Jeff Goldstein: Losing More Slowly is Now Nearing Lost

By Stacy Drake:

Jeff Goldstein recently wrote a piece regarding the release of Governor Palin’s emails, highlighting the now famous message she sent to friends and family just a few days before Trig Paxson Van Palin was born. Goldstein then shares his views of the current media culture that is so damaging to our nation, in reaction to said message. He writes (Warning: Language):

It is profoundly saddening to me to reflect on what the media — and many on our own side — have tried to do to this woman, who clearly embodies the very principles conservatives and classical liberals claim to embrace and fight for, and who is clearly (in my mind) qualified to lead this country back from the brink of socialist hell, so comfortable and committed is she to constitutional authority, and so battle-tested is she after having had to endure a 3-year pop-cultural attempt to destroy her and her family.

I hope in their most private moments, Kathy Griffin or Andrew Sullivan or Janeane Garafalo or Jen Rubin — and a host of others I can name — feel wash over them the sudden rush of shame and embarrassment they so richly deserve.

And I hope it f***ing burns.

The truth is, we have allowed a media culture to form in this country that is rotten to its core. It is petty, spiteful, vindictive, triumphalist, arrogant, profoundly biased, and undoubtedly left-leaning. We have given this media the power to shape our narratives, inform our decisions, and — because there are few if any consequences for doing so — create and destroy individuals with the impunity of a hive minded mob embarking on a wilding.

Helping the media along in such a project — as many “conservatives” do, by accepting as a matter of nature, unchangeable as a hurricane, the premises the media advances — is the kind of intellectual dereliction that has brought us to this point in our nation’s history, where 20% or less of the population controls the reins of political power, as well as the vast majority of our cultural institutions, from the media and the academy, to putative moral authority to champion the environment, the working man, the poor.

Losing more slowly is now nearing lost. And yet still we’re hearing from some on “our” side that we need to find an “electable” candidate that will appeal to “moderates” — someone who doesn’t represent the kind of “extremism” that, in an Orwellian turn, has become synonymous with the very legal conservatism and classical liberalism around which this country was founded, and which provided the template for the most free and prosperous country the world has ever known, with the most free and prosperous people history has ever produced.

I noted this before, but let me note it again: the antidote to Carter was not Howard Baker or George HW Bush. We’re at the brink. And if we can’t articulate the enormous CHASM that separates classical liberal and legal conservative principles from those on witness by the democratic socialists in power — who are actively working to increase government’s size and the people’s dependence on it, intentionally sabotaging energy production and private sector job growth while putting in place the bureaucratic structure to control us through our healthcare decisions and through regulations on the very exhalation that comes from our bodies, or the dust we kick up when we walk — we have lost our country anyway, and it’s damn certain that Mitt Romney and his carbon emission-sensitivity or his ethanol panders isn’t going to do dick structurally to help us get it back. At best he’s a kind of cultural procrastination. And at worst, he comes (courtesy of the press — and like George Bush did in his two terms) to count as the benchmark of right-wing “extremism,” against which the next leftist candidate positions himself.

The GOP is content being the more frugal, more incremental, of the two big government ruling parties.

I’m not content with that as a choice.

And so I fight on.

I’m with him 100% in that… You can read the entire piece here.

Goldstein hits the nail on the head when writing about the influence the DC establishment media class has on the direction of the country. He is especially poignant when discussing the “conservative” side of that coin, and their role in picking the types of candidates we put up against big government leaders on the left. What good does it do us to give Americans a choice between the type of overbearing Statists in the Obama administration, and someone like Mitt Romney, who obviously believes that the solutions to this nations ills can be found with federal intervention? None!

As Goldstein states, politicians like Romney are a type of “cultural procrastination.” While they don’t force us into a system of more government-less freedom, at quite the pace of a Barack Obama, the end result is the same. And if you look at the current state of the economy, our energy situation, and the size of the federal government, you quickly realize that we are on a path that is unsustainable. We do not have time for these big spenders, their cronies, or their expensive hair-brained “solutions,” which more times than not come at the price of our liberties.

I have to be honest with you… It absolutely drives me nuts to watch conservatives fall for media narratives. Don’t we of all people, know better? We cannot trust the media, and that goes for FOX News as well as many “conservative” publications. None of them are worthy of our trust. We have to weigh everything we hear and read. We have to consider the source, and stop giving these tin-can pundits the power to force real reformers out of the debate. There is a reason that people like Governor Palin are shunned by them. She would never accept their big state compromises, and she would never continue us down this path. The status quo has become dangerous, and the only solution is to ignore those who preach it.