This is the kind of moment that the corporate media has been waiting for in order to bury either hers or Obama’s campaign. And they now have something that will be the “defining moment” of the final phase for the campaign. Oh sure, she has been built up time and time again (think New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania and whatever else I forgot), only to be gleefully torn apart as she faltered (or was even perceived to falter) by people like Chris Matthews and his talking meatstick counterparts.
It doesn’t matter if she said something that was on her mind that never should have been said.
It doesn’t matter if this was more callous, more calculating or more thoughtless than anything else that she or her surrogates may have said or hinted over the course of the campaign.
It doesn’t matter that Ted Kennedy was diagnosed with cancer this week, or that the comment was about RFK, JFK or MLK.
It doesn’t matter if she was truly trying to invoke history and picked a very poor example.
It doesn’t matter if she admitted that she was very tired and that it was an incredibly stupid or insensitive thing to say.
It doesn’t matter, at this point, if her supporters will be alienated by what she said – especially since most of those supporters have already voted and/or donated to her campaign.
What matters, sadly but true, is that she has now been officially declared “done” with the one moment that can be played over and over and over and over.
And over.
Which goes back to what we talk about here a lot, laziness and stupidity in addition to bias, as a media problem. The utter arbitrariness, in that what one person says passes without comment other than on the back pages of the Beaver County Tidbit (much to the chagrin of the Tidbit) and what someone else says gets blown up into a 24-hour Pig Fuck of a “firestorm,” which incidentally if I never hear that word again … A bunch of things contribute to this: charged environment, relative stupidity of statement, availability of critics and ease of analysis with which to quickly put together a Sunday show, the latter being so much more crucial than people think. If you can’t get anyone on the phone to say “that was outrageous!” you can’t write a story about outrage.
I’m not defending her at all, at best it was a fucking dumbass thing to say and very uncool, at best. But the total lack of rules to this thing, the lack of dare I say it, standards to which journalists are always declaring they adhere, makes fighting back against it very difficult, and that’s a lesson that all Democrats should have learned four years ago, hell, eight years ago. It’s a lesson they’re going to need to learn damn quick in the coming months.
A.