With the gloves off

Nick Gillespie at Reason has a mild comment on the total media failure during the current and past elections:

Whatever else you can say about Barack Obama before he beat John McCain four years ago, his actual presidency has been far, far worse than could have been predicted. Was his boyhood mentor “Frank” a secret communist? Did Bill Ayers write his books? Did young Barry harbor a soft spot for Franz Fanon and smoke dope like a Cheech & Chong extra? Did he get into Columbia despite being an adult illiterate raised in Kenya by Rosicrucians? Let’s play along and say yes to all this and more.

So freaking what? Compare any and all of that to the grim landscape that Obama has presided over like a dime-store Ozymandias. The guy got just about everything he wanted – expanded auto bailout, mega-stimulus, health-care reform, troop surge in Afghanistan, a free pass to deport immigrants and raid legal-under-state-law pot dispensaries. And it hasn’t worked. The best that the Obama administration can do to defend its objectively awful record – don’t forget the inability to muscle a goddamn budget through the Democratic Senate or deliver a deficit under $1 trillion – is to say that it would have been even worse if McCain had been elected. That sort of counterfactual – and the insistence that it’s alway George W. Bush’s fault – is the last resort of a scoundrel. That was the essence of Clint Eastwood’s bizarre but memorable appearance at the Republican National Convention: Obama hasn’t gotten the job done. If anything, he’s made things worse.

Everyone in the country knows that Obama has been a failure (that’s the essential acknowledgement of Samuel L. Jackson’s sad-sack “Wake the F*ck Up!” video). All the Republicans needed to do to win in November was tie a bow around a vaguely plausible candidate and push him or her out on to the stage. All they had to do was produce someone who would hammer home the dismal failure of Obama’s economic interventions, gesture a bit toward the Middle East and Central Asia where things are as messy as they’ve ever been, and promise to spend less and do less.

Alas, that task proved too difficult for the party of Lincoln…

Actually, I think he’s too hard on Mitt; the guy’s a manager, a damn good one, not a freaking rock star. Frankly, I could do without a rock star for the next eight years or so- a competent businessman that won’t end up selling us down the river and will make the hard choices is good enough for me. Boring is good.

And there has been one good effect- the media have been exposed as the lying cheerleaders I’ve felt they were since the Reagan years, to the point of having been regarded as somewhat of a wacko wingnut. Well, there it is, people- just as I said- and I wish I could take pleasure in saying “I told you so” but it gives me none. Too many have too much invested in this SCOAMF to ever admit what is right in front of their eyes. Hopefully in the silence of the voting booth you’ll vote your conscience and not your ego.