ANABlog Bashes MSM

A while back, one of our favorite bloggers, Marc Geelhoed, pined for a little Hunter S. Thompson in this campaign cycle. He pointed out that despite the wealth of material in this election, the media coverage has been downright eyeball glazing.

Nothing encapsulates that more than an appearance by the total limpdick that Rolling Stone has allowed to ape Thompson for the past few years. Matt Taibbi turns up every now and then on TV, which only reminds us that he's trying even harder than it seems when you read his columns. In person, he comes off as a reasonably-minded preppie, which makes the fire he breathes in print seem all that much more artificial. In private, he's probably not rabidly anti-Clinton or anti-GOP at all.

But Taibbi's not the only douchebag covering this election who likes to get hopped up on nothing harder than Red Bulls and toss grenades into their copy. Chris Matthews never met a boxing analogy he didn't like, and Keith Olbermann wants to be Edward R. Murrow so bad that it's surprising he doesn't broadcast Countdown in black and white.

Take today's big kerfuffle: The Pelosi Letter.

A bunch of Clinton donors didn't like what she had to say about superdelegates going with the popular vote; so, they wrote her a letter. Now, it is a perfectly ordinary letter from a group of donors to a politician asking her to bear their point of view in mind.

However, you wouldn't know that from the headlines, which have raised sensationalism to new lows:

'Top Clinton Backers Threaten Pelosi' (US News)

'Clinton backers warn Pelosi on superdelegate rift' (Reuters)

'Hillary Campaign Didn't Disavow Donor Letter To Pelosi' (TPM)

'Obama Camp Hammers Letter To Pelosi As "Inappropriate"' (TPM)

The coverage of this mundane little story typifies the media's default tone for every moment of this campaign. Other favorite headline verbs: 'bash', 'rip', 'slam', and 'slug'.

As Marc pointed out, this is all a very dim echo of Gonzo journalism, which got woven into the mainstream media so slowly and effortlessly that it's easy to forget how revolutionary it really was. Guys like Taibbi think littering their copy with f-bombs gussies it up enough to call it Gonzo, but what none of these pantywaists get is that Hunter actually had profound insights about the process.

These jerkwads are just ornamenting standard political beat stories with coarse language. Hunter used the vernacular to cut to the core of the matter:

"There is nothing in McGovern’s campaign, so far, to suggest that he understands this kind of thing. For all his integrity, he is still talking to the Politics of the Past. He is still naïve enough to assume that anybody who is honest & intelligent—with a good voting record on “the issues”—is a natural man for the White House.

But this is stone bullshit. There are only two ways to make it in big-time politics today: One is to come on like a mean dinosaur, with a high-powered machine that scares the shit out of your entrenched opposition (like Daley or Nixon)…and the other is to tap the massive, frustrated energies of a mainly young, disillusioned electorate that has long since abandoned the idea that we all have a duty to vote. This is like being told you have a duty to buy a new car, but you have to choose immediately between a Ford and a Chevy."

Unlike McGovern, Obama understands perfectly well that he's taking Door Number Two in Hunter's scenario. Can't reach working class voters in Pennsylvania? Well, then push to register every last college student you can in the state!

And for those who still think that 'Yes We Can' and 'We are the Change that We've Been Waiting For' is about anything but Barack Obama's unbridled ego, Hunter has a bucket of cold water for them too:

"…a man on the scent of the White House is rarely rational. He is more like a beast in heat: a bull elk in the rut, crashing blindly through the timber in a fever for something to fuck. Anything! A cow, a calf, a mare—any flesh and blood beast with a hole in it. The bull elk is a very crafty animal for about fifty weeks of the year: his senses are so sharp that only an artful stalker can get within a thousand yards of him…but when the rut comes on, in the autumn, any geek with the sense to blow an elk-whistle can lure a bull elk right up to his car in ten minutes if he can drive within hearing range.

The dumb bastards lose all control of themselves when the rut comes on. Their eyes glaze over, their ears pack up with hot wax, and their loins get heavy with blood. Anything that sounds like a cow elk in heat will fuse the central nervous systems of every bull on the mountain. They will race through the timber like huge cannonballs, trampling small trees and scraping off bloody chunks of their own hair on the unyielding bark of the big ones. They behave like sharks in a feeding frenzy, attacking each other with all the demented violence of human drug dealers gone mad on their own wares.

A career politician finally smelling he White House is not much different from a bull elk in the rut. He will stop at nothing, trashing anything that gets in his way; and anything he can’t handle personally he will hire out—or, failing that, make a deal. It is a difficult syndrome for most people to understand, because few of us ever come close to the kind of Ultimate Power and Achievement that the White House represents to a career politician."

While Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 is far from necessary reading, it is still a bracing look into the political process, and when placed aside the impotent reportage of '08, it leaves us jonesing for some Gonzo.

Perhaps most indispensable of all, is the 'July' chapter, wherein a 28-year old Rick Stearns explains to Hunter how he and Gary Hart navigated the byzantine credential rules of the party to insure McGovern's nomination at the convention in Miami Beach.

The Democrats bring this shit on themselves with an unstinting devotion to fairness, which inevitably leaves its intended beneficiaries feeling royally screwed over. They've set up a system where neither Barack or Hillary can win the delegates necessary for the nomination.

So, eager young staffers on those campaigns ought to get a copy of Thompson's book and brush up on the art of maneuvering on the convention floor. It might just win their bull elk the White House.