Lance Mannion: Notes from the Drones Club

The other day, at the end of my post about Barbara Bush joining her son on the back of his carnival wagon to help him sell his Social Security snake oil to the rubes, I expressed a bit of hope that the media was finally beginning to actually report the news on President Bush instead of merely relaying the White House's talking points.

My reason for hoping was the AP story on the Mother and Son comedy routine---and if the sight of the two of them together put you in mind of the villainous Ratchett and his vicious, scheming, smothering mother in Robots then you and I think too much alike and you should get help before it's too late for you too---In the story AP reported the fact that Bush is failing to convince people to accept his "plan" above the warm and fuzzy Mom and Son cross talk act.

You see the import there. Somebody in the Washington press corps reporting that Bush was failing at something!

I wasn't thinking that the cowardly lions of the media had finally found their courage. I was thinking that maybe they were going into their circling buzzards mode. It's difficult to remember, especially after the Death of a Hero treatment they gave his funeral, but the press began to get tough on Reagan in his last term. Reagan's popularity began to wane and the buzzards swooped in.

Just as after six years of treating him as something worse than Nixon culminating in the Impeachment charade, which the press aided and abetted, when it was clear that Clinton had not only survived but come out of the ordeal more popular than any other President ever, the media turned deferential. They took out their scorn on Al Gore.

So, I thought, maybe it's finally dawned on them that Bush, who has never been truly and generally popular, is losing even more support and now he might be weak enough that they feel safe enough to pounce.

But then the Linkmeister showed up in the comments section to tell me to wake up and smell the coffee and he left this link to a post by Digby reacting to a stunningly blockheaded column by Dana Milbank of the Washington Post.

Over at the Sideshow, Avedon Carol has also responded to Milbank's column, eloquently, angrily, and at length.

Milbank has been one of the few bright lights not just at the Post---New slogan: We're not really a Republican mouthpiece, we only pretend to be one above the fold---but among the Inside the Beltway club members. It doesn't take much to be a renegade inside the Beltway, of course. It's just a matter of while the other club members sit contentedly in their big armchairs by the fire, smoking their Havanas and sipping 20 year old Scotch and tut tutting over what boobs and rubes the Democrats are and marveling over Karl Rove's genius, Milbank occasionally strolls into the club bar and asks the hired help what they think of Bush's economic plan, then wanders back to his place by the fire to tell his fellow club members, to their astonishment, that good old Isaac behind the bar thinks we ought to take a look at this thing he calls "the Deficit" and another thing he calls "The War in Iraq."

His reports are always met with some polite coughing and a quick change of the subject back to what a cad and a scoundrel that Bill Clinton was, and Milbank shrugs and picks up his cigar and Scotch and resumes his quiet place by the fire.

Milbank's column is one of those shrugs.

Basically, he expresses his dismay at the temerity of a bunch of rank amateurs (bloggers) daring to criticize their professional betters. "God gosh," Milbank says with mild annoyance, "You people need to do something about your anger."

"While it is true that we professionals might be a tad more aggressive towards the Republicans, it seems to me that you all ought to get your own houses in order before you start criticizing that of which you know less than nothing. Besides, the Democrats are just as guilty as the Republicans and as far as I can see there is not a whit's worth of difference between you liberal bloggers and the chaps at Powerline and the Corner. In fact, since you all are much smarter than they are and better bred, you should know to act better than they do, therefore, even if you aren't as egregious as they are, your slip ups are more reprehensible. The peasants can't help behaving like peasants, which is why it's best to just ignore them. But when one of the noblesse act up, well, that just isn't done."

Then besides writing as if Democrats' efforts to get themselves elected are as gauche as Republican efforts to seize unprecedented power and silence all opposition and as if liberal bloggers' attempts to get the media to cover Bush with the same critical eye they turned on Clinton are as destructive as Right Wing bloggers' assault on the very notion of a free and independent press, Milbank sighs heavily and suggests that the only alternative to the timid objectivity the Washington press corps practices now is a totally partisan and, Milbank suggests, completely fictitionalized accounting of events.

(Michael at Reading A1 remembers that there was a time when there was only a partisan press---the first 150 years of the United States---and he doesn't think that a return to those days would be any bad thing. Thanks to the Suburban Guerrilla for the link.)

Digby's response is a rugged but rueful, So be it!

As it stands, we have a Republican alternate version of reality and a mainstream press that is apparently impotent to take it on with any real zeal. I don't know what else to do but create our own discourse that hopefully provides the flaccid media with another point of view that they can then flog with equal fervor. I hope that our discourse is more honest and more true, but I cannot guarantee it. All I know is that we have to pull on the other end of the ideological rope or we are all going to be dragged off the cliff together.

Avendon Carol's reaction is to grab Milbank by the knot of his rep tie and shake him until the ice cubes leap from his highball glass and his back teeth rattle.

We object to the fact that we have to read the entire newspaper to find facts - real, documented facts - while administration/RNC spin finds its way into front-page headlines. We object, for example, to the fact that the headline for the story on the NORC count of the 2000 election claims that Bush won the election when the 43rd graf makes clear that this is not the case. We object to headlines that indicate that the Clintons were responsible for shady business deals in Arkansas when anyone who actually reads up on these things knows they were simply the victims of an associate who had a breakdown and ended up embezzling from them. We object to the fact that, to this very day, falsehoods about Gore and the Clintons and previous Democratic convention speakers (Casey was NOT prevented from speaking because he was anti-abortion; he was prevented from speaking because he refused to endorse the Democratic ticket) are still treated as FACTS by mainstream media.

We don't just read left-wing resources. We find that we have to read damn-near everything to find out what's going on. That makes it impossible to rely on our local newspapers, because we know that the facts come out in dribs and drabs in newspapers and magazines all over the nation - indeed, all over the world. Why should we have to rely on the Guardian to find out what the United States is doing? Why aren't these things on the front page of The Washington Post and The New York Times? Why are some stories - legitimate, important stories - left to Salon and The New Yorker, rather than covered by the major papers? Why is it that I can find the right-wing spin in The Washington Post but don't even find out what the liberal response is until I read The Nation?

Damn.

I guess if somebody like Milbank is still missing the point so completely, if one of the few Beltway Insiders who tries to do his job persists in thinking that the only problem with the Washington press corps is its liberal critics, then Linkmeister is right, my optimism that things may be changing is naive.