I’ve always believed the “power of the media” to be illusory, having power only over those who want to believe in that power. I look upon the media as men were taught to look upon Druid witches and warlocks in the 8th Century; stop believing in them and they will go away…as they have for over 50% of the American people since Reagan.
So this is a tale of how the MSM can host itself onto “conservative media” like a pilot fish does a whale to cause us to do great harm to ourselves.
We are seeing this now with the slow cooking of Ken Cuccinelli, orchestrated by The Washington Post but actually carried out by regional Virginia media, much of it conservative. All you have to do is recall how WAPO took a harmless word, “macaca”. and first hung it around George Allen’s neck in 2006, then, casting their spells with Virginia print, radio and TV journalism, cost Allen his reelection bid and handed the US Senate to the Democrats at what turned out to be a very grave turning point in American history.
The tide they’d like to turn this year is the second coming of the Tea Parties, who’ve been re-energized against Barack Obama, but even more, the Washington ruling elite, of which, WAPO is a founding member. The First Coming was heralded by the election of Gov Bob McDonald in 2009, after Obama was elected, but before Obamacare was enacted. They don’t want to see a repeat.
So, in the last 11 days of the gubernatorial campaign in Virginia, WAPO is doing the same things with Cuccinelli as they did with Allen. After having first greased the stewpot for several months with innuendo and half-truths in Virginia media over an attempted bribery of Gov Bob McDonald by a company called Star Scientific, in which Cuccinelli was only a marginal figure in the investigation, his name nonetheless came up almost every time the case was mentioned. Now the time is ripe to drop this potato into the boiling pot.
So, this week, to seal its curse, WAPO sent the esteemed “conservative” journalist and commentator, George Will, to advise Virginians that they can do better than Ken Cuccinelli, and that better man is Robert Sarvis, the just-turned 37-year old Libertarian candidate.
Will said Sarvis is “amiable”.
Indeed, Sarvis is steadily polling high for a third party candidate and it’s long been understood he could end up being a spoiler in an election that pits a solid conservative, Ken Cuccinelli, Virginia’s current Attorney General, against Terry McAuliffe, a fast talking, platitude-singing crony-businessman and wannabe professional politician…if all the cards fell a certain way.
WAPO is trying to deal the last hands, just as it did with Allen.
In effect George Will is saying that Cuccinelli is less than best because he is too unbending in his beliefs, echoing Sarvis’ belief that “absolutism” is killing the political process. (“Absolutism” is code for Tea Party in the same way “social conservative” is code for Christian. Tough news for Cuccinelli, for he is both, only not in the sense Will infers it.)
In this age of new relativism, which I never would have believed George Will could buy into, I’m not exactly sure how “absolutism” works, but I think it either means one is not supposed to believe in anything 100%, 65% is better, or, perhaps, we’re only supposed to defend an ideal 65% of the time. I’m not sure which, but in asserting this rule today Will has challenged his own philosophical judgements over the part thirty years or so, for I could have sworn he was an absolutist on a whole host of ideals in past years. (You have to go back to when the media felt it was unfair to call Bill Clinton out for every lie, suggesting just one-out-of-every-three, to appreciate where this rule comes from.)
But practically speaking, Will is urging Virginia Republicans who might vote for Cuccinelli that they can do better by voting for Sarvis, thus throwing the election to McAuliffe. And no, George Will didn’t just fall off the turnip truck yesterday. He knows this is the likely outcome of the choices he’s proposed.
He also knows WAPO is part of his rice bowl, and he must protect it….which also explains why, over recent years, he has fallen from a 95% conservative to about that magic number, 65%. Rule: One
can’t afford to believe in anything so strongly that it might cause one to leave a gravy stain on his tie.
But “absolute beliefs” aside what strikes me is the lack of facts Will employs in his “analysis”, proving he has been lazy and may have just mailed this one in for the home team.
Cuccinelli is nationally-known figure and may have national ambitions in the future, which is one reason Democrats would like to nip him in the bud quickly. (Why the George Will I once knew wants to help in this endeavor is still a mystery to me.) He was the first Attorney General to sue over Obamacare in 2010. He is also gained renown for having sued the University of Virginia to disclose records concerning the East Anglia University global warning hoax. A hero in both, courageous acts both, alas, he also lost both in the courts.
Statewide, Cuccinelli is also known for being a strong advocate for making abortion less easy and more safe (which used to be a plank of the Republican Party), i.e, making hospital standards apply to abortion clinics, thus earning the enmity of Planned Parenthood, who runs most of these butcher shops in Virginia, and that portion of the state (the greater DC area) where you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting at least 20 Sandra Fluke’s in the head…assuming you’re in bar.
In Democratspeak, this makes Cuccinelli an enemy of women, especially those who like to live libidinously. The leading McAuliffe attack ads, using a real-life female OBGYN (who apparently never passed 9th grade Civics), accuse Cuccinelli of wanting to ban abortion, and even a woman’s access to contraception, which, again we know from 9th Grade Civics, no state officer, nor the President, not even Congress can deny, indicating the intelligence level of the aforementioned Fluke brigades. (Either these ads didn’t offend George Will, or he never saw them.)
