Campaign Diary: Are We Going to Let The Media Pick Our Candidate? Diana West
http://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/3125/Campaign-Diary-Are-We-Going-to-Let-The-Media-Pick-Our-Candidate.aspx
The media are trying to eject Donald Trump & his Border Wall from the presidential primaries before a single voter gets the chance to pull a lever.
And they say Donald Trump is a disgrace. Some thoughts while trying to keep pace.
1. “News” organizations should not run presidential debates.
As Michael Savage noted on his radio show, the first GOP debate this week was co-sponsored by Fox News and Facebook. Fox News is owned by pro-amnesty Rupert Murdoch and Facebook is owned by pro-amnesty-Mark Zuckerberg.
No wonder the fix seemed to be in. No wonder the Fox-Facebook debate demonstrated there is no mythological “balance” to be found between “conservative” and “mainstream” media; nor, I would add, is baiting candidates the best use of the public airwaves to inform the electorate. That said, they have to get used to it — and so should we, and *even* from Fox.
Fox News, a slick establishment machine with “conservative” branding, showed itself to be actively hostile to both “true conservative” Cruz and No. 1 Trump, who has connected with voters in an unprecedented way with his vigorous, unapologetic build-the-wall, stop-the-alien-invasion, and save America message.
My question is, why should We, the People, have to hold our breaths wondering what journalist-“moderators” will ask next, either to hone their own axes or draw blood from candidates whom they or their bosses oppose?
2. Speaking of blood.
Erick Erickson of Red State has now taken this process of media-vetting — not voter-vetting — to the next level. He has actually rescinded his invitation to GOP frontrunner Trump to Erickson’s upcoming GOP Red State forum over a now-notorious comment Trump made on CNN about Megyn Kelly and the Fox-Facebook debate. Weirder and weirder, Erickson then invited Kelly to take Trump’s place.
The soundbyte heard ’round the media? When asked about Kelly, whose animus toward Trump during the Fox-Facebook debate was widely noted, Trump said: “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her, wherever.”
As interpreted by Erickson and the media clamor of all-the-best-people types, this was a “hormone-related” comment — i.e., menstruation-related comment. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. To be sure, it is not the way to talk, and has become a giant distraction from Trump’s vote-winning immigration message. But is it a disqualifier from future political participation? If that is the case, shouldn’t voters be the ones to decide that? Erickson doesn’t think so. He has decided that Trump’s remark disqualifies himself from public office — at least from appearing alongside Red-State-Respectable candidates.
What is really going on here? Has Erickson struck a blow for decency in discourse, even for the sanctity of American womanhood?
I don’t think so. If this were so, I’m sure I would want to sign up. I would want to be on board. After all, I have spent literally decades cataloguing and bemoaning the depravities of the public square, the sexualization of children, the coarsening impact of casual profanity, the numbing nature of exposure, writing paeons to long lost ideals of reticence and sensibility. I’m not sure what it gets us, but there you have it.
But I smell a rat. A lot of them, swarming a field of hypocrisy.
The understatement of the day is that ours is a culture steeped, marinated and rotted in crudity. That said, should Trump’s use, at worst, of euphemistic crudity (if his detractors are correct) find such severe sanction in the political arena? Really? Think of Bill “put some ice on that, etc., etc., etc.” Clinton. The president-sexual-abuser (and according to Juanita Broadderick, the president-rapist) is not only the Elder Stateman of the Democratic Party, he owes his (and his wife’s) political resurrection to the genteel GOP Bush family. But look out — Donald Trump makes one off-color remark (maybe) and he is the one who gets marched into political quarantine.
And by whom? I have just today been enlightened (warning: profanity ahead) that Erickson once tweeted that with the retirement of Justice David Souter, America had lost “the only goat-fucking child molester to ever serve on the Supreme Court.” Among other things, this tells me he is not someone with a lock on decency in public discourse. Should we take Erickson seriously as moral arbiter, or is he just posing to advance the non-Trump agenda? I do wonder.
Megyn Kelly, meanwhile, is surely Fox-America’s Sweetheart. Again, today, I just listened to a past recording of Kelly engaging in really unbelievable trash talk with Howard Stern; I have seen her steamy photo spread in GQ go by on Twitter. It is of cultural note that such acts once upon a distant time would have ruined her news broadcast career, not enhanced it.
What is relevant today, however, is the extent to which they and Erickson and yes, Trump, all reflect the fallen state of our culture — the normalization of crudity, especially sexual crudity, we all, very much including our children, have to live amid. Given that, this doesn’t seem to be the one time to cry foul and be believed. And no time is right to try to short-circuit the political process.
What I sense is a power play — and that strikes me as really obscene.
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