Politico Can't Resist a Swipe at Brown

Politico has been providing pretty decent coverage of the current Massachusetts Miracle. But their team of reporters today couldn't resist the kind of smarmy editorializing that's given the news media a terminally bad name over the last decade or two. Check out the following 2 grafs from Politico's main morning-after story and you'll see what I mean:

"When there's trouble in Massachusetts, rest assured, there's trouble everywhere, and they know it," he said. "One thing is very, very clear as I traveled across this state. People do not want the trillion-dollar health care plan that is being forced on the American people, and this bill is not being debated openly and fairly. It will raise taxes, it will hurt Medicare, it will destroy jobs and run our nation deeper in to debt."

Democrats pushed back in different ways against Brown’s gloating.

 Okay, let's parse this.  First graf: As best I can tell, it's pretty much a direct quote from Brown's acceptance speech. I listened to it last night and found it crisp, dead on, and an accurate, if occasionally rambling and overlong, assessment of Brown's winning campaign and what it means.

Second graf: Short and sweet and embodies the tic that seems to affect the genes of all who populate the MSM. The problem is in the last word of the sentence: "gloating." That is, quite simply, editorializing of the snottiest kind. MSMers do this to Republicans all the time, working in each story to subtly undermine the character of their intended victims.

To re-state, the first graf above was what Brown said last night. But to characterize this as "gloating" is pure fantasy, a subtle bit of sliming meant to show that Brown has a "mean streak," which is how all evil Republicans are eventually characterized--mean-spirited. Now for all I know, Brown may have a mean streak. But he didn't show any such thing in the quoted material. His statement was, pure and simple, an accurate assessment of what he thought the voters were telling the Democrats last night as they awarded the "Kennedy seat" to a Republican. How stating a simple truth can be characterized as "gloating" is way beyond me, particularly when Brown went out of his way to pay his respects to the Kennedys--several times and without irony.

But he was rewarded in Politico with the kind of casual dissing that the left-wing MSM indulges in all the time, a Gramscian recasting of an objective narrative to support the left-wing "narrative" which characterizes all conservatives and Republicans as base and evil beings who need to be hated and mistrusted at all times.

Either "gloating" was chosen specifically by the authors of this piece as a sneaky way to smear Brown. Or else "gloating" appeared almost autonomically, the kind of characterization that's not premeditated but sneaks in without reflection, so ingrained is the bias behind it. Brown's quoted remarks were in fact a "statement," an "explanation," or an "assessment." In no way was Brown "gloating" except in the realm of left-wing fantasists.

HazZzMat's original and ongoing intent has been to expose the cheap rhetorical tricks that the left uses to obscure the truth, to change the perceived narrative, and to smear anyone who gets in its way. This particular instance, appearing in an otherwise decent story, is a classic example of how the media undermines itself each and every day through its rhetorical dishonesty.

In a way, Brown's victory last night proved that the great unwashed are much smarter than any of the condescending elites ever thought. In spite of generations of Marxist, blame-Amerikka-first  indoctrination in schools, newspapers, magazines, TV shows, and films, the public seems to have retained its collective shit-detector, and that was in evidence last night in Massachusetts. Clearly, the proles now know that Obama and the media fooled them pretty good in 2008. I think they're not going to let this happen again.

(Read the whole Politico story here.)