political culture that it is rightly termed a Kultursmog. The workings of the smog have rarely been as visible as in the aftermath of Senator McCain’s selection of Governor Palin to be his running mate. She, with her political career and lifestyle values, is a perfect blend of feminism and traditional womanhood. Yet, with astonishing speed, she is being depicted in the mainstream moron media as an unacceptable vice presidential candidate. The salient charge is that she lacks experience, though one would have to be pretty thick not to notice that she has more experience in governing than the Democrats’ supposedly experienced yet somehow innocent and untried presidential candidate.

Also being pumped into the Kultursmog is the canard that McCain showed bad judgment and haste in choosing the governor of Alaska. Actually McCain’s campaign reveals plenty of evidence that its seasoned political operators researched her carefully and the media’s supposed exposés were no surprise to anyone but the morons. As for McCain’s judgment, this is the guy who, in late 2006 when the roof was falling in on us in Iraq, sent President George W. Bush a three-page letter arguing for what has come to be called “the surge.” With years of military experience (some of it firsthand) behind him, and having read recently scholarly reports on conditions in Iraq, McCain argued that an additional 30,000 troops would create the security to allow a political solution.

Almost everyone was against McCain, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, some field commanders, the Iraq Study Group, members of the mainstream moron media, and the Prophet Obama. Now we know McCain, the agent of change and bedeviler of Washington insiders, was right. Alas, there is no applause in the Kultursmog.

The Mainstream Moron Media

WASHINGTON

I believe I made a mistake when I decided not to attend the Democratic National Convention. The consequence of that decision has been that I have had to watch its highlights on national television. There the media gaggle, with few exceptions, has plangently repeated— tediously and cheerlessly— many things that I know to be untrue.

The preeminent untruth resounding across the airways is that the Clintons are political geniuses. They are to electioneering what Ludwig van Beethoven was to the piccolo, or Slobodan Milosevic was to ethnic cleansing, to wit, consummate artists. Since the early 1990s I have sedulously researched the Clintons’ life and work. My finding is that they are mediocrities in all things political, save one: huckstering. Moreover, they are accomplished hucksters solely because the media are composed of credulous ignoramuses. Do you think I am being ungentlemanly? I am not alone. In late August, after but two days of watching the media’s coverage of the looming Democratic Convention, columnist Tony Blankley, a gentleman to the utmost, coined the term “the mainstream moron media.” My guess is that Blankley was perfectly serene when he typed out that line. Most probably he was wearing an immaculately starched English shirt. Possibly he was wearing a tie and almost certainly he had his pants on. But really, after two days of the media’s homogenized mush, enough is enough. “When I turned the TV on,” Blankley wrote at the outset of the convention coverage, “the political cable news shows were filled with liberal pundits, liberal anchors, liberal guest historians, liberal weather gals and guys, liberal news-you-can-use chicks, liberal political ‘strategists’ (i.e., out-of-work Democratic National Committee gofers).” Practically everything they droned on about was stupid. Blankley was particularly critical of the blah, blah, blah that followed the Prophet Obama’s choice of Senator Joe Biden as his running mate in their Campaign for Change. Joe is a minor Washington monument, completely with stone head. He has been a senator for 36 years. He may have been a congressional page during the administration of Grover Cleveland. Yet, the mainstream moron media were in the raptures over the Prophet’s bold choice.

Of course, I share Blankley’s derision for the Biden edition of the Media Follies, but it is their ongoing enthusiasm for the Clintons that strikes me as most derisible. Hillary just lost a presidential bid considered for months to have been “inevitable” (though I always had my doubts, as you will recall), and she lost to a political neophyte, a neighborhood organizer from Chicago. By the end of the first month of the primaries, she had blown through $100 million. She was doomed by February 5. During her extended soap opera she was personally indecisive (as was predictable), presided over a chaotic and embittered staff (again, predictable), and had no control of her reckless husband (stupendously predictable), who, contrary to the mainstream moron media, has almost never been an asset for any candidate he supported. In 2004 he campaigned for 14 candidates, 12 of whom lost—but I repeat myself.

Senator Clinton never really had much of a chance, though you will never hear this from the mainstream moron media. Her negatives were always above 40 percent. They were at 48 percent when I last reported on them. No candidate has ever won the nomination with such high negatives. Nor has a candidate won the nomination with such a string of scandals appearing on the public record. Think of her missing Whitewater billing records, her cattle futures skullduggery, Filegate, Travelgate, claims by the last Independent Counsel that she was “less than truthful” under oath, the trashing of the White House as she left in January 2001, the missing White House property she had to return or make restitution on, the last-minute presidential pardons and her brothers’ role in them.

For that matter, think of the early stages of her campaign this year: repeated dirty tricks against Obama, dubious campaign contributions from shadowy Chinese sources, her husband ham-fistedly raising questions of race. Now there is all this residual animosity against the nominee who won fairly, Senator Barack Obama. Huckster that she is, Hillary played to her supporters’ basest instincts, the women of the fevered brow (feminists), the men of the slightly rubicund neck (hicks). My Democratic friends, you will all be better off when these shameless opportunists are in retirement.