Andrew Jackson: his soul goes marching on, tooGlenn Greenwald's a little weak on the Ron Paul candidacy, as Dave Neiwert points out in his latest post on the subject, Ron Paul and his followers Orcinus blog 11/08/07. (He and his co-blogger Sara Robinson also participate in the Comments thread there.) Paul's fans must hate Neiwert's articles on him, which he has conveniently linked at the bottom of that post.
But Greenwald is right on the mark about the exceptionally lazy, brainless conventional wisdom about how everything is "good for the Republicans!" In his post Democrats in big, big trouble because of the Great Iraq War - again Salon 11/09/07, he reviews the history of hopefulness on the part of Establishment pundits and reporters over Bush's Iraq policy, alongside the ever-declining levels of general public support. Despite the well-known susceptibility of us poor humans to demagoguery, the public attitude on the Iraq War is one reason I have such faith in Jacksonian democracy in the long term. Despite the off-the-tracks malfunction of the press, the cloud of phony claims and war propaganda from the administration and the Republican Party and the long wave of post-9/11 fear, two-thirds of the public see that the whole thing was a rip.
The Establishment press optimism about Cheney's War is like something out of 1984: The Comedy. Violence up in Iraq? That will rally people around the President and make it risky for the Democrats to criticize him, so it's good for the Republicans! Violence down in Iraq? That shows Bush's policy is working and makes it risky for the Democrats to criticize him, so it's good for the Republicans!
To quote the Daily Howler yet again, if we didn't have this press corps, you couldn't invent them.
Tags: ron paul, establishment press, glenn greenwald, mainstream media, mainstream press
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