The kind of press corps it takes for democracy to die

Let's give David Gergen some credit. He managed to say out loud that John McCain's whole Presidential campaign right now is based on pandering to white racist fears of Obama - though he didn't go quite so far as using the phrase "white racist": Gergen: McCain Using Code Words To Attack Obama As "Uppity" by Sam Stein Huffington Post 08/03/08.

But with an Establishment press this broken, this was practically an act of wild heresy on Gergen's part.

Meanwhile, MoDo puts out her latest Sunday embarrassment: Mr. Darcy Comes Courting New York Times 08/03/08. In which we learn that Obama grovels to Clinton supporters: Clinton supporters are whiners, and nuts; feminists like Hillary Clinton too much - I mean, those dang feminists didn't like Ludacris calling Clinton a "bitch"; Obama "the Lanky One" is an elitist and a girl; Clinton supporters are hypocritical b*****s (quoting the Murdochized Wall Street Journal as a source); some anonymous poster on some Yahoo! board somewhere says Obama is a "beanpole", a quote that MoDo found it needful to share with the world; Obama is "clever, haughty, reserved and fastidious", you know, like a sissy girl; Obama is a pretty boy with disgusting manners; Obama also suffers from pride and "hauteur" - he's sort of uppity, you might say; oh, and he's black, and blue collar white folks (not nice wealthy plutocrats) are prejudiced against him and besides, he "is surrounded by a miasma of ill-founded and mistaken premises" (though she's so busy writing about his weight that she never gets around to explaining what those may be).

Bob Somerby will probably have a field day with this column. He's always saying that our Big Pundits like MoDo work from novelistic scripts. And, in her increasingly demented way, she gives us her plot outline for the Presidential election:

So the novelistic tension of the 2008 race is this: Can Obama overcome his pride and Hyde Park hauteur and win America over?

Can America overcome its prejudice to elect the first black president? And can it move past its biases to figure out if Obama’s supposed conceit is really just the protective shield and defense mechanism of someone who grew up half white and half black, a perpetual outsider whose father deserted him and whose mother, while loving, sometimes did so as well?

Can Miss Bennet teach Mr. Darcy to let down his guard, be more sportive, and laugh at himself?

Maureen Dowd apparently has not the slightest concern over the disaster we know as the Iraq War, or the shredding of the Constitution, or the torture policy that the whole world outside our frat- and sorority-house national press corps knows is a screaming disgrace. Literally.

It's astonished that a piece of trashy nonsense like this, that would be lucky to make it past the editor of a rural weekly as a gossip column, is treated by the New York Times as high punditry.

The saddest part is that, in a world where David Broder is considered the Dean Of All The Pundits, it is high punditry.

Tags: david gergen, establishment press, mainstream media, mainstream press, maureen dowd