It’s in these social issues that we find the “absolutism” of Cuccinelli in both the language of Sarvis and Will. Only it’s found in Cuccinelli’s heart, not his public or private deeds. The Arabs have a saying I use regularly: “You must be very wise to know what is in the hearts of other men.” Neither Sarvis nor Will are wise enough to impute motives that are in fact not true, but which are only found in McAuliffe ads against Cuccinelli.
So it does seem as if McAuliffe’s ads have been run in tandem with Sarvis’ positions.
Carried out to its logical end, Sarvis’ idea against “absolutism” indeed indicates an indifference about a culture that kills several million unborns a year, and which is slouching into civilization-ending decadence and depravity. At 37, I doubt Sarvis fully understands such cultural matters, but Will surely should. I think he has just chosen to ignore them, for reason already mentioned.
Cuccinelli does has a problem, for while he is an affable man he appears to be a very serious person. Maybe too serious for these times, inasmuch as these are days Christians and anyone else with a moral spine are painted with dark hoods and cassocks. We are not only supposed to forgive our neighbor his sins, but the conditions which allow them. And maybe even the sin itself.
Terry McAuliffe, on the other hand is known more regionally, as a small-time Solyndra-type huckster, who has been accused of causing great loss to investors and employees in deals he profited from. Democrats do this daily. It’s why they’re Democrats, in fact.
Everything you hate about the Obama regime Terry McAuliffe is for, from Obamcare to same-sex marriage, to finding every means possible for government to come between the people and their hard-earned money. Like Harry Reid, whatever his net worth is today, if he wins, expect it to double in four years.
And hubris? Only this week he was forced to take posters down on some Virginia campuses going after the “oral sex” vote. Yep, BJ’s, which should cause us to wonder, at a much deeper, more sober level, well beyond Sarvis, if McAuliffe can win with that sort of outreach, maybe America has finally turned the corner the socialists have so striven to achieve lo these many years. And in just three short years since the Stampede of 2010. See, the stakes really are very high.
We’re talking about real class here, Mr Will, absolute class, and you’ve chosen the wrong side. As civilization hobbles down, must honor also?
Enter Robert Sarvis and why I bother to write about him.
With only two weeks left in the campaign, Robert Sarvis is polling at 10%, when in fact, as a Libertarian, he’s about as “little L” as you can get.
George Will says he is amiable, and I suppose he is, but at 37, experience-wise he hasn’t the years under his belt to run a decent mid-sized company, of say 50 people, let alone a JC Penny’s. Managing a county government is hard, much less a state. Hasn’t Barack Obama proved all these things? On resume alone, Sarvis doesn’t belong on the ballot.
So what about philosophical depth? Sarvis is a Harvard Law man, but decided he’d rather ply his trade as a software designer. Not to damn Harvard Law, except for the extraordinary vapidness of its presence in the current White House, one is caused to wonder just how deeply the philosophical underpinnings of this specially-designed (some even say exceptional) republic is understood by Mr Sarvis. My son is two years older than Sarvis and he’s still a work in progress…and I work hard at it. True libertarianism, like conservatism, is a rigid regimen of personal growth, requiring a life of study for most to master. Listening to his speeches and interviews I’m inclined to think he’s using Cliff’s Notes.
If his understanding of “absolutism” is any indicator, Sarvis’ deep thoughts generally seem to run about as shallow as Al Franken’s from that old Saturday Light Live skit. In the words of John Nance Garner, he’s “as deep as a shallow pool of warm pee”. (I cleaned that up a little.)
I’m not a friend of “little L” libertarianism in part because of its know-nothingness. It’s the “If it Feels Good, It Should be a Constitutional Right” wing of Libertarianism, taking no stock in the simple truth that 75% of the people need a public moral code in order for their families to survive. They don’t want their kids smoking pot, or getting pregnant at 14. The future of their House depends on it. (Chesterton: The common man needs both morality and democracy. Some others do not.) The price adults, including Libertarians, have to pay is to sneak just a bit. “Little l” libertarians are remarkably similar to the teat-fittery of the Left in this regard.
And I’m about as live-and-let-live as a conservative can be. I’ve long supported the idea of “civil unions” everywhere that would enable every person who makes a life choice with a partner to share in the same legal protections afforded to regular families. But in the shallow-or-deep-thought department, neither Sarvis, nor most any other Libertarian, has considered that “marriage” is a sacrament sealing the bond between a man and a woman that predates the state by milennia, and was solely created ( universally) by the world’s religious faiths.
Think about it. Then think about who it is then, that breaches the wall of separation between church and state, just to appease the teat-fittery of a political class of people who want to high-jack a word. The state has no claim to “marriage”, only civil unions. But call them only that and watch the tantrums begin, and you will see what I mean.
So while some attack a man for his “absolutist” beliefs about killing the unborn which stays only within himself, and who stays within the law, and then another man who tells me he favors gay “marriage”, I can call that “libertarian” a statist with far more accuracy than can ever be leveled at Ken Cuccinelli as an absolutist.
When I give a cashier a twenty for an eight dollar purchase, and she mistakenly hands me back a twenty and two ones, I give it back to her. She thanks me, for I have saved her at close-out time. I always say, so everyone can hear, “I’m not going to hell for twenty dollars.”
Of course, this begs the obvious question, “Well how much are you willing to go to hell for, Bushmills?”
Don’t ask me. Ask the esteemed opinion writer for The Washington Post.
But wouldn’t it be a hoot if it turned out that deep pocket-Democrats are funding Robert Sarvis?
