Posted on 03/02/2006 3:02:50 PM PST by MikeA
Some say Dick Cheney is toast. He's too hot to handle, throw him over the side if he won't drop himself into the waves. Don't look now, but that isn't water surrounding the Bush ship of state. It's gasoline.
Have you ever noticed how on a scale of one to 10, every untoward event in the life of the Bush presidency goes straight to a 10?
The Abu Ghraib photos? A 10 forever. Dick Cheney catching a hunting buddy with some birdshot? An instant 10. The Bush National Guard story? Total 10. How can it be that each downside event in this presidency greets the public at this one, screeching level of outrage and denunciation by the out-of-power party and a perpetually outraged media?
There was a time when what's been called news judgment would deem some stories a five or six and run them on page 14, or deeper in the newscast. Back then the Senate minority leader wouldn't bother to look up from his desk. Not with this presidency. Every downside event--large, small, in between--plays above the fold on the front page now. And when Dick Cheney accidentally pops Harry Whittington, old Harry Reid jumps up from his Senate leader's desk faster than a Nevada jack rabbit to announce, one more time, that this "is part of the secretive nature of this administration."
If it all seems more than a little tiresome, if you wish it would all just go away, well, maybe that's the point--their point. Induce swing voters to seek respite from the Bush experience.
Absent any fresh or positive message for voters...try winning by turning politics under the Republicans into an experience of unrelenting discomfort?
Why not make the public just want to throw in the towel on the Republican "experience"?
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
You can read the rest of this incredibly insightful piece on the Wall Street Journal's free site. You don't have to be a subscriber to go there:
http://www.freerepublic.com/perl/post_article?forum=news
No one has done a better job of nailing it as to what the Democrats and their media lapdogs are up to in coming up with the "Bush scandal" dejour to scream headlines with. Every week they come up with something new, even when it's old news such as this week a long ago released videotape of the president's meetings about Katrina that the ADMINISTRATION gave to the AP back on August 28th. And of course last week it was their misrepresentation of the ports deal, then prior to that the Cheney shooting, wiretaps before that and on and on.
For those of you who remember, the 2004 election year was exactly the same with week after week the media blowing some story way out of proportion and dialing it up to a 10 on the hysteria meter. They're just using the same playbook this time around. We can all hope it will begin to just bore the American public and they'll begin to just glaze over at the latest "Bush bash of the week club" offering from the MSM.
But it has the potential of tiring Americans on Bush and the Republicans as Henniger warns. Democrats saw how exhaustion over the Clinton presidency helped put Bush into the White House in 2000. They're hoping the same strategy will fatally wound him for what remains of his presidency and turn him into a premature lame duck. What's disgusting is that the Democrats have the news media's full cooperation in this unseemly strategy.
Whoops, I posted the wrong link to the entire article. Here it is: http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/dhenninger/?id=110007980
It's an adaptation of 'Say something often enough and people will believe it", which the dems use ALL the time.
I think that's exactly it. I mean, which of us isn't just sick of reading about non-stop crises. Some of us recall when Richard Nixon, near the end of his presidency, came down with phlebitis. Newsweek did a cover with a caption like "Now, Illness . . . " which translates, "Here's even more bad news about Tricky Dick." I think that's how most people finally took it: Nixon was unrelenting bad news.
We didn't have Free Reublic in 1989.
Repeat a lie often enough....
"We didn't have Free Reublic in 1989."
Let's hope you're right. But the MSM can still generate a lot of buzz.
Rampant abuse of freedoms leads inexorably to curtailment of those freedoms--in other words, a backlash to dictatorship. It's happened before in history. You can't have liberty without wisdom--and it seems our press is sorely lacking in sagacity.
I notice after turning my iPod up full volume in the subway, after a while, it ceases to be loud enough. I no longer experience the music as intensely. In fact, it wears me out after a while and I turn it off... yeah, there's an analogy here...go ahead, MSM, deafen us...hasten your demise.
I can tell you the MSM is certainly influencing my opinion. I never let a Bush bashing story on tv go by without telling my three sons that this is all MSM hogwash and propaganda, and the talking head are just mindless robots doing the bidding of the DNC.
That's certainly their intention, but it didn't work in 2000 or 2004.
Now, consider that the news media has fewer subscribers/viewers today than in 2000.
Likewise, consider that our labor unions are smaller today than in 2000 (e.g. the AFL-CIO has lost over 6 million members in the past half-dozen years).
So the Democrats are repeating their same plays, but with an even smaller core than they had back in 2000 (when they lost).
What makes them think that they can win now?!
It will backfire. The dems and msm will be perceived as the nattering nabobs of negativism that they have been for the last 40 years.
And they wear the people out.
that is, We didn't have Free Republic in 1989.
...and you can add ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, the NY Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, and their ilk across our once great Country.
IMO, the MSM thinks it's invulnerable... it got away with forging documents designed to affect the results of a presidential election... pretty heddy stuff. Nobody was brought up on charges... no one.
Until their offices are stormed by a disgusted citizenry... they will expand their efforts in denying Americans the truth.
Spul Chik strikx agn.
I only did that because...it was gnawing at me.
you said it -- plain and simple.
Same author's newest editorial in WSJ is great as well...
"Senator Yosemite Sam
Washington defines politics downward.
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, February 24, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST "
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