Batfink's Beep -- 1-5-06

The coming battle

January 5, 2006

As I wrote yesterday, it appears that the Democrats are hitching their 2006 election hopes to the plan of trying to tar the GOP with the Abramoff scandal, a matter in which their own people are as deeply involved as any Republican. On its face, this would appear to be simply a stupid mistake; that would not be an implausible prospect, after all, from the party that thought Cindy Sheehan would play in Peoria. But in this case, I suspect that this would be an oversimplification.

What I really think is going on is that the Dems are counting on their allies in the MSM to keep all mention of involved Democrats out of their reports, and make it look like it's just a GOP scandal. Even at any other point in recent American political history, this would have to qualify as one of the biggest Hail-Mary passes of all time. After all, they'd be betting their future, in advance, on the ability of an in-their-pocket press to sell the public on a big lie, all through an election year, in a sharply polarized America during wartime, and nobody being the wiser. In earlier times, it might even have had a shot at working, about which, more in a moment.

(Ah, for the days when parties would try to get elected on the basis of promises of what they would do for us... but I digress.)

This possibility, if correct (and make no mistake, time will tell) would show us 2 things:

One, it would mean that the Democrats have pretty much thrown in the towel as regards to ever coming up with an issue to use against Bush and the GOP that is actually based in fact. Not that Abramoff, and any politicians who corruptly accepted quid from him with provision of a quo in mind, aren't actual criminals who should be treated as such, mind; what I mean is simply that the Democrats know that it isn't a GOP scandal, and that to sell it as such would be dishonest. They know all that, but feel that it may yet just be their last, best shot at this late hour, given all the things that have failed before.

And, two, it would show that the Democrats still haven't come to grips with the fact of post-blogosphere America. Putting aside their apparent absolute faith that Big Press would enter into such a dirty implicit deal -- since nobody on either side would doubt that -- have these people forgotten the Battle of Dan Rather already? That the MSM is in the tank for the left is just about the whole reason for the explosion of our quasi-trade as bloggers. Do they really think that the involvement of Democrats Harry Reid and Byron Dorgan, say, will just be ignored by the folks who rammed ol' Dan and his forged documents right down NBC's throat?

Actually, I will be at least as interested to see if the MSM itself has forgotten. It wasn't the poster boy for the Democrats, after all, who lost his job over Rathergate. (Okay, so Little Tommy Daschle also fell, along with Jean Francois Kerry himself, shortly thereafter; but we don't really know that it was directly on account of the story that made 60 Minutes a laughingstock, after all.) Big Media, if nobody else, should know better by now; and the backlash on an effort like that, were it to become widely noted, would be the stuff network boardroom nightmares are made of. The Dems, after all, are running out of time, and one would expect them to get sloppy and careless in the home stretch. But at what point will the MSM, which has also taken big casualties as a result of its alliance with the Democrat-left, decide that it doesn't have to fight this battle?

In any case, it certainly seems clear that this will be the next big battle for the new media. It remains to be seen who will be on the other side, but I wouldn't want to bet MY reputation on yet another Dem/MSM big lie working too well under the kind of scrutiny THIS one will draw.

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