Cross-post from DailyKos

There must really be a playbook.  Just like any football team, the Karl Rove Republican Party, seems to always run the same plays.  And they often work.

They work best when aimed at the men and women who report news or at least try, in their uneducated, simpleminded way, to do so.  There are very few giants in their business now, because the protection they once had from the commercial demands of their publishers or corporate owners of broadcast licenses is barely apparent today.  

Newspaper and magazine publishers see their business in free fall, the product of the same inability to look to the future that almost put the motion picture industry out business when television came around.  Broadcasters, protected from in the dog eat dog world of capitalism, at least in some respect, by FCC rules and regulations which took into account the limited outlets available, are now subject to the same pressures as other businesses and the homogenization that has resulted in precious few owners of virtually all the licenses there are has reduced the amount of freedom to report the news that once existed.  (Not always, of course.  Red scares and the realization that there are cheaper ways to make a ton of money have always made television and, to a lesser extent, radio less courageous that print journalism, but today is worse than ever before, in my 56 years old eyes.)

So the Republicans, faced with an unusual cacophony of reports suggesting that their vice presidential nominee was for the bridge to nowhere before she was for it, or that she once was associated with people who wanted Alaska to secede from the union, or challenge it being part of the United States, or that upon becoming Mayor she discussed banning books in the town library, or her adamant opposition to sex education, turn to what the playbook tells them is the best way to deal with this kind of journalism.  Attack “the media” and, without disputing the indisputable or answering the charges at all, simply accuse the reporters of being out to get them since they are not part of the same eastern establishment elite as controls the press and broadcasting.

It is a preposterous allegation, but in one teeny way, it strikes a responsive chord and since it does, the play always, always, always works.  The first time I saw them call this play was during their 1964 convention, where they booed Nelson Rockefeller off the podium, so as to recast their party as all there is left between the welfare state and out and out communism.  At the age of 12, I was barely cheered when John Chancellor, being pulled out of the convention hall by party security operatives, assured us that he had been promised bail money and sign off as “John Chancellor, NBC News, somewhere in custody” to which anchor David Brinkley wryly “chuckled, call when you can, John” making me feel less than that we had become overnight a totalitarian state.

(About eight years later I was sitting in car in Passaic, New Jersey waiting for a friend of mine to emerge from her parent’s house, when Fulton Lewis popped on my radio—I am not sure how.  Before I could change the station, I was nearly ready to drive to safety in Canada or somewhere where freedom still reigned and I was not expected to report subversive activities I might suspect to be brewing.)

Sorry for digression, but it is not completely off point.  The responsive chord that this blame reporters thing always strikes is because grunt reporters, not their bosses the publishers or corporate big wigs and often not even their bosses the editors, do, in the heart of hearts, tend toward candidates from the Democratic party.  Aware of the conflict that arises from this, and particularly after they are attacked for it, virtually every reporter compensates by reporting things, stupid as they may be, that hurt the Democratic party candidate, and withholding or downplaying things that would hurt the Republican candidate.  This, the reporters, editors, and certainly the publishers and corporate big wigs, think, is fair and balanced reporting.  In my heart I like Senator Obama, but in my work I will act as if I dislike him, and vice versa.

Hence, last night’s hysteria over a speech not hugely unlike Senator Goldwater’s 1964 “extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice” address that was roundly panned, and capping a night that made Pat Buchanan’s speech derived from the wise sayings in the Bundestag, circa 1938, seem tame.   Wolf Blitzer, by all accounts, was proclaiming Governor Palin as the face of a new and wonderful Republican Party and Chris Matthews, who, perhaps with an eye toward electoral politics from another platform than the one he now holds, had stopped his nightly pandering to the right, returned in full force, as if he had just heard the speech that would make us finally forget the Kennedy inaugural address.

Over and over it works (although there are cheery focus group reports that suggest it may not have moved the electorate so much, at least not last night).  But year after year, the play is totted out.  It goes like this:  The press reports so attack them for being biased.  Cowed, they will stop making your life miserable, overlook your day to day falsehoods and even promote your own slogans and tripe as if it were demonstrable fact.  Sen Kerry is a flip flopper, Sen Obama has offered nothing but slogans, and so on and so forth.

That is how we wound up with George W Bush and, how he was allowed to take us to war by falsehoods many in the press and who broadcast knew to be unprovable or outright lies.   Keep it up, guys, and we can keep sliding into oblivion, but Karl won’t hurt you any more.