Fringe? What Fringe! This is NOT A Fringe! It’s A… Shrinkage! Just A Shrinkage, Damn You!

Some folks just cannot win.Even when they won. Here’s a (barely) random example: hmmmm…. Democrats!
I say “random” because I randomly bumped into this post by David Sirota on Daily Kos. Read it and visualize his eyes expressing the pain of a 3 year old who just got his lollipop yanked out of his mouth by an unfathomably heartless reality check:

The first example comes from the Times’ piece today about congressional Democrats’ anti-war Out of Iraq Caucus,the New York Times is so blinded by its elitist, Serious Person disdain
for the vast majority of the public that it actually published this absurdly oxymoronic statement:

“Even with a majority of Americans opposing the war, the caucus is struggling to overcome its fringe image.”

 I say this statement is oxymoronic because Democrats who want to bring the troops home from Iraq
do not have a “fringe image” among the public, which also - according
to polls - strongly wants the same thing. Then again, maybe I’m wrong: Maybe this statement is just a very public admission that editors and reporters at newspapers like the New York Times really believe they get to unilaterally decide “images,” not the public; and from their Beltway vantage point where the only Serious People are those neoconservatives who pushed the war in the first place, anyone who wants to end the war is a Dirty Hippie on the “fringe.” Either way, this line is stunning (though sadly not shocking) for its sheer idiocy, its Beltway-typical disconnection from public opinion, its deliberate contempt for the majority of the country - or whatever combination of all three led to its publication.

I hate to rub it in, but I read the NYT article in question: when the Out Of Iraq Congressional Caucus calls 30 press conferences that are completely and utterly ignored by the media, said Caucus qualifies as… well… errr… irrelevant. Of course, one could always cling to the notion of selective reporting by out-of-touch-with-the-heartland Beltway media types (you know, the ones who are beholden to the Bush administration for fear of being ignored or moved to the back of the room at the next White house press briefing), but that dog just don’t hunt. Let me throw some names out there: Seymour Hersh, Keith Olbermann, Helen Thomas, Frank Rich, Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd (let’s play a little game, David Sirota: how many of these people write for the NYT? hint: the last 3 I mentioned), and the list could go on for quite a long time. None of these folks  have ever sounded like Bush lapdogs.
What Sirota ovbiously fails to think about, however, is one thing: media outlets are private entities. I know, I know, in a capitalist society, that means they want to, nay, need to make a profit. An ugly word, for most lefties, but none the less a fact. The need for such profit translates into the need for readers. The need for readers itself translates into said media outlets acting like mere weather vanes of public opinion, lest they fall victim to a journalist (I use that term loosely, since most news reporting nowadays is merely an attempt to convert an audience to the point of view of one supposedly enlightened ideologue) causing a tsunami of disapproval and subscription cancellations. So please, spare me the image of the journalist posing as a white knight of freedom and democracy. I’m so overtaxed already that I can’t afford to buy it.

Finally, Sirota’s whiningly arrogant criticism of the NYT overlooks one other aspect of the problem he develops: it’s not only them who are saying this.  Their claim is corroborated  by none else than a fellow Daily Kos blogger by the name of Wolverine 6, who wrote the following exactly 2 hours, 31 minutes and 26 seconds before Sirota’s  anguished complaint:

Murtha and Levin are complicit with the war crimes. Sunday on Meet the Press, Murtha (via Raw Story)is quoted as saying,

US Representative John Murtha, one of the leading advocates in Congress for pulling US troops from Iraq quickly, said that
Democrats have concluded that ending the war is not as easy as cutting off funding.

“We don’t have the votes to do it,” he told US television Sunday.

If the Democrats fail, the only option left is revolution and foreign intervention. Tyranny is but assured because Congress cannot and will not exercise it’s Constitutional power to end this fascist Coup d’etat.

This is outrageous! The only two options available to Congress,Impeachment and cutting the funds, are now both off the table. What nowDemocrats? What other magic powers will you invoke? You have taken the only constitutional means you have available to end this fascist train off the table.

“We don’t have the votes to do it,”

You don’t have the votes to do it because every Democrat is silent on the WAR CRIMINALS that have infested this country. And furthermore,”So what?” Put it up for a vote. Then do it again and again and again.Twenty six times if you have to just like the Arctic Wildlife NationalRefuge oil drilling agenda.

What up Speaker Pelosi? Are you to be known as the first woman Speaker and last Speaker of the semi-free republic in America? The avarice, the complicity, the cowardice, infidelity, disloyalty, and dishonor on display is a discredit and a disgrace to all Americans and True Patriots.

It is truly nauseating to think that, as this nation sinks down into tyranny and breathes its last gasps of democracy, the democrats have,of their own free choosing, removed from themselves the only two viable options at gaining back liberty.

This is not oversight. This is complicity in war crimes.

This the entire post. No mention of the arrogance of the NYT, not a word about their partisan, elitist ugliness. Actually, the culprit here seem to be Jack “Jowls Of Doom” Murtha, as well as the rest of the Democrat self-proclaimed saviors of this country, who are admitting that the “slow bleed” legislation they were touting as the cure for all ills in Iraq do not have enough votes? Whaaaaat? The House is with a Democrat majority, isn’t it? What gives?

More and more, the left is hitting its soft little nose against the hard wall of facts: they won the elections under false pretenses. They never had a program beyond the “Bush bad” mantra.

Don’t blame the New York Times for that.