Going back to the idea of having shock jocks and other friendly outlets host the
Republican debates, it’s instructive to see what Mr. Limbaugh has to say about it.
“Put together your own debates with your own moderators, whoever you want, and focus on real Republican issues in these debates rather than whether they’re going to do a Hillary Clinton miniseries or not,” Limbaugh said on his show last week. “In this current modern age, there’s no reason anymore to treat these mainstream media people as mainstream objective and non-aligned reporters.”
Without offering evidence, he speculated that ABC’s George Stephanopoulos coordinated with the Obama campaign to ask Romney about contraception during a primary debate so they could create “the war on women” narrative.
“Wherever you go outside of Fox, you are going up against the Democrat Party with people disguised as journalists,” said Limbaugh. “Why do it?”
Why is it that whenever the Republicans appear anywhere other than on hate radio or Fox News they feel like they’re not getting a fair shake?
It’s because anything outside of The Bubble feels unfamiliar and unsafe. People don’t nod in agreement when you say crazy, unsubstantiated things. They don’t swallow misleading or inaccurate statistics. They push back against demonstrable lies. They have a different, more accurate version of history. Sometimes, this makes you look dishonest, or even stupid.
Who wants to look dishonest and stupid? Who wants to feel dishonest and stupid?
Everything inside The Bubble is protected, padded, safe, and soft. Unlike Democrats, Republican lawmakers don’t have to worry about some Rachel Maddow figure querying them about drone strikes, the NSA, the treatment of Bradley Manning, or the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Adversarial journalism is almost non-existent inside the Bubble, except to enforce adherence to Borg orthodoxy.
Once you step outside of The Bubble, you are going up against the uninitiated. These are people who haven’t marinated their brains in Glenn Beck’s conspiracy theories or the sly lies of Charles Krauthammer. They don’t understand what you’re talking about or why you could possibly think what you’re saying is true. Once you go outside of Fox, as Rush says, you are going up against the enemy. They are Democrats disguised as journalists because they don’t accept your version of reality.
Even though he doesn’t know it and he phrases it differently, Jim Bopp agrees with me:
“There are practical, feasible ways for the RNC to control the debate schedule,” said Jim Bopp of Indiana, a former chair of the party’s committee on debates and now special counsel to the RNC. “The debates should be viewed as a job interview, not an opportunity to score political points. The problem is that liberals in the media simply have a different agenda than the Republican Party does in terms of selecting its nominee. They’re not sympathetic to the candidates.”
The problem is that the journalists are not sympathetic to the candidates, but why is that? Is it because all their questions are answered with rote talking points that are somewhere between unresponsive and downright dishonest?
It’s because of that, and because those outside of The Bubble can never understand what goes on within it.
Until more voters have marinated their brains in The Bubble than have not, this strategy will remain a loser.
Fine, go ahead, Republicans. Hide in your Happy Place. Maybe the Republican candidates can all put their hair in pig tails, carry oversized lollipops, dress in polka-dot dresses, and ride tricycles.
Meanwhile, the Democratic candidates should all go on the record imploring Fox/Newsmax to host a Democratic debate. “They’re not just scared of Hillary; they’re scared of Anderson Cooper!”
Of course they’re scared of Anderson Cooper. Teh Gay is an airborne infection, right?
No matter how much they try to hide their unpopular positions, or gloss over the xenophobic tinge of their ideas, ultimately their candidate will have to attend debates moderated by “journalists” and will be wholly unprepared to answer “hostile’ questions.
I mean, honestly they sound like a bunch of whiny children.
And the RNC just unanimously voted to bar NBC and CNN from any GOP debates.
Idiots.
You are not understanding it as strategy, BooMan. The complaint about the mainstream media is a sucker-punch to corporations that own them to get their owners to drag them to cover the rightwing nonsense.
There is a bubble, a real media bubble. It is the large swath of rural and small town areas in the US in which the right-wing talkers are the only things on the radio besides the entrepreneurial preachers. And this kind of bias talk everywhere on the radio in these areas is what shuts their minds to everything but Fox on the TV.
It is a sophisticated and lucrative media strategy that has been running for a quarter century and has measurably change attitudes in a large part of the non-urban areas of the country and through migration spilled into urban and suburban areas. It is a WalMart-like strategy of media dominance by marching from the rural to the urban.
