Since the Obama “you can keep your insurance” lie went viral, several prominent conservative pundits, among them Charles Krauthammer, have been echoing what we’ve been saying almost from the beginning, that the Administration has been acting lawlessly and that lawlessness is abroad in the land.
Then they just sort of shrug, refusing or unable to connect that last dot, as if just calling a criminal dog a criminal dog will make it quit acting like a criminal dog.
We’re on page 37, at least, of the available criminal charges against this regime, everyone knows it, yet none can bring themselves to utter the “I” word, much less the “A” word, which would really be more appropriate. Krauthammer’s a lawyer, surely he can find a real “crime” crime in this Obamacare fraud, a going to jail “crime” crime in fact.
Rather than telling people how bad things are, maybe our brighter pundits had better start suggesting how to fix it. Me, I’d like to hear the sweet gurgling sound of oil tar coming to a boil, in a vat down at the end of a long cattle chute, where 300-400 of ’em can be lined up, and dragged through there by a plow-line rig, quickly dipped, then rolled in a pile of goose feathers like mom used to bread chicken breasts, then ushered onto an awaiting cattle car.
I guess we can’t do that anymore, but it is a juicy thought.
But what we can do is quit this incessant need to use the media as a whipping boy to express our outrage. Fully two-thirds of the media’s power comes from the fact that we on the right believe they have this power. And they control us as Pavlov controlled his dog, with whistles.
The fact is, with Obamacare as it now stands the media is absolutely unable to help Obama, or rehabilitate themselves in the eyes of the American people. Neither can Obama help himself. There’s a simple math to this, as I’ll explain.
You see, the media put Obama in this spot, for they could surely have saved him, and the O’care launch, had they just asked the obvious questions, two months ago, a year ago, three years ago. They probably knew, but didn’t want to know. Now, they are suddenly quiet, and we are angry as if they are denying us things we already know and other people things they should know.
This is not so.
What the media is engaged is a kind of arena behavior that goes to the soul of who they are, where they can neither step forward to continue to prosecute O’care, or retreat from ever having been its harbingers in the first place. Like two boys standing toe-to-toe not sure whether to throw that first punch or retreat, they just spit a lot.
Now, the media is behaving according to ancient, even instinctive laws. And they aren’t the first. In the 1980s there was undertaken several studies as to why the most respected professions in Germany; jurists, lawyers, the senior civil service, and Germany’s god, its doctors, all lined up in lock step to support Hitler, when just a few of them, early on, could have stopped him in his tracks. Going much deeper than earlier analysis that blamed it all on “German culture” or Hitler’s spell-binding charisma, this later research pointed to the power of one’s status among his peers. No one knows for sure whether Hitler created this situation, or was just its beneficiary, but most agree now that the innate desire to attain status among one’s peers maybe stronger than all Man’s primal urges, including sex….proving Freud was at least partially wrong.
Today, we think we perceiev the media as being simply simpatico with the left-wing agenda, but it all likelihood, there are things they need to protect more than Obama’s fragile ego and behind.
What we know is that 90% of everything the media says, in print or on television, is for the benefit of their peers, and they will almost never say anything that will diminish them in front of their peers, UNLESS, they are willing to suffer the ultimate repercussion of ostracism within their group. The Germans professional class never tried it, although several did leave Germany while that window was still open.
To some extent, what we see from the media each day are private letters, sort of like JournoList, in which the general public, but especially the enemy right, and frightened Republican establishment, are merely eavesdropping a private conversation. They aren’t really directing their stories at us, but are engaged in strutting and puffing matches not unlike the annual gathering of buck and doe elk at the stamping grounds in the Coconino Forest.
Going back to the 1970s, as the print media became irrelevant in big city markets because of mergers, ending the left-right, morning-evening press rivalries, (and generally favoring the left), the network media realized they really didn’t have to compete with one another anymore and could work in concert. As a rally point, Nixon helped, for not since Hitler had anyone emerged that could be so completely demonized. Not to break the hearts of you who believe there was ever an honest press in America, not since the election of 1800, I’d say, has that been so. What has disappeared is a competitive press, against which Fox News and the alternative media has only been partially successful…in part because they spend so much time aping them, or propping them up as enemies that are actually larger and more dangerous than they really are.
This current media arose only since the rise of network television, where today we see a corporate media arena almost entirely of the Left, and a media personality arena, almost entirely engaged with status attainment, playing out their strutting and peer games unmindful of the larger arena.
