We Create Our Own Reality

     We won't finally get on the road back to reality until Karl Rove is made the manager of the bargain bin at a Houston K-Mart offering .99¢ discounted books by the likes of Sarah Palin, Brad Thor and Pam Gellar before they get sent to their publishers' shredders.
     If on Super Tuesday 2012 the American public got fed up with the Republican Party's constant lies, scandals, racism, misogyny, ignorance, hostility and overall dysfunction and policies that are more unpopular than an outbreak of AIDS on Fire Island, then why haven't we similarly gotten fed up with the mainstream media and tanked subscriptions, Nielson and Arbitron ratings?
     The return on the ongoing investments the MSM make on the likes of Karl Rove, who had gotten it consistently wrong about 2006, 2008 and most of all 2012 and Dick Morris, who's the anti-Nostradamus, would never fly outside the reality bubble in which the Professional Right (or Professional Wrong, depending on your fidelity to the truth) comfortably lives and into which they wind up dragging a good percentage of us.
     In the real world, a consultant with a track record as abysmal as Rove's and Morris' would, over a period of a few years, eventually not get contracted to provide services, especially if they invariably made their benefactors and erstwhile employers look silly. In the real world, if you don't do your job correctly and show a stunning lack of ignorance in the commission of your duties, you get fired, plain and simple.
     But this is not the real world. We live a Bizarro World in which popular incumbents and candidates, we're told even up until hours before the polls close, will lose to an unspecified whackjob who turns out be to less appealing and electable than a dead gerbil.
     To be sure, not all of them are delusional. Republicans crunch poll numbers just like the Democrats and a canny, observant pundit (such as Nate Silver) can detect trends and see minute but telling shifts in campaign strategies such as Mitt Romney pulling millions of dollars of ads from Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (all states he lost) and diverting the funds to other states in which he thought he had a chance.
     But what does a candidate or incumbent do if the pollsters are wrong such as Gallup's and Rasmussen's now-infamous pratfalls just before Election Day? And these men and women who wear expensive business suits on television, these stupendously accomplished and erudite experts who've worked for presidential administrations, why they can't possibly be wrong! They must know something we don't!
     At least that's the image and the myth that the MSM advances and everything depends upon this manufactured credibility and consensus. Just as war profiteers and other corporations create markets that didn't exist only to corner those markets when demand is artificially created, so the MSM, their tin-plated pundits and the corporate sponsors they all serve literally manufacture truth. As someone (almost indisputably Karl Rove) once told Ron Suskind in 2004, "we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out."
     That may be de rigueur and uncomfortably accepted by the proletariat in presidential policy-making in which the "actors" and "architects" are gone anywhere from one to eight years. But it's fatal, or one would think fatal, for a mainstream media that's around for longer than that, often decades. There was a reason why Walter Cronkite was "the most trusted man in America", a mantle that's never been reasonably assumed by anyone that's come along since his retirement from CBS's main news desk over three decades ago.
     Read my lips: We need to stop PR welfare. We need to stop paying pill-popping child molester Rush Limbaugh tens of millions of dollars a year even while his employer, Clear Channel, lays off hundreds so they can keep covering his checks so he can lose over 130 sponsors and squirt diarrhea at women, liberals who plainly know more than him and minorities.
     And we need to stop parading on television so-called experts and pundits who are plainly subverting the electoral process to exclusively benefit Republican psychopaths who wind up getting voted out after one term. Dick Morris, to name just one egregious example, was not only wrong about Mitt Romney, he was very wrong, predicting that Romney would get well over 300 electoral votes (even the most slanted and hopeful polls by the likes of Rasmussen "showed" Romney ahead of the president by one point going into Election Day) and win by the landslide that the president won by in the Electoral College.
     But the MSM will never learn anything and we'll see the likes of Rove and Morris back on TV in another three or four years even as the GOP harvests another bumper crop of delusional right wing assclowns for our collective, condescending amusement, predicting that one of them will win the White House and that they'll take the Senate.

     Because manufacturing a neck-and-neck horse race when a landslide will surely occur, instead, and lying to the American public in order to sell commercial time at the highest possible rates is certainly more important than listening to Nate Silver.