Democracy Dies in Trivia frontpagemag.com/fpm/271918/dem…
“Democracy Dies in Darkness” is the motto of the post-Trump WaPo. This pompous and self-congratulatory bit of virtue-signaling is meant to proclaim the essential function the media play in protecting the political order against the supposed threat of tyranny embodied in Trump.
The hypocrisy of a media that wear its progressive ideology on its sleeve, and that blatantly skew their coverage of the president at a 90% negative clip, has exposed the motto as mere marketing to the leftist choir.
The truth is, “darkness” is not a problem in the klieg-lit media carnival of 24/7, 365-day on-line commentary, blogs, videos, tweets, cable-news talking heads, and Facebook posts.
The problem is the trivial, often childish, usually stupid content of our Madisonian “passions” that we indulge, even as our political dysfunctions relentlessly worsen.
Gratifying our feelings rather than our reason was most obvious in the rise of Barack Obama.
“The One” succeeded in becoming the most powerful leader on the planet despite being a political tyro with a poorly attended single term in the Senate and a negligently vetted candidate with a Swiss-cheese personal biography.
He had a stable of unsavory associates like terrorist Bill Ayers and “God-damn America” racist Jeremiah Wright, and a zombie leftist of the sort produced for decades by our decaying universities.
And Obama did so not just because of the duplicitous rhetoric of “unity” and “moderation” typical of all candidates, but because of the racial melodrama of white guilt and redemption promised by his light skin, lack of a “negro accent,” as Biden put it.
Because of his photogenic smile and family the media made as ubiquitous as McDonalds. That’s all it took for the worst president since World War II to get elected twice.
The descent into trivia accelerated with the arrival of Trump, who infuriated the left with his understanding of the new mediaverse and its potential for bypassing the media and speaking directly to the masses of disgruntled voters scorned as “bitter clingers” and “deplorables.”
His critics became obsessed with his straight-talking, vulgar, braggadocios style that daily scorned their politically correct and elite-sanctioned decorum.
Beneath that storm of tweets and insults, Trump addressed immigration, over-regulation of the economy, growth-killing taxes, the tyranny of political correctness, and an international contempt for this country fostered during the Obama years––
— issues that long had disgruntled millions of Americans and insulted their common sense.
And when Trump started to govern, that flamboyant rhetoric––unlike Obama’s silver-tongued catalogue of empty promises and camouflaged “social justice” bromides–– actually produced IEDs like Obamacare or a sluggish economy, but economic growth and jobs at home, and...
... renewed respect from our adversaries and allies abroad. His blunt banter may have been trivial, but his accomplishments are real.
Enraged by this success, the progressive media and politicians sank further into the swamps of the superficial – their attention dominated by porn-star gold-diggers, preposterous oppo research, careless associates snagged in 2-bit process crimes...
...obsessing over phantom “Russian collusion,” murky allegations about violations of campaign finance laws, serial hysteria about threats to “democratic norms,” warnings of looming “fascism,” and ...
.. 1st Amendment vapors over chastising a boorish media hack like Jim Acosta, and of course the continuing manic parsing of every transient tweet.
