Dear Reader (whom I would like to organize in neatly stacked binders of readers),

Remember in 2008 when Barack Obama was still our national redeemer, determined to make this the sort of country that deserved a president like him?

Don’t get me wrong, I thought most of that stuff was creepy cult-of-personality hysteria. The supposedly savvy journalists who either participated in that madness or stayed silent about it because it was fashionable to do so proved once again that they see their job as staying ever-vigilant for the madness of the Right. When the Left, and, in an even more scary way, the political center, goes insane, well, that’s just idealism! And democracy! And youthful enthusiasm!

This is why I have little confidence that the media will be of much use if hard fascistic tyranny came to America. Why? Because fascism is almost by definition popular, both with elites and with the masses, particularly the young. Our media is almost uniquely corruptible by such popularity. Sure, if some military dictator came out of the heartland, the press would turn itself into the newsletter of the resistance. But if some charming, charismatic, urban populist with perhaps an Ivy league degree rode to power on a mass wave of almost religious popularity while insisting that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste and that he doesn’t have time to listen to the opposition, I think we’ve all learned that the elite mainstream media in this country would stand along the parade route and cheer.

Note: I am not saying that Obama is a dictator or a tyrant. The man is standing for reelection, after all. I’m just saying that after the dry run of 2008-2009, we have a good sense of how easily seduced some in the press really are.

I mean, just look at Chris Matthews, who pimps for Obama like Kent Brockman for his new insect overlords. After this week’s debate, Matthews was splenetic over the fact that Romney had told Obama: “You’ll get your chance” to speak. Matthews wailed, “I don’t think [Romney] understands the Constitution of the United States. He’s the president of the United States. You don’t say, ‘you’ll get your chance.’ ”

Right, because that’s totally in the Constitution.

But it’s important to remember that Matthews, while certainly a liberal, is also a lover of power. He swooned over George W. Bush in his flight suit like a harem girl trying to catch the eye of the pasha and maybe finagle an extra bowl of couscous. We now know that it really doesn’t matter what revelation about John F. Kennedy comes out, Matthews will still suck up to him like the pissboy in Louis XVI’s entourage. When Mimi Alford’s book came out revealing that Kennedy pimped her out when she was a mere 19-year-old intern, Matthews reacted as if that’s just what great statesmen do.

And he was hardly alone. Matthews couldn’t find a journalist who thought Kennedy’s reputation could be tarnished by the news that he forced an intern to sexually service his brother and staff. Kathleen Parker called the story “delicious” and then literally failed to stifle a yawn.

The new Cuban-missile-crisis exhibit at the Kennedy Library apparently has a big take-out on Kennedy’s secret taping system. Last night I stumbled on a NewsHour segment on it. It reminds me of the fact that Kennedy’s – and LBJ’s – secret system is always treated as a rich historical resource. Nixon’s? Proof that he was Satan’s henchman.

I bet if new tapes were discovered revealing that JFK had not only sexually abused a teenaged girl but then went on to beat her to death with a bust of Winston Churchill and then eat her liver and have her buried in a shallow grave on the White House lawn, Chris Matthews would declare the revelations “troubling” but ultimately irrelevant.

I’ll spare you a long excerpt from The Tyranny of Clichés, but this raises one of my biggest gripes about the phrase “power corrupts.” We all use this axiom as if it’s about the tendency of power to corrupt the powerful. But that’s not really how Acton meant it (though he probably believed that too). His point was that power tends to corrupt the observer of the powerful, most specifically the historian. We admire, sometimes even worship, powerful people and as a result we make allowances for them we would find unacceptable for a normal person. If your neighbor behaved the way JFK did, odds are – if you’re a relatively decent person – you’d keep your kids (and your wife!) away from him. But take the same man and make him president of the United States, and the same folks are begging for a photo-op.

But I digress.

Stuck On Stupid

In fact I had no plan to write about any of that stuff. What I wanted to say is that there were good aspects to Obama’s candidacy in 2008 as well as bad. There was a side to Obama that seemed admirable and seductive to some on the right (hence the ill-fated “ObamaCons”). Let’s face it, there’s a lot that is really annoying about American politics, on both sides of the ideological divide: all of the ginned-up outrage over alleged gaffes, the refusal to give the most obvious interpretation a fair hearing, the way those glowing brains under glass activate our pain collars when we question their orders. There were moments – just moments – when Obama seemed to indicate he wanted to put away those childish things. And I think that tapped into a real desire for a more grown-up form of politics. Obama may have been leftwing and creepily messianic, but at least he stood for some big ideas, as he declared at the Denver convention, “if you don’t have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare the voters. If you don’t have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from. You make a big election about small things.”