And by focusing on it as psychological comedy, Democrats and progressives still manage not to deal with its power.
It might be a loser nationally, but it has picked off state after state. And paralyzed Congress. Your triumphalism is beginning to lead you into hubris. They are not beaten yet. And they are still dangerous.
All true, but I think the point here is that it appears to be breaking down. The area of overlap between the bubble and observable reality is getting smaller and smaller, so it stands to reason that it’s going to be harder and harder to sustain all these illusions.
What looks like triumphalism may actually be strategizing. You see where Republican thinking has degenerated to the point where they’ve forgotten that the general election is more important than the primary, and you think about ways to exploit that. You can’t seize an advantage unless you recognize it.
Of course I won’t deny that I find the psychological comedy pretty amazing. It’s both fascinating and deeply disturbing to watch what happens when several tens of millions of people lose all contact with reality.
Seems to me like the wishful thinking that “They’d never elect Richard Nixon.” “They’d never elect Ronald Reagan.” “They’d never elect George W. Bush” (well, in fact they didn’t but he was still President for 8 years) and so on. In 40 years, the fever has gotten hotter but it’s not yet broken. And I am arguing that there is a structural reason for that. A lot of folks are completely unaware of what is going on and not likely to be anytime soon. Meanwhile locality after locality and state after state are being locked into political minority rule. And no matter how many advertisers drop Rush, he’s still on the air.
Look, I’m not saying the fever has broken, but it isn’t much of an argument to say it will never break because it hasn’t broken yet. And of course there are structural reasons for all this, but the last 40 years have been marked by some pretty significant changes in all kinds of different structures. For instance, the dominance of conservative talkers on AM radio is less relevant now that we have the Internet.
As for wishful thinking, take another look at your examples–all presidential candidates. BooMan frequently argues that there are structural reasons why it will be extremely difficult for any Republican to be elected president for some time to come, so if he’s right we’ve already moved at least a step or two beyond wishful thinking in the presidential category.
Next comes Congress, of course, but you’ll notice that I didn’t express any certainty about the Democrats retaking the House, for instance. But I don’t think it’s wishful thinking to believe the Democrats could win the House some time in the next few election cycles. If it is, why even bother?
The thing is, it’s not a comedy at all to the 150 million or so people who now live in states governed by lunatics. These people are measurably destroying lives, and meanwhile the national Democratic Party, having only briefly dabbled in anything resembling a 50-state strategy, is in utter disarray in a lot of those states.
TD is correct. Drive around Southern Idaho, or central Kansas, or Appalachian Kentucky on a midday and scan the AM dial. What you will find is a dozen stations broadcasting Rush, a few more doing either local wannabes or national alternatives like Levin, Hannity, or Huckabee, and…nothing else. At all. Except the Christian stations, and they have their own stable of biblically paranoid wingnut hate talkers.
I’m traveling to rural Georgia next week to visit my mother, who thinks I’m a “man of few words.” Of course, I worked in radio for many years and I talk just fine, thanks, but I really don’t have anything I can say when everyone else in the room is marinated in this shit. Challenging it is pointless – they’ve been marinated now for at least a quarter-century, and no combination of facts or reality can touch it.
One of my closest long-time friends in Georgia is very bright, an attorney whose heart is in the right place and who primarily works with domestic violence victims. She’s also home-schooling her kids to make sure they understand that humans lived with dinosaurs 6000 years ago and that there’s no such thing as separation of church and state. She didn’t believe any of this 20 years ago. She does now, because everyone around her does, too. And two of her kids are now old enough to be in college. They’re doing great – in the Christian school they chose that is accredited even though it reinforces all this mythological crap as “fact.”
And the tens of millions of people who think this way know that you find them amusing and deluded and pathetic, and they hate you for it.
Thank you. Too many people enjoy poking fun at the folks entrapped in these areas instead of understanding that it’s like living behind an Iron Curtain of propaganda. And the socialization and social pressure that has always forced conformity in the South (during slavery and segregation) continues to be used to force conformity. And ostracism and excommunication are social forms that are still used to punish those who deviate from the social line. The difference is that Rush and friends aligned with politicized preachers maintain the social pressure through a perversion of the evangelistic idea of “witnessing to truth”.
