Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who announced for president this last week, is completely understanding of what lies ahead. Said a wry Cruz to Fox’s Megyn Kelly: "Well, look, there's nothing like the warm embrace of the mainstream media.”
In other words? In other words the conservative presidential candidate realizes that the supposedly “objective” mainstream media can’t abide conservatives and will do anything and everything to paint him as some sort of wild-eyed crazy man. But the obvious question arrises. Who is more mainstream? The liberal media or Ted Cruz?
For a man who announced his candidacy only this last week he certainly has drawn an impressive list of critics who are already determined to tar and feather him. For David Letterman Cruz represents the “extreme right wing” of the GOP. On MSNBC, Donny Deutsch launched on Cruz as “scary…dangerous… slimy.” The New Yorker’s John Cassidy took a look at the Latino Cruz and loftily declared him “uppity”….and then apologized. Oops. Don’t want to give the impression liberals hate Hispanics!
Then there was crew at The View. Whoopi Goldberg and a visiting Joy Behar led the attack. After declaring herself a “Ted Cruz birther” (Cruz was born in Canada of an American mother, and he never went after President Obama on the “birther” issue) at the beginning of the week she made a point of coming back around later in the week, the punch lines went like this;
BEHAR: The bottom line with this guy is he's a climate change denier. We cannot have a president of the United States that's a climate change denier.
GOLDBERG: He’s a gay people denier. He's a woman, right to choose denier. He denies everything. Listen, I'm sorry and I am going to take pot shots at him. He may not have been at the charge but he didn't stop the charge.
And on - and on - it went. One of my favorite anti-Cruz rants - I’m think of starting a collection of these jewels - was this one from one Mark Morford, a radical columnist out there on the Left Coast for the San Francisco Chronicle tweeted:
Nation's worst, dumbest senator to announce presidential bid at one of America's worst, dumbest universities. http://t.co/H9xppH40P9
— Mark Morford (@markmorford) March 23, 2015
And beyond columnizing in Lefty Land, Morford, who went to UC Berkeley and therefore assumes being a star at Princeton and Harvard Law makes Cruz dumb? Morford has a web site in which he memorably describes himself this way:
“Mark Morford was raised by nubile, long-eyelashed callipygian wood nymphs and spoon fed dark chocolate, raw pomegranate seeds, Shaiva Tantra mantras and small-batch artisan bourbon until he could fly.”
Oh goody. Mental acuity, San Francisco-style. This will impress the Mullahs and Putin of the smarts of the average American voter for sure! No wonder they think Obama is naive and gullible. This kind of “thinking” is at the base of not only Obama’s support but it underlies today’s left.
What does all of this say? What it says is that the leftist penetration of the culture has overwhelmed journalism and certainly television outside of Fox. It began a long, long time ago. And it was out of step with the American public then.
In 1972 the Nixon campaign ran a television commercial linking his Democrat opponent, then-Senator George McGovern, to “acid, amnesty and abortion.” The “acid” was a reference to drugs (LSD), abortion spoke for itself and amnesty was not about illegal immigration but rather amnesty for deserters in the Vietnam War. What was not known in 1972 was who said this originally -- and the answer was a blockbuster when it was revealed by the late columnist Robert Novak decades later. The answer? Then-Democratic Senator Thomas Eagleton -- a liberal Democrat who was picked as McGovern’s running mate only to be dumped after 18 days because of revelations he had been treated for depression. The original story - source held in secrecy by Novak was written this way:
“One liberal senator feels McGovern’s surging popularity depends on public ignorance of his acknowledged public positions. ‘The people don’t know McGovern is for amnesty, abortion and legalization of pot,’ he told us. Once ‘middle America—Catholic middle America, in particular’—once they find out, ‘he’s dead.’”
The “legalization of pot” phrase was changed by McGovern’s opponents to the more alliterative “acid” - and the phrase caught on as fast as possible in a day before social media. The Nixon TV ad was a sledgehammer in painting McGovern as the candidate of the far , loony left. And Eagleton was proved right. “Middle America - Catholic middle America in particular” fled from the Democrats. Nixon carried 49 states. Yet as reported here in a 2004 Media Research Center report:
In their 1986 book, The Media Elite, political scientists S. Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman and Linda S. Lichter reported the results of their survey of 240 journalists at the nation’s top media outlets: ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report. When asked about their voting patterns, journalists admitted their preference for Democrats:
Of those who say they voted for major party candidates, the proportion of leading journalists who supported the Democratic candidate never drops below 80 percent. In 1972, when more than 60 percent of all voters chose Nixon, over 80 percent among the media elite voted for McGovern. This does not appear to reflect any unique aversion to Nixon. Despite the well-publicized tensions between the press and his administration, leading journalists in 1976 preferred Carter over Ford by the same margin. In fact, in the Democratic landslide of 1964, journalists picked Johnson over Goldwater by a sixteen-to-one margin, or 94 to 6 percent.
