We’re always fond of quoting H.L. Mencken’s line that “It is the prime function of a really first-rate newspaper to serve as a sort of permanent opposition in politics.” If you truly hold yourself out as an objective media source, as numerous individual journalists still profess, and even an entire news agency or two, it seems like a pretty useful way of doing business.
We all know in 2013 it’s a lie, of course. Or as Ace writes today, “Liberal Media Gloated About Suspicions That Hilary’s Concussion Wasn’t a Concussion; Now Clam Up.” And along the way, explores how the knees reflectively jerk at the modern MSM:
Thus, when a conservative expresses skepticism, the intellectually-insecure liberal must vehemently take the position of absolute guilelessness, absolute credulity. If a conservative doubts the word of a liberal politician, the insecure liberal demonstrates how rational he is by assuming — nay, insisting— that everything a liberal politician tells him is 100% true.
In an effort, then, to define themselves against the Other, they have taken an unfortunate tendency of the out-party to engage in conspiracy-theorizing (as the left engaged in under George W. Bush, by the way) and made themselves into reflexive skeptics against the skeptics, or, more accurately, reflexive paranoids against the ostensibly paranoid.
But this puts them in a remarkable, risible position, far more incredible and lunatic than any position they’re seeking to define themselves against: postulating, incredibly, that there is an alien species upon the earth, a species which looks human but in fact is otherworldly, and which simply does not have the human capacity for deception or self-dealing behavior, and this strange absolutely-ethically-pure alien species is commonly known as “Liberal Politicians.”
Is the conservative paranoia about Obama being a Manchurian candidate with malice in his heart excessive and unhinged? Perhaps. But is the liberal reverse paranoia — what is the word? — that Obama is constitutionally incapable of selfishness, deception, and self-dealing any more reasonable?
It is in fact less reasonable: For we know many humans who are in fact selfish and dishonest, but we know of not a single person still living on earth who is by definition incapable of either sin, to the point where, as their claims carry them, to simply question Obama’s, or Hillary”s honesty is to give evidence of a form of mania.
What a remarkable transformation of liberal views on the ethics with which political power is exercised — just 5-6 years ago they considered the theory that the American President had deliberately permitted the murder of 3000 citizens in order to secure a short-term political advantage a theory which, while unproven, was no strong mark against its proponent, to a new theory, upon the Apotheosis of Barack Hussein Obama, that the American President and his lesser ministers have simply not told a single untruth in their lives and to suspect them of doing so is a mark of lunacy.
Yeah, that always ends up well — or as Ace notes at the conclusion of his post, “This is a dangerous moment. I keep saying this, but I do think Tyranny is in the air. When the press decides that our Dear Leaders are above suspicion, and any suspicion is evidence of both mental illness and treason simultaneously, we’re living on the cusp of Chavez-like times.”
Read the whole thing — and then check out Michael Walsh at the Corner, who takes us on a very-much related “Voyage to Laputa.”
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