Boys Crying Wolf

Atrios has a great post up today, featuring the long lost Mighty Mighty Reason Man, about Instapundit and his gang’s early retreat to threats of force when things don’t go their way.

Instapundit: (Via alicublog)

Freedom of the press, as it exists today (and didn’t exist, really, until the 1960s) is unlikely to survive if a majority — or even a large and angry minority — of Americans comes to conclude that the press is untrustworthy and unpatriotic. How far are we from that point?

Gosh, I don’t know. But just as soon as I get over the whiplash, I’ll give it some thought. After all, just over a year ago, when the media slobbered like a bunch of 2 dollar hookers over Dear Leader’s codpiece on that aircraft carrier, they were being extremely patriotic and trustworthy. I don’t know what the hell has happened to them. Maybe we should ask Eliot Abrams if Sy Hersh is the anti-Christ.

Atrios also quotes Newties former flak, and current editorial whore for the Washington Times, Tony Blankley, saying:

It is heartbreaking, though no longer perplexing, that the president’s political and media opposition want the president’s defeat more than America’s victory. But that is the price we must pay for living in a free country. (Sedition laws almost surely would be found unconstitutional, currently — although things may change after the next terrorist attack in America.)

Isn’t that sweet yet sad? It’s heartbreaking … On the other hand, blowjobs were also such threats to the country that we had to use the nuclear constitutional option of impeachment, so there doesn’t seem to be much that isn’t cause for putting the jackboot on the neck if that’s what it takes to make America free. (Certainly, it’s nothing that a little harmless forced sex couldn’t cure, eh Tony?)

What’s happening here is entirely predictable because modern Republicans are demented children. They have two modes — smug and rabid. When things are going well for them politically, they are unbearably arrogant, shoving it in everyone’s faces, ungraciously lording it over all concerned. When things go badly they instantly begin foaming at the mouth and escalate rapidly into a psychotic break.

The thing to remember is that their threats and tantrums are real but usually ineffective in the long run — but they often have the unfortunate salutary effect of cowing the press, who are a bunch of prissy little sissies.

The Reason Man says:

It’s as if I stood on a street corner screaming about the malevolence of the homeless, and then asked a homeless guy how long he thought he would survive if a large mob bent on hanging winos were to suddenly form in the vicinity.

How, then, can this be interpreted as anything other than “how long before the people I represent use their influence to forcibly ‘balance’ the news”?

It can’t, and they know it. They use this intimidation technique all the time.

One perfect of example of this phenomenon is the Florida Recount. Underlying all the legal mumbo jumbo and the behind the scenes maneuvering, lay a palpable nervousness in the media. Their daily refrain was, “hurry, hurry, hurry — the country is getting impatient,” “so far, there are no tanks in the streets, so at least we can be grateful for that,” even though polls showed that the people weren’t particularly in a hurry and were too riveted to their televisions to contemplate revolution. But the Greenfields’s and the Williams’s and the Matthews’s were constantly referring to some dark possibility of civil insurrection if things didn’t wrap up quickly.

They weren’t dreaming, they were just taking Republicans at their word. Bush’s team was down there in Florida ginning up the emotion, hysterically accusing little old ladies of “diviiiiining the will of the voters,” pounding down doors in mock riots, appearing on television shows and ranting delusionally about the Democrats stealing the election. (William Bennett on Capital Gang became so red-faced I thought he was having a heart attack.) The freepers sent in their goons to shout at the VP residence to “get out of Cheney’s house!” Tom DeLay said quite openly that he would not allow Al Gore to take the presidency. Justice Scalia hinted darkly at civic upheaval if Bush didn’t get his way.

The public, reasonably, were unimpressed. After all, the Republicans had been in high dudgeon over something or other for years. From haircuts to travel agents to Chinese espionage to Lincoln Bedroom to cattle futures to blowjobs and state troopers and wagging the dog, Republicans were always foaming at the mouth. What wasn’t a threat to the republic with these people?

But, the press continued to respond as if each GOP meltdown means that there are going to be riots in the streets, apparently led by a bunch of paunchy middle aged men in ill fitting suits who never got laid when they were young, never went to war, never made a team or played in a rock band so their dreams of masculine glory remain unfulfilled well into their 50’s.

Whether it will work again is up for grabs. After suffering under more than three years of smarmy, unctuous GOP “success” even the media may have reached a point where they find it preferable to have these people raving from the sidelines. Their impotent threats of revolution are clearly far less harmful than their proven incompetence at governing.