Biting The Hand That Got You Elected

Upon our return to Orgle Manor yesterday, we picked up a dead-tree copy of the Sunday Pravda on the Potomac just to see what's been going on in our absence.

Idly flipping over to the opinion section, I found myself reading an op-ed by one Rick Perlstein which combines two cherished Lib memes - that conservatives actually are mentally unstable and that the push-pack against ObamaCare consists of nothing but attention-hungry knuckle-draggers being fed false talking points by the insurance industry - and goes on to suggest that the mainstream media has violated its traditional liberal watchdog role and is now in cahoots with the Right. A sample:

It used to be different. You never heard the late Walter Cronkite taking time on the evening news to "debunk" claims that a proposed mental health clinic in Alaska is actually a dumping ground for right-wing critics of the president's program, or giving the people who made those claims time to explain themselves on the air. The media didn't adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set of "conservative claims" to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal claims. Back then, a more confident media unequivocally labeled the civil outrage represented by such discourse as "extremist" - out of bounds.

The tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America's flora. Only now, it's being watered by misguided he-said-she-said reporting and taking over the forest. Latest word is that the enlightened and mild provision in the draft legislation to help elderly people who want living wills - the one hysterics turned into the "death panel" canard - is losing favor, according to the Wall Street Journal, because of "complaints over the provision."

(You can go read the rest if you really want to, but you'll have to go find it yourself because I don't link the WaPo due to its subscription requirements.)

It has struck me for some time now that the effort of The One and his flacks to dismiss the angry backlash against his vaulting ambition as nothing but the bloviations of lunatics and Big Business dupes is an arrogant, tone-deaf miscalculation of major proportions. It also strikes me that taking gratuitous shots at the MSM for not smothering it is the fastest way to make this miscalculation absolutely suicidal.