Justifiable Paranoia

The Anchoress:

Barack Obama is running against John McCain.

John McCain and Sarah Palin are running against the microphones, cameras and ink barrels of the easily wounded mainstream press. Obama doesn’t have to do much of anything if the barely knowledgeable and completely agendized press is going to carry him to victory on their shoulders.

And of course, a press who will not ask a probing question, investigate a shady association or demand any sort of accountability from the guy they put into place is not going to ask much of him once they’ve enthroned him there. Which is all a nation needs to nurture an ambitious sapling looking for love into a mighty oak of tyranny.

The press used to like to say their job was to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” or some such…but they won’t dare make Sen. Obama the least bit uncomfortable, will they, with a searching question. They didn’t “afflict” John Kerry much either, but this time ’round it’s truly remarkable.

Some are wondering why the press has gone this far - why they are in the process of destroying their own credibility in an effort to insure a victory for the Democrat candidate over McCain, the guy they loved, as long as he was singing their tunes.

Well, really, it is simple. With the first-amendment unfriendly Obama in the White House, the Internet-unfriendly Pelosi running the House and as many as 3 SCOTUS judges to be named probably within Obama’s first year in office, the press will face a huge reduction in competition from the alternative media. With a filibuster-proof house the so-called “fairness doctrine” will quickly be put back in place, which will effectively end representation of opposing viewpoints. With Mrs. Pelosi’s previously murmured intentions to regulate internet freedoms and access, even unto her own elected colleagues, the ‘net will cease to be a force in politics or freedom of expression. And the newly revitalized ‘activist’ Supreme Court will uphold all of it.

In other words, with an Obama victory and a Democrat sweep, the press will - within a year or so - once again be “the only game in town.” And with no reason to do so, they will not even pay the barest lip-service to opposition opinion. Hell, they barely do, now. They will become the monolithic monopoly which acts as the trumpet for the Glorious Government of the People’s Republic of America - or, if you like, Pravda West.

I expect we’ll also see a newly minted “crisis” coming down the pike every other week - to keep the nation off-balance and distracted. Fun times.

Once again, as one raised by classical liberals, one who considers herself, still, to be a “classical” liberal, I am at a loss to understand how those who call themselves “liberal” in 2008 can find this unfree, suppressive press acceptable. I am at a loss to explain how the very people who have been hyperventilating about “lost civil rights” - and projecting all manner of suppression onto a Bush administration that never shut down a film, or a parody, or a radio station or a book or play or any media that criticized it so roundly and with so much vigorous hate - are so willfully blind to the maneuvers being run by their favorite candidate. But love is blind. So, apparently is the appetite for victory. Winning “at all costs” - even unto the ends of the scorched earth - will end up costing a great deal, but some don’t seem to care about that.

A President Obama seems to promise a heavy boot coming down hard on dissent and to seriously threaten civil liberties, beyond the first and second. He’s already showing his inclinations in that area. Those of us who dissent will no longer be told “dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” We’ll be feeling full-blast the “chill wind” Tim Robbins so prosaically imagined all those years ago. I can’t wait to see what happens to our rights to assemble and to worship. Hey, where 2 or 3 are gathered, and not in his name, there might be a conspiracy - can’t have that...