Obamacare has almost destroyed this arena-within-the-arena structure because it has steered both arenas into almost untenable positions, especially the individual personalities vying for status. It’s not that Obama lied to us, the people, but Obama lied to them and caused them to lie for him. Now they are being prodded to continue pushing the new meme that the site is now fixed..it isn’t, and they know it isn’t…and that all will be well with Obamacare…it won’t, and can’t…and they are balking because they know these things, in part because of their own circle of friends who are being damaged by O’care.
But neither can they make news of the Obamacare disasters; the women and kid with cancer, or the lady Obama praised for signing up, then sicced IRS on her after she went public that she’d been defrauded. Animal behaviorists describe this as a “tie”, when the parties (media) can neither invade (start the fight) or retreat (run away). I call it an existential moment. Every species does different things, teen age boys spit, and journalists suddenly become mum.
And they become mum because they know that not only did Obama lie to them, but he lied to the American people, and that injuries are occurring and there is nothing anyone can do to hide it, fix it, or rescue it.
Not only is their integrity at stake, but so is there status, if they even utter a single loaded word.
Now this sort of “arena event” doesn’t come along every day, so no one knows how it will turn out, for as we know, we have our own arena players watching all this play out. It is very dynamic.
But the lesson we need to take from this already, while it is still developing, is that things that are personally felt and known by the American people cannot be negated by any media campaign. The only way Barack Obama can fix this is to exactly as Ted Cruz and Co have asked, and go in and repeal Obamacare…a process the Democrats in Congress would much like to have a hand in.
Obamacare and the Circle of friends.
You’ve read a lot about people with cancer, for instance, who have had their insurance cancelled. The media didn’t put those stories out there until someone had first put it up on Facebook or sent a painful email. The mainstream media had very little to do with this. Our side of the media, which probably actually is the larger media, FYI, pushed the story forward.
And of course, you can all remember the wrath these stories stirred in you and your circle of friends.
But we are distant strangers. So imagine the wrath, the far more deeply felt wrath, against the government, against Obamacare, against Obama, felt by the people who personally knew those victims….family, friends, and their circles of friends.
Then consider the size of those circles.
I can use myself as an example, for I’ve lived a life of a semi-hermit. I don’t play golf, go to saloons, Rotary Club, etc. I don’t hang out. Still, were I screwed by Obamacare, simply having my insurance cancelled, I have five of six old high school chums, ten or fifteen college friends, another dozen of so from law school, and twenty or thirty from the Army. I have maybe thirty colleagues hereabouts. And my wife, three generations from this same town, has at least 37.000.
A simple email from me would work its way onto dozens of Facebook pages, not a few Tweets, and hundreds of “I guess you heard about V” emails, all within a few days.
Quickly, news of my being “pained’ by Obama would leap from about 60 to at least six thousand also being pained. If I’d been a teenager, triple that. If a had weeping mother, or an out-of-work father, quadruple it.
And here’s the kicker, every single one of those 6000-20000 people would have a special and specific empathy with my plight. There is never a chance of famine-fatigue setting in as we sometimes do when we’re inundated with bad stories about people we don’t know.
You don’t have to go to six degrees of Kevin Bacon to realize, three will do, and three are automatic. People will grieve for me because someone they know is grieving for me.
And at the third degree, those circles of friends begin to overlap.
This is personal folks, and even if Obama doesn’t care to know it, or the media doesn’t want to see it, almost every American will feel it by the middle of 2014. And so will their Congressmen, who are no doubt already getting feedback on this phenomenon back home.
The media as farce
This isn’t rocket science. We continue to prostrate ourselves with anger about what the media is either doing or not doing, and by “we” I can point a finger at Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and all the other prominent conservative luminaries, who seem to have a deep need to martyr themselves, as victims of the media. 80% of what the media says comes to us through them. The truth is, what the media says is directed first at each other, peers, in search of status and one-upsmanship. Other than their ability to frighten Congressional politicos in general and Republican politicos specifically, they often have no power at all, except for the power their right wing media enemies give them.
This Obamacare failure is the perfect example, for all the power the media will have in the coming months as the circle-of-friends of millions of American destroyed financially and healthcar-wise by Obamacare begin to over-lap will be the power granted them by us, thru Limbaugh, Beck and company, and thousands upon thousands of blogs and tweets, all feeling sorry for ourselves about a situation that neither the media not government can fix.
To the extent they most want to be paid attention to, especially by their enemies, I suggest we leave them to flap in the wind.
There is no place they can run to, no place to hide, except in the shelter of the people’s angry, awaiting arms.
