Bozell Column: 2012, A Year Of Media Savagery

For those Republican presidential candidates who eventually conclude there is no path to the nomination, there is consolation in the notion that they won’t be the ones to face the brutal onslaught being prepared for the GOP king of the mountain by Team Obama and their army of “objective” media allies.

This time around, the Obama machine cannot run on the fairy dust of Hope and Change. They cannot suggest after four years of dreadful executive-branch performance, the Promised One is on the horizon. Their only path to victory is the one that finds their opponents even more disliked. So it can be guaranteed that whoever wins the Republican contest will face one of the most scorching personal assaults the country has ever witnessed.

Occasionally, the old-style thrill-up-my-leg-over-Obama quote still emerges. The Media Research Center’s “Best of Notable Quotables” winners for 2011 provides examples. Stephen Marche of Esquire magazine won over judges of the “Obamagasm Award” by energetically asking “can we just take a month or two to contemplate him the way we might contemplate a painting by Vermeer or a guitar lick by the early-seventies Rolling Stones or a Peyton Manning pass or any other astounding, ecstatic human achievement?” At least when they said this in 2008, it hadn’t been completely disproved. Marche reminds us of Baghdad Bob, the ridiculous propagandist for Saddam, proclaiming the defeat of allied troops while they emerged around the corner.

Marche actually claimed we will look back decades from now and see “a glorious idyll in American politics, with a confident, intelligent, fascinating president riding the surge of his prodigious talents from triumph to triumph.” Someone hearing Marche declare this might rush him to an emergency-room for signs of dementia.

The winner of MRC’s “Media Hero Award” came forward as the congressional career of Anthony Weiner was about to end after having demonstrated his contempt for his wife by showing off his body parts all over Twitter (and actually tweet-exchanging with high school
girls).

Read More at Newsbusters By Brent Bozell, Newsbusters