Redstate

By Robert A. Hahn Posted in Liberals — Comments (3) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Today's Opinion Journal brings us this piece by Martin Peretz, previously noted in this diary by pennconservative.

Peretz, a somewhat less batty Moonster than we're used to seeing — he's editor of The New Republic — bemoans the fact that his Democratic Party is lurching leftward into the same Peacenik graveyard that buried the hopes of George McGovern and a generation of Democrats that followed.

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What Peretz doesn't mention — and somebody should — is that the Democrats' headlong march to the left is highly popular among the sort of Democrats who write the "news," with the consequence that the entire country, not just Connecticut, is getting a full dose of antiwar demagoguery seemingly coming from the Democratic Party leadership.

The truth is, most people don't know who the Democratic Party leadership is. Without a Democratic president, it's sort of hard to tell. It's not even clear that the Democrats themselves know. There's Howard Dean, who is described as the "head of the Democratic National Committee," but other than him, the Democratic leadership consists of whomever the Democrats who write the news think is important. Increasingly, these are antiwar figures.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Congressman Jack Murtha is a long-time resident of the back bench, in the lower house, from the minority party. He even has some long-ago tarnish left on him from a scandal called Abscam. How does it happen that Jack Murtha has become a headline maker? What other lower-house back-bencher has been invited onto the Sunday talk shows, not just once but numerous times? Jack Murtha is a headline maker because the headline writers want him to be. He is what the Democrats in the media want all Democrats to be: far to the left of the American public... just as the Democrats in the media are.

If this is August, it must be Cindy Sheehan. Already we're seeing the Cindy Sheehan stories, and she hasn't even cranked up her protests yet. Cindy Sheehan is important — to the sort of Democrats who populate the media — and so everything she does is Big News that requires attendance by multiple reporters and cameramen.

No one cares about Cindy Sheehan. Cindy Sheehan is nothing, and nobody. She's on TV and in the papers for the same reason that Jack Murtha is on TV and in the papers: because the media is full of Democrats who believe that what she has to say is important, and that everyone should hear it. They believe that because they live in a bubble of all-liberal, all-the-time newsrooms and cocktail parties where they never hear anything else. They really believe they are "mainstream," because the only opinions they ever hear are their own.

It's true that Cindy Sheehan is no sort of Democratic Party official. But it's also true that no one is going to mistake her for a Republican. Every time the media trots out one of these antiwar figures for our edification, more peacenik-stink gets on the Democratic Party and on the Democrats running for office. The folks in the Astrology-Based Community™ think this is wonderful, but those Democrats who actually hoped to take back the House and the Senate this year have to wonder how much more of this help they can withstand.

It used to be that the leftward tilt in the media was of great benefit to the Democratic Party. But the tilt has become so pronounced in recent years, with everyday reporters and editors sounding more like left-wing bloggers and conspiracy cranks every day, that the media are no longer helping. Instead they are portraying to the public a "Party" that is far to the left of the American electorate, and considerably left of where most Democratic office holders want to be.

Those of us on the right who used to fear the effects of a left-leaning media on the national discourse can only be thankful that the left's greatest creation has finally gone Frankenstein on them, leading them back into the graveyard from which it came.