The Success of the Media's Tet Offensive II

Students of history (if indeed there are any left, aside from academic propagandists) have belatedly noted over the last few years that the vaunted North Vietnamese/Vietcong Tet Offensive was, in fact, a significant victory for the United States and a crushing defeat for the Marxist thugs who launched it. And yet, after the battle was over, and for successive decades, it was trumpeted by the media as a dramatic American defeat. One that proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that we were trapped in a "quagmire" and needed to accept defeat and withdraw.

This, of course, is precisely what happened eventually. But many years later, and after the Democrats, flush with their victory over the hapless Richard Nixon, cut off what funding was left for the South Vietnamese military, thus assuring a Communist victory.

As we've discussed in recent blog entries, in this day and age, it's not really what you do that counts. It's how the story is spun by the hard leftists in the media, driven by lefty Boomers eager for yet another Amerikkkan "defeat" to be declared before they hang up their journalistic spikes. (Which won't be too soon for HazZzMat.) If you trumpet a lie loud enough and long enough, it miraculously morphs into the perceived truth. And once this happens, the longstanding lie is very difficult to dislodge, even with demonstrable and well-documented truth.

I thought about this today as I read a reader comment posted on PowerLine, derived in turn from that website's new Power Line Forum. Referencing Alexander Hamilton's famous phrase, "The [or your] people, sir, is a great beast," one particular forum thread notes the continuing, pernicious influence of the MSM on largely uninformed voters uncurious enough to accept the MSM's often malicious propaganda as the truth.

The initial poster notes:

I’ve read the post-mortems and the analysis as to why the Republicans lost (i.e. lack of progress in Iraq, Republican lost their way and betrayed conservative principles etc.). I’m sure those reasons played a part. However, I think that one only has to understand what Hamilton refered to as the “Ignorant Masses” and their susceptibility to the old media’s influence to identify one of the greatest contributing factors to Republican losses. I’ve encountered a lot of people in my travels and I must say that I find it depressing how astonishingly ignorant most are in regards to all things political. I also find it amazing how readily these people parrot conventional wisdoms and clichés created by the main stream media regardless of any factual basis. I would find Hannity’s man-on-the-street bits humorous if they weren’t so depressingly representative of the norm.

His latter reference is to Sean Hannity, who, once a week, does a hilarious stunt on his afternoon-drive radio talk show, where one of his people interviews the "man on the street" in New York City, popping random political questions out to randomly selected pedestrians (like "Who is Nancy Pelosi?"). The results are hilariously uniform. 9 of ten of the random selectees proves, at least inferentially, to be a supporter of the Democrats. (Not surprising in NYC, where Republicans are never invited to the best parties.) And of the selectees, about the same percentage have no clue as to what the answer to each question is.

Hannity's questions are specifically selected to be topical and often at the top of the MSM's news scorecard. But the largely Dem respondents (and some Repubs, sad to say) simply have no idea what Hannity's plant is talking about. Which, of course, proves Hannity's point, that bucketloads of people, in this case the Bluest of the Blue Staters, go to the polls and have absolutely no idea what they're going to get when pulling the lever. Assuming they even go to the polls. (Which many of them confess they don't.) And hence, the reference in this thread to Hamiliton's unpleasant, but sadly still-true remark.

But Power Line posts perhaps the most impressive and insightful comment in this thread to its main pages. It reads in part:

"The people” are not collectively a great beast, but there’s something to be said for their ignorance - of news unfavorable to the Democrat/leftie point of view. The MSM is almost wholly populated from the top down with actual 68ers or their pupils, who learned after Tet that they could bring down a government simply by filtering the reporting of current events to exclude any showing success of Administration policies - or by reporting US victories, which Tet was militarily, as defeats. It worked then and it works now.

This comes back to our main point and our reference to Tet, so eloquently and briefly addressed by this commentator. When the MSM lies loud enough and long enough, its lies become the "truth." So it was for Tet, and so it may be for Iraq. The only way for people to get past this is to get involved and do a little research themselves. But they rarely, if ever, do so.

For whatever reason—piss-poor public "education," perhaps?—today's average Democrat-voting Joe will do far more research on buying a new car than he will on choosing a political candidate. Perhaps he figures that he has to use the car every day, so it's more important than carefully selecting a Congressional representative. But then, you have to live with the consequences of a current Congress' tax policies every day, too. And, given what's just transpired, in just a couple more years, Joe might find that he only has enough take home pay to buy a used car rather than a nice, new one. But he just won't be able to put two-and-two together and discover the cause and effect.

Which the left, including the partisan hacks in the MSM, will like just fine.