They compounded a millionfold Bush's legacy of incompetence by soiling both possible Republican ideological strategies going forward: They killed off Bush-style neoconservatism as well as the more traditional fiscal conservatism McCain himself was once known for by trying to fuse both approaches into one gorgeously incoherent ticket. Full Story »
Posted by Randy Morrow
The article is colorfully written, though occasionally Taibbi's images go maverick on him. He describes the spectacle of the disasterous campaign, but largely misses one facet that is bothersome. Why was this election even as close as it was; why did Obama not win 75% to 25%? He touches the periphery of it when he talks about the dumbed down Ivy League journalists.
We’ve dumbed this process up so much over the years, in fact, that it had lately become hard to imagine an American presidential election being anything but an embarrassment to the very word “democracy.” By 2004, that once-cherished ideal of political freedom and self-governance that millions of young men and women gave their lives to protect as recently as WWII had been reduced to the level of absurdist comedy. You had a millionaire Yalie in an army jacket taking on a millionaire Yalie in a cowboy hat, fighting tooth and nail for the right to be named the man “middle America most wants to have a beer with” by a gang of Ivy League journalists — a group of people whose closest previous exposure to “middle America” was typically either an episode of Cops or a Von Dutch trucker hat they’d bought for $23 at Urban Outfitters.
The race was kept unconscionably close by a bevy of commentators and media republican advocates in the big corporate media who mostly kept promoting the McCain/Palin ticket and platform and echoing attacks against the Obama/Biden ticket and platform. Their are exceptions, but mostly the press is not serving to inform the democracy.