I have no trouble believing that, and I hope you don’t think my comment is in any way at odds with what you’re saying. I didn’t intend anything regional at all. Since I live in California, most of the people I know who watch Fox and listen to Rush Limbaugh are also Californians.
Okay, Tarheel, you’ve opened up a very interesting discussion here about the schism between national and local. On the national front, the comedic ridicule of these ridiculously comic right-wingers is crucial to the current democratic dominance of the presidency. During the Reagan/Bush/Bush era the GOP was winning the comedy war. Limbaugh succeeded in making fun of “political correctness” while the democrats kept nominating humorless patsies like Dukakis and Mondale. Now Stewart, Colbert, Fallon, Leno, and Obama himself for that matter, have inverted the comedy curve with a vengeance. GOP-moderated debates will produce increasingly hilarious reels of comedy gold to be mined by not only by comedians but faux-seriously gawked at by the jilted corporate media outlets as well. Akin, Mourdoch, Angle, O’Donnell et al were brought down by comedy on one side and real outrage on the other. Combined with demographics, the GOP will be shut out of consideration for the White House and, as long as they keep getting more extreme, the senate. Recent cycles have shown that a red state senate candidate can’t be nearly as extreme as a red district congressperson. It follows that governor’s mansions should also start flipping back, but state legislatures may get even more extreme.
But your point – which I can’t dispute and which is scary – is that their angry, stupid minority is growing and getting angrier. So where does this lead? Civil war? It’s a mess, but I think Booman is not deluded to say that – diabolical plan or no diabolical plan – the GOP is screwing itself nationally. One comment talks about the presumably intelligent Georgian home schooler who has been convinced by peer-pressure to take religious superstition literally. But with so much media hitting her from the other side, there’s got to be a tipping point. The use of the n-word, lynching, and many forms of segregation have been beaten back in the south by societal consent that it’s evil, as confirmed by movies, television and the media at large. Discrimination against women and gays is also moving rapidly in that direction. I don’t know that Limbaugh is going to hold his angry rural base together all that much longer.
Good points. What I see is that more people are operating in a narrow-casting universe that does not disturb their bubble are rarely get outside of that bubble. The golden age of broadcasting was when the “media at large” had the effect of delegitimizing racism. That common mass broadcast environment no longer exists, and you have the likes of Hannity and O’Reilly providing excuses for the most over racism and bigotry. And that’s the polite end of what people are exposing themselves to.
But what is holding the balance most of all is the network of churches that believe in a Christianized nation and are the main local forces behind the peer pressure. That holds the non-angry rural base together for bad policy. Because these churches are very much opposed to the “social gospel” that government can do anything.
As for whether it holds together much longer, I hope that you and BooMan are right, but I don’t see many cracks yet. Not here and not in the Midwest.
The feeders for this rage are many. And with so many conduits for it here in the Midwest, I think anyone would be naive to believe it is in the throes of death. I don’t believe this is something that is just going to, one day, implode on itself. It is going to die a very slow and painful death, with an unimaginably huge amount of collateral damage.
I see the same next door in Indiana, where it’s difficult to impossible to even recruit someone willing to run against the entrenched repub legislators in some rural districts.
Our county offices are staffed 100% by Republicans. We haven’t had a Democrat in a county level office for over 25 years. No one who has run has even come close. They rarely get out of the 30-35% range. There are some Dems scattered here and there on boards and a few township trustees. We have had a couple of Mayors in small burgs. That is the extent of it.
Exactly correct. I am one of those 150 million. And I don’t find it at all funny. There really are areas where you are risking physical harm by simply expressing Democratic principles and standing up for them. If one lives in a safely Democratic or liberal enclave, it is hard to wrap your mind around this. Yes, hate is not too strong a word to use. I have had it directed at me. I have seen the look in other men’s eyes when I know they really, really want to just punch me in the face; simply because of my existence in “their world”. It is absolutely mind-blowing to me.
It used to be that people were ignorant because they were isolated; cut off. Now, they’re ignorant because they’re tuned in.