In 1980? This time journalists gave 25% to Reagan -- who won 51% of the popular vote in a three-way race with Jimmy Carter and independent John Anderson.
Put another way, this liberalism in the world of journalists has been present for decades. What’s changed is that the culture has taken such a far left turn that it now represents the mindset of everybody from Letterman to Whoopi to the San Francisco columnist apparently raised by "wood nymphs."
Into all of this steps Ted Cruz. The 2015 embodiment of that long ago slogan that mocked the liberals of the day as enthusiasts for “acid, amnesty and abortion.” Who stands up in a packed auditorium of cheering college kids and tells these celebrities and journalists something that is the complete opposite of their world view. He’s opposed to amnesty, he supports traditional marriage, he believes liberals are members of the flat earth society when it comes to the science of climate change— and all of this decidedly mainstream thought utterly freaks out the denizens in the media precincts of Manhattan and Malibu and for that matter almost any media precinct period. They are agog.
Look no further than this clip of Cruz rebutting a liberal journalist in Texas on climate science to see the kind of thing that drives the Joy Behars of the world over the edge.
Reporter Jay Root of the Texas Tribune stated as fact that “most people believe the science is clear.” Well, no. As Gallup reported just this week: “…Americans are no more likely today (55%) than in the past two years to believe the effects of global warming are occurring.” The poll also says: “Less than half see global warming as a serious threat to them.” In other words, what Root was saying was a calmer version of Behar’s hysteria. But it was liberal gospel nonetheless. Cruz never dodged:
On the global warming alarmists, anyone who actually points to the evidence that disproves their apocalyptical claims, they don't engage in reasoned debate. What do they do? They scream, 'You're a denier.' They brand you a heretic. Today, the global warming alarmists are the equivalent of the flat-Earthers. It used to be [that] it is accepted scientific wisdom the Earth is flat, and this heretic named Galileo was branded a denier.
I'm a big believer that we should follow the science, and follow the evidence. If you look at global warming alarmists, they don't like to look at the actual facts and the data. The satellite data demonstrate that there has been no significant warming whatsoever for 17 years. Now that's a real problem for the global warming alarmists. Because all those computer models on which this whole issue is based predicted significant warming, and yet the satellite data show it ain't happening.
Nevertheless, Cruz argued that he's a champion of the science on the issue. "I am the child of two mathematicians and scientists. I believe in following evidence and data.”
Far-out, crazy right-wing stuff, yes? Well, yes if you’re so far left you’d have made the Titanic tip over before the iceberg.
The question here is just exactly how far apart are all these lefty journos and celebrities who are going after Ted Cruz from the reality of the American people? Is this, like 1972 and other years when these kind of folks were so far out of the mainstream that 80% of reporters were voting for McGovern when over 60% of the American people were voting for Nixon?
Here’s a hint of what may be coming. Reported a presumably uncomfortable Washington Post: Within “just a little more than 24 hours” of his announcement Cruz had raised a million dollars for his campaign. By Thursday the number was up to two million. That’s two million dollars in the span of just over 72 hours for a candidate who calls climate change the theology of a flat earth society, is staunchly pro-life and pro-traditional marriage. If Cruz’s positions are so far out of the mainstream, why is he getting all this money?
Somewhere in the television studios and newsrooms of the “mainstream” media one wonders if the thought ever occurs to consider just how “mainstream” their beliefs actually are? And whether the assumptions of journalists about the popularity of everything from climate change to same-sex marriage is in fact justified outside those studios and newsrooms.
Are we headed into yet another election where, as with that election about “acid, amnesty and abortion” overwhelming numbers of journalists will vote one way - while the country goes completely the other way? Can it happen again? Is the “mainstream media” or Ted Cruz really “mainstream”?
Or, to borrow from San Francisco journalist Morford, have the mainstream journalists and Hollywood celebrities of today spent too much time among “nubile, long-eyelashed callipygian wood nymphs” being “spoon fed dark chocolate, (and) raw pomegranate seeds” to have a clue what the average American between Manhattan and Malibu really thinks about what Ted Cruz is saying?
