Ponzi Punditry

by digby

Somerby discusses yesterdays atrocity on Hardball, so I don’t have to. He sums it up quite nicely here:

Short story? The plutocrats are trying to pick your nominee, as they tried to do in 1999. Then, these same tools puffed the wondrous Bradley, and viciously went after fake, phony Gore. And just so you can see who they are—these people who try to select your nominees—here they are, on last night’s show, discussing Social Security:

RUSSERT (11/5/07): If you’re going to make tough decisions as a president, you have to answer tough questions. What are you going to do? Show us how you’re going the lead us. Everyone knows Social Security, as it’s constructed, is not going to be in the same place it’s going to be for the next generation [sic]. Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives.

MATTHEWS: It’s a bad Ponzi scheme, at this point.

RUSSERT: Yes.

It’s a bad Ponzi scheme, the boys both said. Everyone knows it, Russert asserted. Of course, here’s Paul Krugman, on the day of that remarkable Dem debate, saying exactly the opposite. In fact, no leading Dem—save, perhaps, Obama and Edwards—thinks anything like what Russert and Matthews said. But plutocrats have pushed those scripted deceptions at the public for twenty-five years. Last night, their well-paid “Lost Boys” were pimping again—and telling you, you Democrats, who you should pick for your candidate.

Sadly, Matthews and Russert are so balls-out stupid that they may believe the things they said. They got their narrative about Social Security from the club long ago; they may not even know it’s a fraud. But these are the people who fought very hard to pick your nominee eight years ago, and they are trying, very hard, to treat you like things they own now.

Somerby is right. These people are determined to pick your nominee for you — and then they will help the Republicans destroy whoever that is in the general election. That is what they did to Al Gore, that is what they did to Howard Dean (and the John Kerry) and that is what they are currently doing to Hillary Clinton. This is not a case of only going after the front-runners, because you see very little of this kind of coverage about Giuliani, who is a veritable font of misinformation, hallucinations and lies. Neither can it be ascribed to “speaking truth to power” and going after the party that is expected to win, because they went after Howard Dean at a time when Bush was expected to win re-election handily.

I don’t care if you are a Hillary fan or not, it ends up being bad for liberals in general, particularly when they use things like the lethal lie that screws up the entire Democratic agenda when it gets any traction: social security is most definitely not a ponzi scheme. As Somerby says, this is a plutocrat agenda item that only willfully dishonest millionaire pundits like Russert and Matthews would ever characterize that way. (They know which side their tax cuts are buttered on.)

And anyway, even though they trash Clinton most gleefully, they make sure to give other Democrats a working over in the process, just in case one of them catches on. I heard some “analyst” on MSNBC say that the new Edwards “Heroes” ad, which I thought was very effective, looked like it was a “Lifetime Channel, made for TV movie — all those people standing beside their uhm, barns, waiting for their quilting bees.”

There was a time when midwestern farmers were talked up as the salt of the earth Real Americans who decide elections. But I guess that’s only true when they are Republicans. Appearing in a Democrat’s ad, they are smugly derided as a bunch of rubes or Hollywood phonies.

I am tired of the media presuming to decide who is worthy to be our elected leaders. They don’t speak for anyone but themselves. They infect our politics with their pinched insular viewpoint and then presume to tell us that’s what we all think too. It’s insulting.

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