Hang on, what tens of millions of people are we talking about here? We’ve got plenty of them in California, for instance, so I don’t see how it’s a slur on Georgia to say that Fox viewers swallow a bunch of lies. I’ve got a cousin in Atlanta myself, and I certainly don’t hold it against her that her state is governed by lunatics. It’s two different things.
I live here and that’s what frightening to me. The religious private schools and home schooling and watching the GOP controlling the levers of power at the state level, undermining the public schools (more and more populated solely by minorities, by underfunding and diverting monies to charter schools. It’s set us back 3 generations. Indeed, my grandparents (and I’m one) were more open minded than most of the parents I see around me.
If we ever needed to get in the trenches and fight, now is the time. We need a DNC chair who’s not also a Congressperson. We need someone who can devote her or his entire energies on rebuilding the Democratic party in the red states. Starting in mine, preferably.
Has quantum physics progressed to the point where we can make the Republicans their own pocket universe where they can go and stop fucking up our reality? That would seem to be a mutually satisfactory solution, since they’re obviously pretty fed up with the way reality keeps puncturing their bubble.
They have basically the same idea. They call it “The Rapture.”
It seems largely right to me, except the assumption of pushback from mainstream media figures, who too often just go along with the crazy in the interest of “balance.”
You’re right. Bopp’s whining rings hollow specifically because “the media” is owned by right-wing corporations. Notice the talk about Fluffyhead? He might get fired, or shuffled around, because of poor ratings, not because he’s a blithering idiot asshat.
My first thought was the obvious – that this makes no sense for the GOP. Then after digging into it for a while it became apparent why they are doing it. To start with, two observations:
First, as Boo notes the GOP commentators have quickly coalesced around the idea of having only right wing commentors asking debate questions.
Second, the same GOP commentators are strangely silent about how Fox and other right wing debate hosts actively kneecapped Ron Paul’s campaign by giving him the silent treatment during the primary debates. Apparently they see this as not a problem.
The net result is that the GOP are essentially handing over primary candidate selection to leading right wing news media – the same news media that gives red meat propaganda to the proles while promoting the interests of their nobility. The key is to understand that those selected to be debate hosts will be strongly loyal to the GOP nobility. In this way the GOP primary process will be safeguarded from populist candidates like Ron Paul as well as from too-crazy-to-win-the-general-election candidates like Santorum and Gingrich. The GOP elders are doing this to make sure that they keep getting squishy candidates like McCain and Romney who can pretend to be mainstream for the general election but have enough conservative cred to get the base to the polls. Moreover it allows the GOP elders to take steps to prevent their anointed candidate from having to make some ridiculous statements in primary debates (i.e. don’t believe in evolution) that will haunt them in the general.
So far so good, for the GOP elders. Combine that with laws designed to prevent large numbers of Democrats from voting and 2016 is doable.
The problem for the GOP is twofold. First, the lesser problem is that this means that the GOP candidate won’t have been “battle-tested” in the primary and won’t have standard answers ready for mainstream questions when the general election campaign is underway. Likely not a big problem – the mainstream press is pretty useless for asking tough questions to begin with and Romney showed that a lot of practice and training can result in media-friendly general election debate performances.
But the second problem is extremely worrisome and severe – for the GOP and the world. This means that the GOP elders are coalescing around a strategy that continues to encourage sheer craziness in their base. Perhaps the elders have reviewed the options and figure that they can’t put pandora back in the box so they’ll let the base stay crazy and work with that. Or worse – and I suspect this is the real story – the elders themselves now believe most of the crazy so don’t see it as a problem. I suspect few really think Obama was born in Kenya or that he’s a Muslim – the GOP nobility unlike their proletarians generally have international travel experience and are too worldly to fall for those basic prejudices. BUT, they believe perfectly in austerity theory, in climate-scientists-are-lying, in social-programs-caused-the-2008-crash, in social-security-is-a-pyramid-scheme and in universal-health-care-caused-the-european-economic-crisis. So, likely they actually believe probably 85-90% of the crazy stuff Rush says so they don’t see the need to stop the crazy thinking.
And since the GOP elders include most of the top non-politician leaders of the US this is a very scary thing.
You’re working way too hard to make something stupid seem logical. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Actually the first draft of that post was shorter and essentially agreeing with the premise that this was just plain stupid by the GOP. But as I thought through the consequences I revised my opinion.
