Had the media done its job, the blogosphere would be nothing more than a big, wonky chat room.
The Beltway press should have remembered that politics is their subject, not their profession.
The Washington press corps, feared by successive administrations, are now despised -- ugly pets to be kicked into the back room when company shows up.
It is no wonder the administration issues platitudes and lies with casual ease. No one in the press stopped them for six years, and it's not for certain that the new Congress can, either.
Worse, now too many in the media are long since too compromised to back down; keeping to the talking points is now no longer easy, but necessary for their reputations, their careers and, perhaps for some, even their need to retain legal counsel.
It would have been so much better for everyone, for the media to have just done its job. However, perhaps I am being naive. Perhaps we all were. Perhaps, in truth, the media did its job, as the media has done its job in numerous 20th century situations, where what the government said, what the ruling party said, and what the press said were harmonious.
But that's not patriotism. That's tyranny, no matter what you call it, it's bad, it's not America, and it's good to see that Americans, true and blue, are remembering their voices, and making their wishes heard, whether the sad, beaten, compromised and despised media covers the renaissance or not.
UPDATE: BONUS Diary!
I had intended to revisit one of my first DKOS diaries, The End of the Age of Reason, by itself. However, given the relevance of the topic at hand, here you go.
This is what the future looked like it was going to be three years ago to me. How's my driving?
The Enlightenment has come and gone.
Welcome to the Diminishment.
Empiricism as the fundamental epistemology, the validator of knowledge, the means of proviing what is true and what is false, is out the door.
We are being dragged back to impulse, to ecstatic decisionmaking, liberated from personal responsibility for our judgments and actions by immersion in an all-knowing, all-encompassing Party.
The Nazis introduced this, and destroyed not only millions of lives but two centuries of some of the best intellectual discourse the world had witnessed since the Age of Pericles.
The Republicans are doing the same. Since their ideology, a direct descendant of the original fundamentalist reaction against science and the Enlightenment, cannot bear the scrutiny of reason, reason has been handed a fatwa by the right. Simply put, for the right to lie, reason must die.
The consequence has been the bifurcation of the country into two camps, one armed with reason, the other with ignorance.
We are faced with the prospect of an America that is ruled not only by people who do not know the facts, but do not care to know them, and do not care to know how to find them if they ever do change their mind.
This movement, this accursed plot, this Ignorance, is handing the keys to world dominance over to our enemies, all so that an especially selfish, self-centered, self-incognizant faction can feel better about itself.
Unstopped, they will harm themselves and take the rest of the world down with them.
Part of the brazen character of their actions, the crimes grand and petit that are the texture of Republicanism in this day and age, is a reflection of the inability of modern-era Republicans to reflect.
They do wrong, because they simply cannot envisage that it is wrong when it is themselves who are doing it, or wrong when someone with whom they share affinity is perpetrating such acts as blatant lying, affirmation of killing as its own unqualified good, impoverishment of Americans, etc.
It truly escapes their awareness that these acts, reprehensible out of context or in association with persons outside the fold, are wrong when fellow-travellers do them.
Ignorance allows this; it is the selective blanket that allows the barbarian to kill with relish, decry killing by others as suspect, and swear vengeance when bereaved by the killing of kinsmen.
The idea that bloodshed is morally problematic, for the reason that it is bloodshed, is not only impossible to receive -- it is offensive to hear the concept uttered.
Tell me I am wrong.
I wish that were the case.
We are seeing the willful flight to barbarism by a significant portion of the American popoulation, a catastrophic breakdown of civic values as a response to...overstimulus of civic values.
There is always the possibility that a dynamic society will progress so far that is begins to leave much of its own membership behind.
I am of the opinion that this has indeed occurred, and we are seeing the full-blown reaction to this phenomenon.
It has happened before in modernity; the clearest example being the rise of the Third Reich in Germany.
The good news is that enough Americans can see the danger (I pray) to slap some electoral sense into our countrymen.
And if not by the ballot, we must slap some sense into them anyhow.
Somehow we must make our brethren on the right see the danger of refusing to concede anything to reality that is against the party agenda.
In lieu of that, we must fortify our own minds and those of as many of our countrymen as we can, and save as much of the legacy of power, principle, prosperity and prestige bestowed upon us by our forebears as we can. If possible, roll back the onslaught of ignorant darkness, If necessary, build strongholds of learning and enlightenment to wait out the storm. In extremis, send the best works and seed of our civilization into exile.
This is the onset of the end of the world if we fail.
The line must be drawn here.
We must succeed -- for our brethren on the right as much as for ourselves.