Lorie Byrd today links to a piece by David Limbaugh, at Townhall.com, which documents and demonstrates the Democratic party and the LSM* (nee MSM) strategy of using "the Big Lie" to discredit and undermine the Bush administration. Others have spent time in the recent past documenting, often with exquisite detail, various under-reported scandals, including the world's worst scandal (UN's Oil for Food), the CIA's rogue attempt to undermine a sitting administration whose policies they dislike (and to do that well known bureaucratic dance, the CYA), and the scandalously biased reporting by the former MSM on Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans. My interest today is in explaining why the Mediacrat strategy threatens disaster for themselves and is dangerous for the country.
For politically expedient, short sighted and short term political gain, the Democrats and their allies in the LSM, who comprise, together the "Mediacrats", are playing a dangerous game that has a number of possible outcomes, none of which are likely to be felicitous to our future political dynamic. Consider this a cautionary tale of the future:
I write a great deal about mental models, whether called templates, paradigms, transference reactions, neural nets, we create and develop mental models, constructs, from infancy and throughout our lives. Our models help us interpret the world of our senses. More importantly, our mental models, in fundamental ways, determine our perceptions. In the same way that someone who is color blind cannot differentiate red from green, a person who believes everyone is basically good will have trouble recognizing when they are in danger from a human enemy; likewise the paranoid cannot recognize when he has a friend. Mental models that are far removed from reality will ultimately fail in one of two ways. Either the person recognizes that reality does not conform to their template and is forced to develop a new one (the new girlfriend who is the most loving person a man has ever met turns out to have cheated on him; the model fails, catastrophically) or the model fails but it is denied by the person (the abusive boy friend "really" is a loving man; here fidelity to the model requires a denial of reality that keeps the woman in the position as a victim of abuse.) Our mental models are layered and have various degrees of complexity. Some models fit neatly alongside or on top of others; in cases of greater concern, models can be contradictory and incompatible. This leads back to the Mediacrats.
The dangers in the distorted model promulgated by the Mediacrats is twofold. If we liken the major media organs as equivalent to our sense organs, they not only allow us to perceive the world, but they surely shape our perceptions of the world as well. As long as the media can focus exclusively on the number of American deaths in Iraq, for example, the model of Iraq as Vietnam, a disaster and a quagmire, can be sustained, whether accurate or not. If the number of American deaths continue to diminish, elections in December go off well, and Iraq has a functioning government by the early spring, the media will be in a quandary. Their model will have been shown to be a failure (a mismatch with the reality on the ground) and their already diminishing market share will continue to disintegrate. They thus have a stake in our failure and as every day passes, that stake grows larger. Their core constituency, perhaps 20-25% of the population, will stick with them (who are they going to believe, the Iraqi people or the likes of Paul Krugman) but the bulk of the American population which remains, by virtue of their non-reliance on soft left ideology (ideology is a model, par excellence), able to accurately assess reality, will make a different determination to the question of who to believe.
For the Democratic party, the problem is similar, but in some ways worse. They also require American failure in Iraq in order to substantiate their claims that the Bush administration has been a disaster. If the Islamic fascists calculate that they can help the Democrats in November of 2006 by killing Americans in Iraq (or anywhere else, for that matter), there will be a surge of terrorism leading up to our elections in 2006. (However, keep in mind it is not so simple; our intelligence and military must be doing something right, since the predicted pre-election attacks did not succeed in 2004.) A major problem for the Democrats is that local elections are decided on local issues and incumbents have overwhelming advantages. The likelihood of the Democrats gaining the House or the Senate is slim, and Bush will still be President for the next 3 years. This means if they fail to win the House or Senate, they can only spend the next two years obstructing the will of the majority and be seen as more nakedly rooting for failure in Iraq; if by some fluke they win the House and/or Senate, they have no agenda to implement except to interfere with the prosecution of the Iraqi war, a non-winning strategy, as well.
By 2008, it is very unlikely that Americans will be getting killed in significant numbers in Iraq; either the Iraqis will have shown themselves capable of maintaining their advances, such as are taking place right now in Operation Steel Curtain, or they will be losing to the Islamic fascists; in any case it is hard to conceive of circumstances in which American forces will still be conducting the bulk of the military work 3 years from now.
This means the Democrats will have to continue playing a losing hand from now until 2008. Their model requires two additional features beyond "Bush lied". They require us to believe the threat from Islamic fascist terror was always overblown and that by being in Iraq, we have created a problem where one didn't exist before. Unless the Islamists decide to lay low for the next 3 years, this is likely to be an increasingly untenable position. A crucial point is that this requires the Islamic fascists to confine their terrorism to Iraq in order to support the Mediacrat model. Considering that just at this moment the French riots are ongoing, and difficult to tie to Iraq when the French were the leaders of the opposition to the war, the idea of Islamic terror being primarily caused by the Iraq war will be seen as increasingly unlikely and irrelevant. Furthermore, evidence continues to accumulate that the threat from Islamic fascism is world wide, and the LSM, despite their obvious interest in minimizing news of non-Iraq terrorism, must report some news from time to time. The Democrats, by tethering themselves to a model that suggests appeasement and denial, will have almost no chance of winning in 2008 unless the Republicans completely self-destruct.
And worse for the Democrats, if they win in 2008, a President Clinton would find her hands tied. The country will have agreed that the threat is essentially a criminal, not military threat, and there will be no ability for a President Clinton to plausibly threaten military force against rogue states like Iran (see Amir Taheri's article today for a chilling look at an Iran where their leader actually says what he thinks), or failed states like Somalia.
This then is the heart of the problem for the Mediacrats: They have tied their prospects to American failure in Iraq. If, by helping shape and frame the perceptions of Iraq, they succeed in promulgating their model upon the country, they can win but we will, as a country, lose. If reality contravenes their model, their very viability will be brought into question. It is ironic that those who fancy themselves to be "reality-based" have constructed a model of reality that cannot succeed.
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