The net result is that the GOP are essentially handing over primary candidate selection to leading right wing news media – the same news media that gives red meat propaganda to the proles while promoting the interests of their nobility.
Not true. The crazy candidates split the vote in ’08 and ’12. If the crazies all agreed to back one candidate then Willard or Cranky McSame would have been toast. And it’s why Christie will likely win the nomination in ’16, because Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and others will likely split the bat guano insane vote.
True, the crazies did split the insane teavangelical vote in 2012, throwing the nomination to Romney. It helped, of course, that none of the crazy candidates could sustain polling momentum for more than a few weeks, thus none could amass much in the way of delegates. It also helped that the GOP primaries are generally winner-of-plurality-takes-all.
However, the problem for the GOP elders is that this scenario requires that there be one apparently-rational candidate and a bunch of crazies to split the votes. First, given current trends that proposition is at best dicey – you can’t be sure that the next apparently-rational candidate will get enough votes even in that situation. Second, even in that scenario you have a bigger problem of no backup if the anointed one has to step down. Imagine in 2012 Romney having, say, a major stroke in June after the primaries but before selecting a VP. In that case they go into the convention with Santorum, Gingrich, and perhaps Ron Paul fighting for the Romney delegates. Basically, after Romney there was no viable candidate for the general election.
If you’re one of the GOP nobility you want a system that assures you’ll get a candidate you like and that has a good backup plan. That means you have to take the selection out of the hands of the proles.
And by the way, I know Chris Christie is the apparent frontrunner now and he’s clearly being groomed for that role. He definitely comes across as sane relative to the rest of the field, all of whom seem to have decided to run to the right of Michelle Bachman. And I know that in recent tradition the GOP nominee is set up as the heir apparent at least 3 years in advance. But I also know that the most successful GOP candidates are those who try to appear moderate and “above the fray”, which Chris Christie definitely does not no matter how many man-hugs he gets from Obama. Which is why I think the GOP nominee is someone who isn’t in the race yet – someone who has the political and funding pull to enter the race in 2015 and quickly take over the front runner role. I’m referring, of course, to Jeb.
I think you nailed it there. The GOP elders live in a bubble of their own. Their personal wealth insulates them from the real world; likewise the financial economy that supports them is insulated from the real economy. (Wall Street thinks the recession is over even if no one else does.) Unlike the proles they have the power to turn their out-of-touch beliefs into policy that affects all of us.
This is not some genius strategy by the GOP. It’s quite simply idiotic. This strategy will not prevent candidates from ripping each other to shreds. It might, in fact, promote it. It will not hold the base in check. It will excite them. It won’t prevent GOP candidates from making insane comments; it will make such comments more likely. Most important, it will make it even more impossible than it already is to reform the party or nominate a moderate conservative. This is the GOP in a death spiral, chasing its surviving voters into the grace.
For the sake of America, I hope so.
I’m still stuck on Rush’s assertion that Stephanopoulos created the “War on Women” meme. That would date it to about a year ago, when it really took off a couple of years ago when no-exceptions-for-rape-or-incest bills first started getting serious traction, followed, of course, by the no-free-speech-for-doctors laws, the forced “listen to your unborn child’s heartbeat” laws, and eventually the state-mandated rape laws, stonewalling Lily Ledbetter and domestic violence laws, and so on. It’s bad enough to pretend the WoW is a substance-free media ploy by Democrats, which is virtually every GOP lawmaker’s claim. But at least they could get the timeline right.
Who am I kidding? One of the coolest things about living in their Alternate Universe is that it suspends all rules of time and space. Did you know Stephanopoulos rode to that debate on a dinosaur? It’s true – I read it in WorldNetDaily!
Would the shut-out media outlets have the fortitude to react to being shut out? As in not even report that the debate(s) happened? Or anything regarding the Republican primary? Or, in an ideal world, take a microscope to each candidate’s history, platform, and public pronouncements and tease out the logical implications if they’re elected president?
Or will they pull yet another Mr. Coach Kline?
The media will report on the crazy stuff the GOP says in its bubble debates for one reason – ratings. There is even more money to be made providing entertainment to the left as there is to be made from further stirring up right.
more like “Going out of the Shell” 🙂 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mokoolapps.horsespuzzles