Read It And Weep, Freeper

Though the Democrats had the winning hand, if you will, on November 7th, some of us don’t know when to fold ‘em, get up and walk away from the table, as witnessed by this Letter to the Editor in the Bucks County Courier Times this morning.

I was disturbed but not surprised that our Congressman-elect, Patrick Murphy, whom the Courier Times endorsed, voted for John Murtha for minority whip.

Isn’t this the same John Murtha who was an un-indicted co-conspirator in the ABSCAM bribery scandal?

Murtha didn’t go to jail because they couldn’t prove he took money. However, he sure as shooting knew people were being bribed; it’s on videotape.

If he were an honest politician, he would have reported the bribery scheme to law enforcement.

Closer to home, Murtha is the king of pork in the House. He directs hundreds of millions of dollars in earmarks etc. to his district. Our new congressman, I think is obligated to ask why and demand that some of that pork be cut back or directed to Bucks County. After all, it’s our tax money.

I didn’t vote for Pat Murphy because he is totally inexperienced, but I did hope that there would be a change from the same old stuff if he were elected.

However, I can see from his initial actions we can expect more of the same old stuff.

Since you endorsed him as noted earlier, how about some editorials on his actions and let’s keep his feet to the fire. You owe us that much.

Rick Petrucco
Lower Makefield

I hate to break the news to Petrucco (a chronic offender in this newspaper) but Patrick was supporting Murtha for majority leader, not minority whip. The Democrats, God be praised, will be the majority party starting next January. Nice that Petrucco actually knows what he’s talking about, isn’t it?

And I love it that Petrucco believes Murtha was obligated to contact law enforcement because he supposedly knew people were being bribed. I didn’t know Petrucco could read people’s minds. Fascinating!

And I got a chuckle out of the line, “Murtha didn’t go to jail because they couldn’t prove he took money.” It’s called “presumption of innocence,” you meathead!

And I’m not going to comment on Petrucco’s allegation that Murtha is the “king of pork” because, as if often the case, he provides no specifics for his charges. It’s laughable, really, that he talks about abuse of congressional earmarks and doesn’t bother to mention outgoing House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who failed to disclose his participation in an Illinois trust in real estate near the proposed route of the Prairie Parkway, a highway project for which he’s secured $207 million in earmarked appropriations. If Hastert has managed to secure that kind of dough, then you can imagine what kind of a “taste” he expects to get for all of his nefarious efforts.

(Oh, but if this were a land deal involving Harry Reid, John Solomon would be "reporting" from here to tomorrow event though no earmarks are involved.)

Well, believe it or not, everything I’ve mentioned here so far is just an introduction into a fine column that the Courier Times printed yesterday from Elbert Ventura, a research fellow at Media Matters for America, people who (as I’ve stated a few times already) are going God’s work as far as I’m concerned. Ventura is writing about the decline of right-wing, Repug-friendly media (we can only continue to hope).

As the dust settles on last month’s historic elections, the Democratic Party can take stock of an impressive tally of triumphs. On top of Congress, the governorships, and the state legislatures is a list of marquee conquests: would-be President George Allen, far-right hero Rick Santorum, the Donald Rumsfeld era, and the myth of Karl Rove. Less celebrated but no less noteworthy is the blow taken by another stalwart of the conservative movement: the right-wing media.

When the Gingrich Congress first took power in 1994, observers gave a healthy dose of credit to the then-emerging conservative echo chamber. Looking back, it seems hardly coincidental that the rise of Republicanism in the 1990s coincided with the rise of Rush Limbaugh and the creation of the Fox News Network. In the years since, the Republican noise machine has only grown bigger and brasher. Joining Rush and Fox are an army of talk show hosts, bestselling polemicists, and shoot-first bloggers, all of whom have played an integral role in the contemporary Republican Party.

Well-funded and well-oiled, the noise machine is always at work for the GOP. The 2004 presidential election proved just how crucial it has become to Republican electoral success. From false rumors of John Kerry’s $150 haircuts to the fatally damaging fabrications of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the conservative media funneled Republican talking points into the mainstream, peddling spin as substance and insinuation as news. The result was a thumping from which Kerry has yet to recover.

Last month’s elections saw the same dynamic at work. The Drudge Report, one of the right’s most reliable conduits of innuendo, pushed a salacious item about sexually explicit passages in the novels of Jim Webb, the Democratic candidate for Virginia senator. Drudge’s strident coverage drove respectable media outlets like the Washington Post and CNN to give the non-story attention.

Another scandal touted by Drudge and the right-wing blogs concerned House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s alleged disappearance from the campaign trail, a claim that suggested Pelosi was in hiding because of her unpopularity with the public. The “Where’s Pelosi?” narrative was dutifully picked up by MSNBC and Fox News within hours. Perhaps they should’ve looked harder. Just a day earlier, Pelosi had appeared at a campaign rally in California with Bill Clinton and was also interviewed on CNN.

The most successful of the right-wing noise machine’s last-ditch efforts to commandeer the media was its elevation of Kerry’s botched joke about Iraq into a national scandal. For days, the press dropped issues of genuine consequence in favor of wall-to-wall coverage of Kerry’s gaffe. In right-wing circles, the “scandal” they so successfully pushed was seen as the final blow to the Democrats’ ebbing hopes of taking Congress.

But something happened on the way to the voting booth. The Democrats’ victory at the polls suggests that the right-wing noise machine that has proven so harmful to Democrats in particular, to honest public discourse in general, is starting to sputter. Despite the machine’s best efforts to steer the discussion away from the GOP’s myriad failures, the voters eschewed spin and cast a reality-based vote for change.

Indeed, there were even hints of outright disdain for the right-wing media. In the loudmouths of the right, Americans may have seen a reflection of an overreaching Republican government – an obnoxiousness best exemplified by Rush Limbaugh’s attacks on Michael J. Fox’s commercials in support of stem-cell research funding in Missouri. The state was eventually decided by a razor-thin margin. Surely there is no small amount of poetic justice in the notion that the godfather of conservative media may well have contributed to his party’s defeat.

But those expecting a chastened and reflective conservatism should think again. The right-wing media emerged during an era when conservatives were shut out of power. As Democrats take control of Congress and the Bush Administration plays defense, the noise machine only figures to grow in volume and vitriol.

The bigger worry is that the mainstream media will not have learned their lesson from these elections. Despite the dark arts of the right-wing echo chamber and the pusillanimity of a clueless press, the voters turned a deaf ear to sound and fury signifying nothing. Will the mainstream media be as judicious and prudent as the voters in the next two years? If they seek to remain relevant, they may have no other choice.

Actually, I hope our corporate media friends continue on their current path, since, to be perfectly honest with you, I’m tired of trying to cajole them into doing the right thing. They should know to do it anyway. And I’ll admit that my reasons for feeling that way are partly selfish, since it could very well lead to an increase in readership of blogs to obtain a reality-based perspective (including this one, I dare hope).

And besides, our corporate media can always count on an audience of hammerheads like Rick Petrucco who want to be lied and propagandized to and generally lead around by the nose as opposed to actually using the brains God gave them to digest and process information on their own.