Shame and Loathing on the Media Trail

Roger L. Simon on the media’s silence on the IRS scandal:

Obama is beside the point. They don’t even like Obama anymore.  Nothing could be more obvious. Almost nobody does.  But they won’t say so in public because that would mean that they would be revealed as fools who believed the most banal tripe imaginable. It would also mean admitting Barack Obama never really existed, that they invented him. He was their projection. Barack Obama is the creation of the New York Times, et al.  Without them he would never have happened and they know it.

So the media are left in an untenable position. If you say Barack Obama is a mistake, then you yourself are a mistake. Who wants that?

No wonder they won’t investigate the scandals. No wonder they won’t report any of this. They are too ashamed of themselves to speak.

The heroes of Watergate are no more, if they ever were.  (That was always basically a chimera.)  The myth of the crusading investigative reporter is not only dead, it’s decomposed. In the disintegration of the Obama administration, the end of the mainstream media is not  collateral damage, it is the core damage.

That is already evident in the response to the IRS scandal.  It is metastasizing rapidly despite the near blackout by the MSM. In one recent poll 63 percent of Democrats think the IRS intentionally destroyed the emails.  Democrats.  How’d they find that out?  Not from the New York Times.

Get ready for endless tantrums of many sorts.  When moral narcissism of the level we have been experiencing breaks down, anything can happen.  The media will do almost anything to preserve their fragile selves. Evasion, distraction and outright lies will be continuous and may reach unprecedented levels.

Roger’s article was referenced on the air by Rush Limbaugh in the first half-hour of his show yesterday; Rush added:

Roger Simon, writing at PJ Media, has a piece today called: “IRS: Shame and Loathing on the Media Trail.”  His point is that with the failures that Obama is racking up here, the worldview of leftists and Democrats and their lifestyle is under threat because of the debacle that is the Obama presidency.  And to face the reality of the Obama presidency would mean to see everything they stand for falling apart.  Everything they stand for dissolving in a puddle.

Everything the left wanted when they supported Obama, every utopian dream they had, represented by his election, the country’s falling apart, everything is a disaster. Obama is clearly — I mean, in a charitable sense, in their view, by the way — this is crucial — in their view, it may be he’s incompetent.  They will never assign ideological intent to Obama.  They’ll always chalk it up, his buds in the media will, to incompetence.  But Simon’s viewpoint here is that Obama’s now beside the point they don’t even like him anymore and that nothing could be more obvious, but that they’re not gonna call him on any of this because it would basically acknowledge that they and the things they believe in are failures, and the things they believe in don’t work.

So they’re not gonna do that. They’re not gonna hit Obama.

Longtime friend of PJM Neo-Neocon concurs that the establishment media will never en masse change their punitive socialist worldview. Instead, as Neo writes, “I’m afraid what the Times is doing is ass-covering:”

They can’t think of a way to spin Obama’s abysmal failures any more (they do have certain standards, although those standards are pretty low), so they are silent.

They’re also very accustomed to setting the news agenda, and think they can get away with ignoring news they don’t like. That Times slogan “All the news that’s fit to print” takes on new meaning, doesn’t it? Up till now I’d always assumed they were conveying the idea that they cover the news thoroughly (they’d like us to think they cover it objectively, too, but that’s an absurdity). But did you ever wonder what sort of news isn’t “fit to print”? Why, it’s news that would hurt liberals and help conservatives, that’s what news. And it doesn’t matter if that news constitutes the biggest scandal since Watergate—potentially even bigger than Watergate.

At the time of Watergate, I never for a moment stopped to wonder what would have happened had Nixon been a Democrat and done exactly the same thing. Well, now I don’t have to wonder.

Actually, if you’re curious to what would have happened had Nixon been a Democrat, just pick up a copy of Victor Lasky’s 1977 book, It Didn’t Start With Watergate, which places that scandal into context alongside numerous prior and equally massive abuses of power by Democrat presidents of the 20th century and how the media reacted — or didn’t react — to them. (Please whoever currently holds the copyright on this title — republish this book in Kindle format.)

But in any case, as Ed Morrissey writes, noting that the IRS has spent over four billion taxpayer dollars on IT over the past five years, “Democrats like having the IRS act as the speech police, but cheering for the IRS is a lot less prevalent among Americans outside the Beltway.”

By ignoring or severely downplaying this story, the Times and network nightly news broadcasts are positioning themselves as de facto IRS cheerleaders — and evidently, they’re perfectly happy with that.

(And why yes, it was fun Photoshopping an update of Hunter S. Thompson’s 1973 book for the 21st century to fit Roger’s title. As with the duality of the rest of the MSM’s coverage of Nixon’s crimes and given his Mencken-esque loathing of most everyday Americans, I wonder though, what Thompson himself would have thought about the IRS scandal?)

Related: Instapundit spots the “FRIDAY AFTERNOON NEWS DUMP: IRS failed to tell federal court of lost Lois Lerner emails.”