They might have learned something from the original breakfast flake of modern times Ross Perot. But the news media do not learn. They speculate, they trumpet, they pander, they shill – “It’s news! How can we not cover news?!”

And who made it news?

You’d think certainly they would have learned from Rudy and Fred Thompson, the real Law and Order and the fake. (The Army Corp of Engineers is still calculating the size, impression, and speed of Thompson’s 2008 face-fall.)

Their attention span is so short, that it took less than a week for the long-heralded Rick Perry, on the basis of one, by this point, SOP conservative gaffe-charge – the “treasonous” Ben Bernanke – for the MSM to begin fishing around for another savior: once more into the news-cycle breach Chris Christie. Et tu, Paul Ryan? Say, why not James O’Keefe? There must be a promising high school Young Republican who can “look presidential” if you squint.

But, they will protest, Karl Rove talked about it. How can we not repeat his talking points, float a trial balloon for him, claim the news cycle for him, shill for him, report the news? For today’s journalists, who skipped the training in editorial judgment and who present the truth and the lie as two sides of an argument, anything a pol says, no matter how false, manipulative, and self-promotional is news that simply must be reported. To remind, as well, as they signed up for the second coming of Perry, that the man consorts with an American turn on the Muslim Brotherhood and that he publicly titillated Texas crowds with talk of secession from the union – which last time, we will recall, produced a civil war that rent the nation and cost nearly three quarters of a million lives – well, this might be considered taking sides, and the media wouldn’t want to do that. Better, instead to function as megaphones for the real media masters.

Now the same mimickers of political-class drivel fuss over Perry’s extreme comments about Bernanke as if that’s news. And search again for the new messiah. Might they rather report on what is the real story – that the GOP has descended to levels of anti-intellectual ignorance, corporate plutocracy, chauvinism, xenophobic and racial hostility, and militaristic belligerence that have probably not been seen from a major political party in a putative democracy outside of the Balkans since the early 1930s? That it says something worth deeply pondering about the GOP that with so many candidates in its field, the party itself recognized that there is something somehow wrong? With Islamist-styled religious extremists (Perry and Bachmann)? With historically and naturally ignorant McCarthyites (Bachmann and Palin)? With self-righteous apologists for colonialism who cheat on and abandon their cancer-stricken wives (Newt Gingrich)? With religious fear mongers (Cain)? With crackpots who attract anti-Semites and white supremacists and who think there’s nothing wrong with the U.S. that 1927 couldn’t fix (Ron Paul)?

What’s the worst you can say about Mitt Romney, that he’ll tell you anything you want to hear? Swear that man in – that’s presidential.

But the MSM, which cannot, because it will not, think, will instead keep heralding, from week to week, the next great thing in GOP candidacy – and the heat of Perry’s campaign, under which they are the ones holding the match – claiming that Washington is broken, without making distinctions, and utterly failing to see they’re broke down themselves and completely blocking the road.

AJA

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• Even Ron Paul Thinks Rick Perry’s a Nut [On The Trail] (gawker.com)
• Rick Perry vs. Ben Bernanke (swampland.time.com)
• Trump praises Perry, keeps open a possible run (boston.com)
• Rick Perry’s dangerously overheated campaign rollout (salon.com)
• Michele Bachmann and Christian Taqiyya (sadredearth.com)
• The Tea Party Bolsheviks & the National Debt (sadredearth.com)
• “At Long Last, Have You Left No Sense of Decency?” (sadredearth.com)