I give all but one of the GOP candidates an “F” for last night’s performance.
The very premise of the Republican presidential debate, hosted by NBC/Politico and broadcast by corporate welfare queen MSNBC proves that conservatives don’t understand the power the media is trying to exert over the next election.
It is an insult to the house of Reagan that MSNBC would try to pass itself off as a fair news organization with the eight Republican candidates giving the sneering, snobby and snide enemy a certain imprimatur of legitimacy.
The only reason the GOP is in a fighting stance in the 2012 presidential election is the Tea Party. The alternative narrative-drivers at MSNBC have spent much of the last two-plus years trying to frame millions and millions of patriotic and concerned Americans as violent, racist knuckle-draggers.
To dignify those habitual and unaccountable slanderers by appearing on that stage shows that apparently these Republicans and daily MSNBC punching bags don’t comprehend the scope of the media problem.
Barack Obama was elected due to the work of the media in 2008. Barack Obama will not cross the finish line in 2012 without the help of that same media–with MSNBC leaning forward as it pushes their wildly unpopular President from behind.
For instance, the moderators dared Mitt Romney to distance himself from the Tea Party–after MSNBC and Politico spent years painting the Tea Party as toxic.
Yet MSNBC and Politico conspicuously refused to bring up the massive deficits that gave rise to the Tea Party in the first place, and which the majority of Americans rightfully fear.
(Ironically, given MSNBC’s repeated meme that the Tea Party is racist, the moderators patronizingly trotted out an Hispanic anchor to ask the candidates about immigration, then dismissed him when they moved on to other issues. This was classic MSNBC race-baiting against the GOP. Why didn’t they bring up a twelve-year old girl to ask the HPV question? Maybe I shouldn’t give them any ideas.)
Wednesday night’s moderators also treated Michele Bachmann as a second-tier candidate, despite her win in the Iowa straw poll, and tried to frame the debate as Romney v. Perry, before any GOP voters have even had a say. They are using the absolute power of media manipulation to tell GOP voters who their candidates are.
Afterwards, MSNBC’s exclusively leaning-forward “progressive” panel-Sharpton, Maddow, O’Donnell, Shultz, et. al.–a sluggers’ row of free-market media losers–sneeringly, snobbily and snidely framed the debate they’d just witnessed as a freak circus of unintelligible and retrograde imbeciles. All while the smartest man in the room, Al Sharpton, called Galileo, “Galeo.” It is amazing how these irony obsessed leftists can’t see how foolish they look.
Why would those candidates who seek to govern the free world put themselves in this utterly absurd position, entering an arena that is so unfairly structured to make them look extreme, ugly, stupid and crazy?
I give Newt Gingrich a “C” for pointing out the obvious when he chided the moderators over the rigged line of questioning. But we knew he was going to go after the media bias on display, because that’s his new line of attack, and a sign of life in his formerly moribund campaign.
2012 will be won or lost in the media trenches. General Electric (still partial owners of MSNBC, and its crony capitalist architect) has become the poster child for rent-seeking corporate welfare and tax dodging. Do Republicans not know that GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt is Obama’s close friend and corporate fig leaf as chair of the administration’s jobs panel? Why did none of the eight candidates shove this back in the aggressive moderators’ faces: that they are as complicit in the debt crisis–that they refused to bring up in the debate–as Obama himself?
MSNBC is the administration’s government-supported public relations operation, continually featuring news segments framed by the George Soros-funded and John Podesta-led Center for American Progress and Media Matters for America. The latter is partially funded by a labor movement that considers those that appeared on the Reagan stage “sons of bitches” and has declared “war” on them. MSNBC even injected an SEIU hit job ad during a debate break.
My message to these GOP candidates, while they’re licking their wounds this weekend, is this: you only have yourselves to blame.
When the New York Times and other media outlets push false “anti-science” and “racist” memes, intentionally distracting from Obama’s debt disaster and the jobs crisis mega-disaster–subjects that MSNBC did everything it could to steer clear of at the Reagan library–remember this: you willingly walked into this trap set by those willfully seeking your destruction.
Worse yet, MSNBC’s ratings would constitute a national disaster worthy of FEMA intervention. On Wednesday night, the Republican party invited millions of unsuspecting independent and Republican viewers into a venue that holds a majority of them in contempt.
Am I calling for a boycott? No. I’m not boycotting dog-fighting rings–I just wouldn’t ever entertain the thought of going to one. So the question is: Why would you? With all due respect, I have no choice but to question the judgment of those who would willingly subject themselves to a forum that puts them at the mercy of political opponents in the media who wield “objectivity” as a weapon–opponents who unsurprisingly used last night’s opportunity to craft narratives designed to help reelect Barack Obama.
In 2008, we watched John McCain’s campaign repeatedly play the role of Charlie Brown to the media’s Lucy. Last night was a demoralizing reminder that the next GOP standard-bearer will find him or herself on their back after the media has pulled away the ball.
Those in the Tea Party, who in 2010 made the conservative resurrection possible, have learned everything they need to know about the mainstream media, and will be less than enthusiastic about a candidate who hopes to achieve positive results by chumming up with those who actively seek their destruction.
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