Cracked Bells

Darned good Vanderleun post.

excerpt:

[T]heir cracked bells will never stop ringing.

And those bells will ring even louder in the next few months as the liberal media, bleating in lock-step with the Left and the dwindling liberal Democratic party, tries to beat a war-weary electorate into shrugging submission; into a desperation so deep that they will do anything to make this cast-off cartel of crap shut up, even vote them into power. And so they will ring out their cracked bells of doom, of surrender, of despair and the decline of America into delicate things.

Nothing else has worked and nothing else is to hand. So ring out the message of cracked bells, Let the citizens of these states know that for you to shut up, they've got to give power over to the party whose plan is to kill them after taxing them half to death. Boys and girls up in your trembling tower, jerk on the ropes. Ring them bells. It just might work. We don't like long wars, we like quick wins. Maybe we'd like a little peace and quiet around here for a change. Or maybe, just maybe, we'd like you to shut up and listen to us. God knows more and more of us try harder and harder not to listen to you.

But don't think that we're stupid. After all, we're smart enough not to listen to you. And don't think we don't see your plan. It is so hard to miss since you seem, in your dotage, to have hidden it in plain sight, forgetting we've all read Poe's "The Purloined Letter" in high school. Let me see if I can explain it clearly, even to you. Please try not to quote me out of context.

...

The program of this dying media -- which has chained itself onto a drowning political philosophy -- is quite simple: To take the rest of us down with it. And you plan to do it by carping on doom to such an extent that one literally will not be able to hear oneself think. Doombells in the coming months will ring everywhere at a volume louder than a U2 concert seeking to save Africa from the Africans. Stick you head out the window on Mainstream Media Street and listen. Do you hear it? Yes, there it is.

...

The bells, bells, bells, bells, bells of the Bush-bash are clapped over the citizen's ears wherever and whenever he foolishly glances at a newspaper's front page, or mistakenly clicks on a major network of a Sunday morning. Stock markets improve, jobs are so filled up that there are jobs Americans won't do because they have jobs they are happy to do. A deep problem of many Americans looking to buy second (or third or fourth) homes is that interest rates aren't as magical as they were a year ago. The 18% mortgage interest rates brought to you by Jimmy Carter's administration are consigned to the shadows while Jimmy Carter, America's official Buffoon to the world, is actually given space for his opinions on how to handle Iran, the price of oil, and the national economy. And the ratings tank, tank, tank, and the circulation of newspapers creates ever widening unemployment in the news rooms, and still the cracked bell beatings go on in the hope that Americans everywhere will say, "Hurts. Hurts! Make it stop!"

But it won't stop because, like bears hooked on garbage, the mainstream media of the United States knows only two things and tells only two stories.

In the end, the old media is dying off because the only stories they know are "Vietnam" and "Watergate." Everything they've said for nearly half a decade are just variations on those themes and we've become sick and tired on these old moldy tales; a sickness unto the death of the old media...