A media environment that tilts to the right is obscuring what President Obama stands for and closing off political options that should be part of the public discussion.
That's the first line of his June 4 column. And he's absolutely right. But the title of that column is "Rush and Newt Are Winning" and that's absolutely wrong. That's not the root of what's wrong in his column, though. It's just the tip-off.
Dionne continues:
Yes, you read that correctly: If you doubt that there is a conservative inclination in the media, consider which arguments you hear regularly and which you don't. When Rush Limbaugh sneezes or Newt Gingrich tweets, their views ricochet from the Internet to cable television and into the traditional media. It is remarkable how successful they are in setting what passes for the news agenda.
The power of the Limbaugh-Gingrich axis means that Obama is regularly cast as somewhere on the far left end of a truncated political spectrum. He's the guy who nominates a "racist" to the Supreme Court (though Gingrich retreated from the word yesterday), wants to weaken America's defenses against terrorism and is proposing a massive government takeover of the private economy. Steve Forbes, writing for his magazine, recently went so far as to compare Obama's economic policies to those of Juan Peron's Argentina.
The mention of Steve Forbes provides the opening for seeing what's wrong with Dionne's headline formulation: It's not "the Limbaugh-Gingrich axis". It's our entire political class that's out of whack. Not just Rush-Newt and Steve Forbes and Dick-Liz Cheney and Sarah Palin and Rick Perry and Pat Buchanan and Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck and etc., etc., etc. Not just the rightwing crazies, in other words, but the "sensible" Democratic establishment as well. In short, all of Versailles.
Last night saw one of the most amazing programs in the history of Bill Moyers Journal. Really, one of most amazing programs Moyers has done, period, in all his years on television. His guest for the hour was Andrew J. Bacevich, a West Point graduate, retired colonel with 23 years in the Army, and author of several books, including The Limits Of Power: The End Of American Exceptionalism, just released this week. Here's a distillation of their conversation:
As I suggested in my diary earlier today, "We're So Lame" , the Democrats would be much better off scrapping their "national security" lineup full of disgraced Iraq War hawks, and replacing the whole lot with Bacevich. More reasons why on the flip--and a suggestion about how we might change the direction of our country.
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