Candidate Obama’s best moment wasn’t when he promised to make the seas turn around, or when he cured that beggar’s blindness, or when he cooked twelve-minute brownies in seven minutes (“I think you need to stop using back issues of Newsweek for your research,” – The Couch). No, arguably it was when he attacked Republicans for mocking him for saying that people should keep their tires properly inflated.

“It’s like these guys take pride in being ignorant.”

Well, look at the Obama campaign now. By his own standard, short of wearing enormous shoes, a red nose, and a flower that shoots water – or maybe guest-hosting the Lawrence O’Donnell Show, the guy couldn’t be making more of a clown out of himself.

For several days now he has been trying to make the fact that Mitt Romney looked at resumes of applicants in binders into proof that he hates women. Or something. I still don’t get it. Don’t get me wrong. I think the phrase “binders of women” is inherently funny. It sounds like evidence seized from Eliot Spitzer’s office. But I really have no clue what Obama is talking about.

Big Bird, binders, corporate jets, and the Buffett rule: This is the agenda of a president who has nothing worth saying or doing. It’s pathetic.

To Hell With You All, Cont’d

Part of the challenge for me at least is not letting the media’s ass-clownery infect me. But it’s very hard. Look, the MSM is liberal and it affects their news judgment. I know next I’m going to tell you that dogs lick their nethers because they can and that most Americans prefer eating an ice cream sundae to receiving a proctological exam with a rusty eggbeater. But bear with me. The media are quick to outrage over things that confirm their conviction that Republicans and conservatives are fascists/racists/nutters/whatever. But when liberals get in trouble, the instinctive emotional response from the MSM is to defend, rationalize, or understand the transgression, not condemn it.

The unfair fallout of this for sane conservatives is that we sometimes end up internalizing the media’s idiocy. It was insane for the press to take seriously, even for a moment, that Sarah Palin’s congressional map motivated the Tucson shooter. In-frick’n-sane. To the extent the Daily KOS crowd actually believed what they were saying in this regard demonstrates that they are lunatics.

But the press and the president created a standard. They said that martial metaphors and violent rhetoric have no place in politics. Moreover, they encouraged a riot of handwringing and thumb-suckery over the issue. But it was all aimed rightward. I think the double standard is sincerely held. Only conservatives are literal when they use violent rhetoric, liberals are merely figurative. Or only conservative voters are sufficiently stupid to not understand that such rhetoric isn’t a license to kill. Never mind that political violence in America has at least as deep a history on the left than on the right (I’d argue much, much deeper, but I’m trying to be even-handed here).

And so the same people who earnestly insisted that Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin had to be to blame for the Tucson bloodshed turned a blind eye to similar rhetoric from Democrats (this was the point of my most viral post ever, “To Hell with You People.”

So for example, yesterday Joe Biden made some dumb comment about how Paul Ryan and his colleagues wrote a book called Young Guns (my wife worked on it, for the record), “but the bullets are pointed at you.”

Now, how should we react to this? On the merits, it’s an entirely harmless comment. But if Paul Ryan said anything like it, it would be oh so very troubling and dangerous. In other words after creating a BS standard, we’re forced into either accepting the BS standard or letting it be enforced selectively against Republicans and only Republicans. Or, we can whine about liberal media bias or Biden’s hypocrisy. I don’t have any great solutions, I’m just vexed.

Various & Sundry

Sorry if today’s G-File feels phoned in, I’ve just been really harried of late. I promise after the election things will be a bit more normal and a bit more jocular.

In the meantime, here’s today’s column.

Oh, the paperback of Tyranny of Clichés is coming out in the spring. I need to make corrections to anything I got wrong in the hardcover. I have some, obviously (the witches at Salem were hung, not burned for instance), but if you have others please send ‘em along.

I will be at Saint Louis University next week. Come on down, or up, or over.

These are 25 places that look fake but are real. I particularly like the hellmouth (#24).

If you’re like me, you’re probably sick of Gangnam Style just on principle. But you might like Eton style.

This is awesome: scared brothers at haunted houses caught on hidden cameras.

Hilarious: Why on earth do they put deer crossings in places where the poor animals can get hit by cars?

Ten (or at least eight) clever Halloween costumes.