I’ve been losing weight pretty fast lately. It may be in part due to the wise counsel of my doctor (who did, after all, vote for me when I ran for local office last year), but I think it’s also because Big Media is up to its old tricks again. They’re making it hard for me to keep anything down.
Remember four years ago when the dogpack journalists covering the presidential campaigns were so casually referring to George Bush as the candidate of the “extreme right”—mainly because he hadn’t barred the doors at the convention to keep Pat Buchanan away from the microphone? Well, now they’re referring to Bob Dole as being a creature of the “far right.“ Better duck—here comes lunch!
As near as I can tell, Dole’s “far right” credentials—in the eyes of Big Media—stem from the fact that he wants to prevent Bill Clinton from being re-elected. Clearly the sort of attitude one would only expect of a wild-eyed, apocalyptic “militia” type, right? Worse still, Dole’s been a Republican all during his political career, never having jumped ship over, say, Joe McCarthy or Barry Goldwater or Watergate or Ronald Reagan. Big Media loves Republicans who go over the rail at the first mention of steering the nation even a tenth of a degree less to the left, and Dole’s never done it—must be a closet Nazi at heart, right?
Next comes the fact that he once earned his keep by prosecuting criminals—trying to punish victims of society for the things every enlightened citizen of the world knows their social environment forces them to do! How heartless! (I have to admit to some surprise at learning of this—how much time could he have had for a career before going into the Senate back around 1583?) Anyone who can not only blame individuals for their misdeeds, but try to persuade poor, ignorant jurors to do the same, must be somewhere away to the right of Heinrich Himmler!
So what if Dole’s now leaving everybody with the impression that he would rather veto than sign bills repealing the unconstitutional Brady Law and the downright silly Ugly Guns ban? So what if he took a leading role in getting Reagan and Bush to go along with three consecutive “largest peacetime tax increases in history”? (Didn’t either Reagan or Bush ever hear of the old saying, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me”? Maybe it should be amended: “...and if you fool me a third time, haul me away in a straitjacket.“) So what if Dole seeks to gut the portions of the Republican platform that have made Christian conservatives one of the party’s most valuable assets both on, and before, Election Day? So what if he talks about getting “blame” for tax cuts instead of taking credit for them? These things are all just simple, sensible positions, Big Media tells itself, and Dole may be a jackbooted crypto-fascist at heart, but he’s a reasonable jackbooted crypto-fascist…
Lordy, I give up.
This “far-right” drumbeat has got Bob Dole so buffaloed that he’s showing a cowardice almost on a par with that of his opponent. Lord, deliver us! Get Bob and Bill both in the same place, and let the ground open and swallow ‘em both up. And let ‘em take the Washington press corps with ‘em. Let the Devil find out what “hell” really feels like.
