E!! The True Conservative Story™

This post by Yuval Levin is well worth reading.

Some excerpts if you choose not to click through:

I have never seen, and I admit that I could never have imagined, such shameful, out-of-control, frenzied, angry, condescending, and pathetic journalistic malpractice. The ignorant assault on Palin’s accomplishments and experience, the breathless careless airing of deranged rumors about her private life, the staggeringly indecent mistreatment of her teenage daughter in a difficult time, the ill-informed piling on about the vetting process, the self-intensifying circle of tisking nodding heads utterly detached from a straightforward political event, have been amazing and eye-opening…

The spectacle reveals a deep rot at the heart of the political press, and has been among the most shameful chapters in the history of modern American journalism. Not everyone has joined in, of course, but essentially all of the important institutions of our political press have played their part in one way or another…

…the treatment she has received is not what just any VP candidate would get, and the attitude and assumptions underlying this week’s amazing assault raise very troubling questions about the cream of the crop of political reporters. They have shown themselves to be too insulated and too solipsistic to help the public better understand our politics, and too self-important to report on events as they happen. This is far more than media bias. Let us hope it is a passing episode.

We live in strange times.  The term “Tabloid Media” used to mean publications like the National Enquirer and The Star.  Now it means the New York Times and all the major news networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) as well as cable news stations MSNBC and CNN. 

Just to be clear, I rarely read/watch any of these.  And when I do, it is with a critical eye and ear.  These newspapers and media channels have become positively smarmy in their coverage (eg what we’ve seen this week with coverage of the pregnancy of Palin’s teenage daughter).  They are overtly biased and downright rabid in pursuit of the political agendas of their editorial staff and/or respective publishers. 

In short, they are not to be trusted.  Primarily because they claim to HAVE no bias, which is so laughable it ends the whole debate right there.  I’d rather read/watch a biased account from a publication/station that makes no attempt to hide the political views of its editors/producers than read/watch a biased account from a publication that claims to be neutral. 

In the first case, I know what I’m getting and can more easily separate the wheat from the chaff.  In the second case, well…  I can’t even take them seriously enough to read/listen to their sensational, fundamentally dishonest headlines and story lead-ins.

As I noted in a post the other day, Republicans have historically tended to be more reliable voters than Democrats, i.e. they show up at the booth with a lot less prompting and prodding.  This is a factor that cannot be left out of the registration equation.  Democrat campaign managers need to figure out how many registered Democratic voters are needed to equal/exceed one Republican vote.  Because it is an issue of quality over quantity, it is not going to be a one-to-one correlation.

On this subject, NV Senator Bob Beers has some comments on all the media attention the voter registration issue is getting.  He notes that while much Ado has been made about the voter registration gains made by Democrats in the past year (here and here and here), some Republicans see it another way:

The hyper-aggressive Democrat voter registration program, funded by Harry Reid’s millions in advance of his 2010 re-election or election of his son in his place, seems to have been focusing on that peculiar brand of ultra-transient new resident, most of whom have probably moved home in the wake of the flattening of Nevada’s once-thriving job market.

Some contend the Democrat voter registration program has become so aggressive that it has taken to registering people who do not actually exist.

The majority of existing voters who are changing their party affiliation to Democrat had been registered Non-Partisan. Those people probably were already voting Democrat, so changing their registrations won’t have much impact on November end-of-season voting, though it will cause an increase in the raw number of Democrats who vote in primaries.

As case-and-point, Beers points to the primary balloting…particularly in the Porter-Titus congressional district, where more Republicans voted than did Democrats.  26,892 Republicans voted compared to 26,241 Democrats despite all the buzz re: the massive registration lead Democrats had supposedly built in that district.

Below Beers shows the trend in some other districts where there was both a Democrat and Republican primary:

This McCain campaign ad is a must see.  LOL