AlterNet: Only in America Could a Two-Faced Creature Like McCain Attain Such Media Status

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Only in America Could a Two-Faced Creature Like McCain Attain Such Media Status

By Rory O'Connor, AlterNet. Posted September 5, 2008.

Only in America could a man who has called the mainstream media his "base" run against that very same media.




Only in America could a man who has been in office for decades run as an "outsider" against the entrenched interests in Washington.

Only in America could a man who is a longtime Republican stalwart run against his own party, which has governed while controlling most of the institutional levers of power -- the presidency, the Supreme Court and the Congress -- for much of the past eight years.

And only in America could a man who has called the corporatized, in-the-tank, mainstream media his "base" -- the media that made him its darling and hailed him for his supposed "straight talk" -- run against that very same media, bashing it figuratively while "peace officers" were doing so quite literally to journalists in the streets of St. Paul, in a manner unseen since the '60s and the Chicago days of Richard Daley and the subsequent Nixonian "nattering nabobs of negativity" era.

Yes, welcome to America, land of opportunity, where every politician is a self-styled "change agent" -- yet little ever seems to change.

Running hard against the elite, effete (or as Bill O'Reilly concisely puts it, the "sniveling, left-wing, wine-drinking, brie-eating") media establishment -- while simultaneously chewing on pork rinds, downing shots of Crown Royal with beer chasers, and quadrennially cozying up to Soccer and Hockey Moms and Nascar Dads -- is of course a time-honored tradition among political practitioners within both the Republican and the Democratic wings of America's ruling Property Party. Yet few since the days of Tricky Dick and his attack dog Spiro Agnew have taken the obligatory attacks on the media to such heights -- or depths, really -- as the McCain-Palin campaign, now effectively run by the bullet-headed attack dog Steve Schmidt and other acolytes of Karl Rove and the band of merry miscreants most responsible for the debacle formerly known as the Bush administration. .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/97766/only_in_america_could_a_two-faced_creature_like_mccain_attain_such_media_status/