We have a received a "sign," perhaps a significant one. Michael Medved seems to be dumping on Michele Bachmann.
Michael Medved ran this in an item, yesterday--Friday, August 12th:
(GOP presidential candidate Tim) Pawlenty also made the fair point that Bachmann had achieved nothing in Congress and that for all her talk about a “titanium spine,” the major fights she emphasizes in her campaign boasts—against TARP, Obamacare, the debt ceiling deal—all proved to be losing battles. It didn’t help T-Paw, however, that Bachmann looked hurt, dazed, and almost deflated at his criticism; she never answered him with a persuasive citation of any legislative accomplishment. Instead, she offered outrageous lies about Pawlenty’s gubernatorial record—claiming he’d said the era of small government was over, or that he imposed cap and trade—that quickly provoked appropriate scolds from some of the truth-squadding crews that try to clean up the factual detritus that follows such events.
A lot of you probably don't know who Michael Medved is, despite his decades of effort directed at making you know who Michael Medved is. But you do know him if you regularly follow conservative broadcasting in your effort to find out "where rank-and-file conservative voters and activists get their latest opinion from." (I know a lot of you try to screen this stuff out of your day; I have to look at it to do "the continuing story of Michele Bachmann.")
(CONTINUE)
Michael Medved is currently a right wing pundit (I say currently, because he was formerly known as a movie critic, a less successful Siskel and Ebert type.) For quite some time, he's functioned as a less successful Sean Hannity/Anne Coulter, a sometime fill-in for Rush Limbaugh. A second-stringer conservative propagandist, but very well known to conservative talk radio fans, and he publishes the same kind of crap books that Coulter does.
Medved's also very much a proponent of the "Israel can do no wrong" school of the American right. And he has pass-key to America's conservative evangelical broadcasting, too. For different reasons, those outlets are also of the "Israel can do no wrong" school, as is Michele Bachmann.
But Medved's entree into the broadcasting of the American religious right allows him to spout views on all sorts of subjects there--it's not just opinions about Israel, national security, and the economy. For example, once I heard Medved talking about the animated feature film about penguins, "Happy Feet," with Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family and the Council for National Policy. During the broadcast, Medved and Dobson were persuading each other and their broadcast audience that this cartoon (about a little talking penguin who wanted to dance) was actually coded propaganda to further the gay agenda. Really! Look:
http://stillwatertribune.blogspot.com/...
Rush Limbaugh/Ann Coulter-style propaganda, regular access to the secular conservative broadcasting and conservative evangelical broadcasting, lockstep support for American military solutions to protect Israel, gay penguin panic promoted as a matter of national concern...You can see why Medved is such a "good fit" for the conservative evangelical right and a nuthouse conservative evangelical candidate like Michele Bachmann.
But there he is, yesterday, noting that she's a liar and no-achievement demagogue in the Daily Beast.
It's very tricky to depend on "analysis of the party line of movement conservatism" as an augury of the future. But it is true that pundits of the right (no matter where they publish or who they work for) tend to sing together, in concert, in response to some "insider" party line on what's going to happen. I think it's significant that Medved (given the Medved profile I described above) is willing to concede, publicly, that Bachmann's a liar. It lends credence to what liberals and progressives have been pointing out about her all along--and that's a big step for a little conservative. Given his record, I don't think Medved would do that unless he smelled a conservative "it's not Bachmann, it's Perry" trend.
Medved joins many media critics of different political persuasions in telling us that Perry was the real winner of the latest GOP contender debate--because Perry wasn't there. That suggest that someone has told this particular propagandist that "it's going to be Comrade Perry, not Comrade Bachmann." I don't know that that's true, but I know that Medved slavishly follows the conservative party line, year after year.
I don't think that Medved publicly identified Bachmann to the public as a liar because he read the New Yorker and Rolling Stone or saw that picture of her on the cover of Newsweek, this week. Medved (like other conservative propagandists) knew she was a nut, liar, and bigot all along. That's conservative media inside baseball--they know that Palin's unqualified, GWB is an eff-up, Cheney's a liar, McCain's too old and a late convert to the right, Bachmann's an extremist nut. They'll support the prospects of such leaders anyway, if they think it advances conservative hegemony. (For these guys--it's not about the United States and humanity, it's about career and conservative power.)
But I think that conservative leaders (who help to determine what Medved and other media wingers will say) may be concluding that "yeah, the word's getting out there on Bachmann, she may have a little too much tin foil hat baggage, after all--and this latest media stuff revealing that record could make her a liability."
Medved gets the word from above, and denounces accordingly--just like a little Pravda editor under the old Soviet regime. "Puff Perry, Comrade Medved, and call into question the errors of Comrade Bachmann." "Da." So this particular tidbit of Kremlinology may turn out to be significant.
And Comrade Joe Scarborough denounced her, too. Comrade Joe is notoriously unreliable from an ideological perspective if you are a right-winger--but he is still "in the Party" and he is on television. And he denounced Comrade Michele this week, too. (See the link below.)
We won't know if this is a real change in the party line until we see flips on Bachmann's desirability from Comrades Bill-O, Sean, and others. I don't expect total flips on her (I don't expect Comrade Hannity to yell at the TV camera: "Denounce the deviationism and irresponsibility of Comrade Bachmann!") But if they go soft on her--and begin to puff Comrade Perry instead... we'll know; the word has come down: "She's acquired too much media "she's a nut" baggage this year and is now "bad for the Party." Comrade Perry can secure the same base for us in a WH bid.")
I know many of you think that Bachmann on the WH ticket would be good news ("we can beat that nut.") It's not. Bachmann on the ticket means coat tails, coat tails, coat tails--in local, state, and down-ticket federal races. Because millions of conservative evangelical fans inspired by her presence on a WH ticket will also be voting in those races, too. And donating, and even volunteering. Even if her ticket loses, her presence on that ticket can raise the "degree of nuttiness" in American government.
LINK:
Medved...
http://www.thedailybeast.com/...
Joe Scarborough goes off on Bachmann...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...