Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Why is this? Digby accurately predicted yesterday that this would get little to no coverage, because Dems "don't seem to have any kind of apparatus" to "catapult the propaganda," so to speak. Of course, as Digby suggests, Dems themselves might consider doing some catapulting themselves right about now. Has any high-profile Dem issued a statement on this or pushed it in some other way? After all, every Republican from Dick Cheney on down waved the O'Hanlon-Pollack piece at every conceivable opportunity. Dems can do this kind of thing too, one imagines.

Nonetheless, even without the Dems pushing it, you'd think this would be seen by the big news orgs as an important story. Even if the administration didn't tell them that it was.

Link

Here are the relevant votes, House and Senate. They'll go a long way to explaining why the Democrats aren't trumpeting this critical op-ed. The least opprobrious conclusion, based on the votes, is that too many of them are dirty. Some understanding of the way the media works would also help. They may recall that the news stories leading up to the war were heavily laden with pro-war spin -- most memorably, the articles written by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon. Gordon is now writing about Iran. The media does not operate as a democratically oppositional force. The owners and big brand celebrity media personalities are participants in the formation of the timocratic consensus. Their media outlets are mouthpieces. They marginalize dissenters in their ranks the same way snotty, snobby kids form cliques to ostracize their peers. As Rep. David Obey (D. WI) put it, "It's time these idiot liberals understand that." Of course he was talking about ending the war by continuing to fund it, not talking about the process that got us into it, keeps us in it and ensures another war.

The puzzled, ingenuous and dismayed schtick of the liberals, never entirely convincing to begin with, has become shopworn and more than a little repulsive. The nebbish who glumly resigns himself to assisting with his own abuse is not very sympathetic. A herd of them, egging each other on and moralizing at stragglers, belongs in a burlesque.