MICKEY KAUS: “My theory: MSM terrified Orlando attack will produce Trump lead. All hands on deck. Old rules No Longer Apply. We’ll show him.”

He’s very likely right, but I’m not sure about the “old rules apply” part, as the MSM pounding Trump is simply a continuation of a long playbook.

During the height of the MSM’s zaniest conspiracy theory dissembling during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Mickey wrote, “Previously, [the media] couldn’t grouse about the Iraq War without seeming defeatist (and anti-liberationist and maybe even selfishly isolationist). Even the Clintons never figured a way out of that trap…Katrina gives [the MSM] a way to talk about Iraq without talking about Iraq. No wonder Gwen Ifill smiles the ‘inner smile.’”

Such demagoguery produced results, as Bryan Preston wrote in November of 2006 at Hot Air. “What cost the GOP its majorities in Congress and statehouses?… The GOP’s fortunes fatally cratered in the Fall of 2005, and were recovering ever since minus a couple of blips this year. What happened in the Fall of ‘05? Katrina. That storm turned out to be the hurricane that changed history:”

There’s a lesson in all of this, that’s an old one but an important one to remember: Demagoguery wins, and more so when it comes in the middle of a horrific disaster. Also, lies do indeed travel halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. By the time the story of New Orleans buses surfaced (only to be buried by the AP and ignored by the national media), the disaster had been framed as a Bush failure and the damage was already done. The media’s later mea culpa did nothing to change the basic narrative that already had a life of its own.

Years later, DNC Chairwoman Donna Brazile would later confess, “Bush came through on Katrina,” but as a wise future mayor would advise in the fall of 2008, “Never let a crisis go to waste.”

And speaking of 2008, it was that year that the media went all-in to elect Obama, ceding their pose as “objective” journalists in order to consummate their “Slobbering Love Affair” with the man they made president, to borrow from Bernie Goldberg’s classic title.

But it’s always been just a pose. On Tuesday, CBS Late Show host Stephen Colbert “slammed Donald Trump on Tuesday’s episode of The Late Show, drawing a swastika to explain the presumed Republican presidential nominee’s response to the Orlando, Florida mass shooting on Sunday,” Entertainment Weekly notes.

The old rules at CBS certainly apply here — comparing the Republican nominee to a Nazi has a long and storied pedigree at the “Tiffany Network.” Just ask the ghosts of Walter Cronkite and Daniel Schorr, who dished out the same treatment – on the CBS Evening News no less, not the network’s late night gab fest and comedy show – to Barry Goldwater in 1964.

There’s no doubt the media viscerally loathes Trump — in large part because Trump isn’t afraid to get in their faces and punch back twice as a hard, as a wise community organizer would advise. But they’d be battering any presidential candidate with an (R) after his name right around this time. The old rules are very much in force.