“Forty years ago, indeed right around this time of year in 1973, the American populace eventually cottoned on to the Watergate scandal,” Mark Judge writes at Real Clear Books:
As Woodward and Bernstein uncovered more and more, the public began to turn against Nixon. But it was a more literate and engaged population back then. These days, people seem to have lost the basic ability to reason, or be outraged.
And it is in dealing with the fact that nobody cares that David Freddoso makes a big mistake. “I don’t have a fix for liberal media bias,” he writes near the end of Spin Masters. “But even if it can’t be fixed — so what? No amount of slanted coverage — whether it comes in the form of subtle bias or the overt propaganda from 2012 that was designed to drive fear and resentment — can forever overcome the soundness of a truly good idea.”
I’m sorry, but that’s just not true. Propaganda, lies, slander, and derision of an opponent can indeed overcome the soundness of a good idea, and if not forever, than at least long enough to see the long, slow deterioration of a country and a culture.
Recently Senator John McCain was on Meet the Press talking about his fight to discover the facts about Benghazi. In what was one of the most bizarre examples of role-reversal I’ve ever seen, McCain fired off several unanswered questions about the massacre to the Meet the Press moderator, award-winning and establishment journalist David Gregory.
Forty years after the fact, we had a complete mirror image of the Watergate hearings. In 2013, it was a U.S. government official who was hunting for facts, and a reporter who was trying to hide them. “Do you care, David?” Senator McCain plaintively asked. “Do you care?” Gregory, like Nixon before him, had no answer.
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