Politics, particularly during a campaign season, is the sometime ungentle art of fooling all the people some of the time.
Fooling all the people all the time, Abe Lincoln tells
us, is not possible in a constitutional republic operating side by side with a
vibrant and watchful media. But fooling all the people all the time is hardly
necessary when appointment to office depends upon garnering 51 percent of the
vote. In the struggle for votes, we all know, incumbents have a huge money and
status advantage over challengers and, despite mythical views of a free press
unattached to the reigning power, incumbents usually are able effortlessly to
round up what we might call the media vote as well.
Fooling all the people some of the time would not be
possible in the absence of 1) a bewitching populist message, 2) a convincing ritualistic
denunciation of a clamorous minority opposition, and 3) an adulatory media “glad
to be of use” in T. S. Eliot’s memorable phrase, “to start a scene or two.”
“No! I am not Prince Hamlet,” Prufrock says in Eliot’s poem
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” nor was meant to be; Am an attendant
lord, one that will do To swell a progress, start a scene or two, Advise the
prince; no doubt, an easy tool, Deferential, glad to be of use, Politic,
cautious, and meticulous; Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; At times,
indeed, almost ridiculous— Almost, at times, the Fool.”
Naturally, the media does not often think of itself as an
obtuse tool useful to Machiavellian politicians, but it is in the nature of political
fools and tools to be petted, cosseted and artfully used by professional politicians.
The best reporters blowup their sources every few years; these are few in number.
True, Joseph Pulitzer, after whom the much coveted Pulitzer
Prize is named, once said that good reporters should have no friends among
politicians – and even, one supposes, among editors friendly to politicians –
but Pulitzer has been moldering in his grave since 1911.
In post-modern calculus, even yesterday is old news and may
be safely consigned to the trash bin, along with beheaded Columbus statues,
devalued founders of modern political parties such as General and former
President Andy Jackson, the father of the modern “democratic” Democrat Party, Thomas
Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, and anyone more
ancient than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a former barkeep who now serves as the Cromwell,
along with aged Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, of the new-model Democrat
Party.
A few years ago, Connecticut’s Democrat Party ejected both
Jefferson and Jackson from the title of its annual money maker, the Jefferson-Jackson-Bailey
Dinner, leaving poor Bailey, who owned no slaves, twinkling alone at the top of
the marquee.
Consider for a moment, purely as an example of tendentious
reporting – or non-reporting -- the blackguard Hunter Biden, son of the next
Democrat president, so current polls indicate, Joe Biden.
We know from past news accounts that Hunter Biden has been boastfully disreputable. He impregnated a stripper and was forced by courts to
pay for the upkeep of his offspring; he dated for two years his deceased brother's wife; he
traveled to Ukraine and China where he scooped up millions of dollars,
apparently for having been the son of then Vice President Joe Biden. Recently,
long suppressed e-mails have surfaced throwing additional light on Hunter’s questionable
dealings with a Burisma executive and a Chinese energy firm.
Would Joseph Pulitzer have considered it a story? Would
Pulitzer’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch and New York World have covered the
story from its beginning to its bitter end? Or would Pulitzer – an obtuse tool,
glad to be of use, and a prominent Democrat – have snuffed all mention of the two
monetarily rewarding connections, along with Twitter and Facebook? When was the
last time a Pulitzer Prize was awarded to a valiant snuffer?
To ask such questions is to answer them.
Developing stories of this kind need not be denied by Joe
Biden or anyone else. Advising a modern Prince, Machiavelli would certainly note
that denial is no longer a part of political disputation in the post-modern
world. It is only necessary to introduce dollops of doubt into a narrative to destroy the
collective certitude of observable facts. And indeed, some of the people some
of the time will be fooled by this useful political stratagem – among them
reporters who have ignored Pulitzer’s sage advice that recorders of facts
should not themselves play the part of snarling political dogs in campaign fights.
One of the images on a computer likely left by Hunter at a
repair shop shows him spaced out with what looks to be a crack pipe smooching
his lips. A picture like this is worth the proverbial thousand words. Compromising
emails are part of the computer stash. The images and words have now been
spiked by both Twitter and Facebook, an unnecessary measure. In the post-modern
world, where the meaning of meaning itself has been hauled into epistemological
jail, one need only slather facts with doubt to smother the vox populi.
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