Do I Have To Keep Using The Word "Rigged"?

I am sorry to agree with Mark Halperin, but this is indeed a low point in the annals of American politics. The faux outrage from the McCain campaign over the common analogy "lipstick on a pig," a line that was the title of McCain aide Torie Clarke's book, was something I expected to be a giant cable news story, but that doesn't make it any less depressing.

It doesn't matter that Mike Huckabee shot it down. It doesn't matter that the "Truth Squad for Palin" conference call yesterday was so ridiculous that former Massachusetts Governor Jane Swift actually ended up claiming that Obama shamefully called McCain a fish. It doesn't matter that McCain said the same thing about Hillary Clinton. It doesn't matter that Joe Klein, who has finally cracked the GOP code on this stuff, is sardonic and mocking:

The John McCain campaign is so, so upset that Barack Obama said that McCain's efforts to camouflage his own policies is "like putting lipstick on a pig." I am sure that there is no cynicism involved here. I am certain that Steve Schmidt and his band of merry men--and they are, almost exclusively, men--are deeply offended, in their feminist souls, by what they perceive as a glancing reference to Sarah Palin's lipstick on a pit bull line in her acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention.

What matters is that it's being covered at all. Not just by the Republican house organs of Fox News and the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal but by the so-called "respectable" news organizations. This is the clearest indication that liberals are still swimming up-current against a corporate media that is actively working against them. There is no way in the world that this nonsense should be getting any level of attention. I'm not questioning the size of the attention, I'm questioning the existence of it. But it's cheap and easy to build a flimsy set, play a soundbite from a pool feed, and get two shouters on opposite sides of the political spectrum to argue about it. There's no food or lodging cost to putting a reporter in the field, no cost to rent space around the country or the world for the reporter to file a story, no cost for a cameraman at all, really (most of the remotes where you see talking heads coming from have a ready-made camera setup and a button for the talent to push; it's a one-man operation).

Now, Obama is absolutely right to call the media out for promoting this phony outrage, but I don't know how much good it does:

Calling it "the latest made-up controversy by the John McCain campaign," Obama responded to the Republicans' charge that he was referring to Palin when he used the phrase "lipstick on a pig" at a campaign stop Tuesday.

"I don't care what they say about me. But I love this country too much to let them take over another election with lies and phony outrage and Swift-boat politics. Enough is enough," he said.

Yeah, they're lying. But if you're explaining, you're losing, as they say in politics. And yet if the Obama campaign "went on the attack" over something - which they do, literally every day - it doesn't get reported. People are acting as if the media is this blank slate where they just absorb whatever message reaches them and they blurt it back out. That's not how it works. There are editors and story producers who manage the content and make decisions on what to cover. And inevitably, they cover the Republican attacks and smears. Not the fellow POW who said that McCain is unfit to lead the country, not the good friends of Sarah Palin who said that she is unacceptable as Vice President, not the unchallenged statement that McCain wanted to abolish the Department of Education. It's "lipstick!" and the like.

Yes, you can't win if you're constantly on defense. You also can't win if your message is stifled and those making the editorial decisions of what to play up and play down consistently fall on the side of your opponent. If there's anything that the Obama campaign needs to do better, it's something that's done out of sight of all of us, and that's haranguing media executives and working the refs. Not that I think it would matter.

...I mean, The Poor Man has this right, but people throw around this word "fight back" an awful lot without defining what it means. One dude shouting with nobody around to hear it isn't going to do much.

Besides, the media is owned by big corporations like GE (NBC), and the GE’s of the world tend to do quite well in Gilded Ages (although personally, that’s shortsighted - depressions are a bitch even for the fat cats). Nevertheless, GE recently intervened to knock Keith Olbermann down a peg because he was getting too loud and too liberal. Glenn Beck is fine though. Joe Scarborough too. Tucker Carlson is edgy! Fox News doesn’t exist.

My friends, expecting the media to live up to even some middling ethical standard is pointless. Don’t complain, fight back. It’s incumbent on everyone from Barack to the guy on the bar stool to swing big, hard and often. Fuck the issues, fuck decency, fuck the facts, fuck civility. That’s a loser’s sport.

What happens when they swing and nobody sees it? Because that happens every day.