In his latest column, Jonah Goldberg argues that the Cranbrook-bullying “scoop” at The Washington Post may not have been the right occasion, but that Mitt Romney needs to get “very angry” soon with the pro-Obama news media. After all, “the mainstream media are so deep in the bunker for Obama, they could ride out a nuclear war without having their Jenga tower fall over.”
"The Post's decision to play up the [haircut] story as if it were major news -- front page, thousands of drably dull self-serious words piled high to elevate and justify the one buzzy nugget -- is an embarrassment," he wrote. "It was clearly intended to link Romney to the new progressive cause: fighting anti-gay bullying, in the context of President Obama's "sudden" support for gay marriage. It was naked advocacy gussied up as journalistic due diligence."
I'm not sure Romney will go all Spiro Agnew on the media. George W. Bush never did. In a strange way, attacking the media is probably seen as something that makes you look more "ultraconservative." But it's true that a Republican cannot simply accept the tilted templates the media employ. But often, a Republican has to choose which way to be attacked. Romney would have been attacked if he had directly admitted the haircut incident, and attacked for his don't-really-remember answer. Pick (a) or pick (b). They'll slam you either way.
Goldberg also mocked the whole gush over Obama’s gay-marriage proclamation, starting with the "First Gay President" cover of Newsweek:
Tina Brown, editor of Newsweek and the Daily Beast, may be a genius. No doubt it has gotten boring saying Obama's opponents are racist. Now the press can treat his critics as homophobes, even the ones holding the same position on gay marriage that Obama (publicly) held for the last decade -- until last week.
The Obama campaign's rationalization for the president's decision to drop what most knew was a calculated political lie is that it would "fire up" his base among rich liberal donors and college students. It did that.
But it also fired up his base in the press corps, enabling writers to rekindle their obsession with the "historic" nature of the Obama presidency.
As the London Telegraph blogger Tim Stanley writes, everything the president does is cast as part of history. The president could go "seal-clubbing and much of the media would see it as a new epoch for winter sports. 'Barack Obama Becomes the First President to Kill Six Seals in Under One Minute,' the New York Times would proudly report."
