As I write this in mid-2020, Abrams is credibly talked about as a possible vice presidential running mate for Democrat Joe Biden, though her only real claim to fame is losing a run for Georgia governor, not by the tiny and disputable amount the media likes to imply but by over fifty thousand votes—far too many to be the fault of Republican voter suppression as Abrams likes to claim. Yes, history is replete with efforts to suppress votes, particularly the votes of marginalized Southern blacks. But no one has plausibly alleged that such voter suppression efforts made the difference in that 2018 gubernatorial race. In fact, minority turnout was at a record high in that election. And yet Abrams still lost by a handy margin. But who needs evidence when you can blame your own failures on racism?
It’s more like journalists just want to talk about voter suppression and Stacey Abrams in the same segment, then let viewers draw their own (false) conclusions, which maybe will redound to the Democrats’ benefit in November 2020. Worth a try, by their low standards. The argument is never made, just slyly implied.
MSNBC’s Chuck Todd concluded an interview with Abrams by asking, “Do you worry that no matter how qualified you are on paper that the perception that you have not run a large organization as an executive officeholder, or that you have not won statewide, is a knock against you?”
Qualified on paper? As basically the premise of the question? What?
Stacey Abrams was the minority leader in the Georgia Legislature. As the president might say, I prefer my running mates to be majority leaders. Minority leaders essentially complain for a living. They don’t craft policy. I know. I’m in the minority now!
Abrams’s answer was head-turning, too. Because she ran a leftist voter registration organization, she claims she was clearly qualified to be number two. Right. Based on FEC filings showing the revenues and expenses of Stacey’s make-work job, she’d barely be qualified to own and operate a string of Ruby Tuesdays. Unlike her political hack organization, at least the Ruby Tuesdays would add value—and have killer ribs.
As for Beto O’Rourke, failed Democrat Texas candidate for U.S. Senate from 2018, it was never clear what he stood for that was interesting besides himself—and that wasn’t too interesting. Yet the media were happy to say amen to Beto’s emptiness. They couldn’t get enough of beta male Beto, but it turned out voters could.
Beto understood that eyeballs matter, and he could occasionally be funny or cool (by political standards), but there was no substance there. Beto himself was Beto’s only message—and this cult-figure-in-his-own-mind lacked for devoted followers in the real world. The press loved him for some reason. This book will have more substance than Beto’s whole campaign, I trust. We are glad to keep Sen. Cruz in the Senate. You can’t beat Lion Ted lying down.
Rounding out the most embarrassing media-beloved leftist losers of the 2018 cycle was Florida Man Andrew Gillum. Oh, Andrew. We were told he was the “next Obama” following his failed tenure as Tallahassee mayor. Despite the murder rate in his city rising far faster than the quality of life, he was able to beat three white people for the Democratic nomination for Florida governor. Gillum’s fellow African Americans made up about a quarter of the Democratic primary electorate.
Gillum got the media to charge—or falsely imply—that Republican Ron DeSantis was racist. Guilt by association. Quotes out of context. The usual stuff. Gillum lost anyway. But losing wasn’t so bad…at first. Gillum got his CNN commentator gig but ultimately traded that for the disco ball and the nurse and the penis injections and all that. If you don’t know what I’m referencing, ask Google.
But an arrogant press will continue to push its favorite potential superstars. And it’ll hype every disaster that happens on Trump’s watch whether it was his fault or not.
The New York Times ran the names of a thousand people representing 1 percent of the “nearly 100,000 lives lost to coronavirus,” taking up its entire front page, no doubt viewing each death as a rebuke to Trump. One problem—besides Trump having handled the crisis pretty well—is that as soon as rebel journalists started checking the Times’ list of the dead for themselves, they didn’t have to go any farther than the sixth name to find someone who had in fact died not of coronavirus but by being shot. This is your paper of record.
If the Times was trying to fan the fires of conspiracy theories about the coronavirus crisis being overblown or a hoax, I guess they accomplished their mission. But I’m sure that wasn’t the idea. They pompously introduced the list by saying that the victims were not just “numbers.” Fair enough. But some of them also aren’t coronavirus victims.
Faced with so much press bias, you can take the “battered spouse syndrome” approach tried by George W. Bush—just hoping one day you’ll be able to please your attacker. Or you can be dismissive of the press like Trump, who was asked some gotcha question about oil by a reporter and responded, unfazed, by asking the reporter at what price oil was currently trading. The media have no idea about such real-world details, but they ask the questions they’ve been told might embarrass the president, which is the important thing.
For good or ill, a free market in journalism means that all the press ultimately cares about are ratings and clicks. Competition exposes losers, and eventually exposes arrogance. In the short term, they’ll say whatever promotes the Left, but they’re not going to keep saying it if ratings tank and they have to admit they’re losing America instead of leading America by the nose, the way they could back in the twentieth
