Digby Ditto

Seconding Digby is as unnecessary as it is ubiquitous.  I almost never disagree with him, and nobody would listen to me if I did.  But I agreed with this statement so much that I wanted to repeat it:

This is why we are having such a disconnect with the mainstream press. They are laboring under some ridiculous belief that they are the voice of the people when they are actually the voice of the establishment --- which is, by the way, Republican.

And it’s absurd how obviously true this is, but how little people know it.  Because the media is under this absurd delusion that both they and the Republican leadership truly are “in” with the Joe Sixpack crowd and represent the “true” Americans.  Much more so than an east-coast elitist liberal such as myself.  Sure, I’ve lived almost my entire life in the South (excepting two years that the Air Force stationed my dad in Alaska); and have lived in Texas for well over two decades.  But no matter, these New York and Washington media-types have much better red-state, meat & potatoes credentials than myself.  I mean, hell.  I don’t think I’ve ever voted for a Republican.  So how could I possibly be a real American?

And I think that a big source of this is that the bigtime media has become a regular listener of talk radio; or at least have fallen victim to talk radio spin.  And just as Jews sometimes found themselves agreeing with the stirring words of a Hitler hate speech; the media hasn’t connected the dots to realize that all that “east-coast beltway” bashing that these guys constantly spew applies directly to them (not that I’m making a moral equivalence).  But it’s not just the media’s fault.  Partly, it’s because the radio-talkers aren’t really attacking anyone real.  They have developed fictional liberal strawmen that everyone can agree are horribly stupid and evil people.  And so when the media-types listen to this, they can’t help but imagine that they’re not the targets.  And everything the Limbaughs say sounds so natural and normal that they can’t help but believe that they’re getting homespin wisdom straight from the heartland.

And of course, that’s all because the ultra-rich Republican Party has developed a pretend NASCAR culture to appeal to people who have no business voting Republican.  And the media just eats it all up.  Just as Republican politicians continually stamp the Seal of Sixpack on everything they do; media elitists like to regard their inside knowledge has having that “special” touch of real America.  And the obvious irony is that most of these “outside the beltway” gems are mass-produced right in the heart of the beltway itself.