What's The Matter With The Media Left?

Thomas Frank, best known for his book, "What's the Matter With Kansas?" has a new book out, "Listen Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?",  in which he bashes the Democratic Party as it is, a book which is being taken up by the Bernie or Busters in his rump effort to defy mathematics and the voters, and which is being excerpted and featured in many of the organs of the "liberal" press and pixels.

Obviously its publication was planned to take advantage of the political climate of a presidential election year,  it was published March 16,  I don't think there is any other explanation of why it would be brought out now.   Obviously, now,  in May,  what was likely to be the case is set in stone, that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee facing a would-be fascist strongman,  Donald Trump, the main impact of the book will be to drive people out of voting for her and either wasting their vote on someone who will never be president of the United States or not voting or, in a rather disturbing number of declarations, voting for Trump.  

Thomas Frank is clearly hoping to benefit from this scenario or he would have published his book after the election, when it would probably have gotten far less buzz and sold fewer copies.   I think that in this election season his book of would-be idealism is made into an act of cynical and irresponsible exploitation of the time and a sacrifice of the realistically achievable better alternative in favor of what will not be if Democrats don't win this election.   

I have come to see that a lot of the institutions of the left are like that, the magazines, the webazines, the publishers, the few and far between figures in the electronic media, to one extent or another a lot of them are more interested in their own careers and media presence than they are in the very real reality that American politics are in 2016.  

By the time the votes for the nomination have produced the real nominees who will go on to have a real chance at becoming President of the United States next January, the situation is set, the real issues determining who will be president are the only ones that matter.   

The corruption in our politics is the creation of the Supreme Court in its "free speech" and money=speech rulings - those rulings cemented the role of millionaire and billionaire money into the determining factor in who is elected to office. They were aided in that by such allegedly liberal institutions as the ACLU and the free-speech absolutists - many of whom work in the corporate media.   Those rulings are the real reason that Democrats CAN'T WIN ELECTIONS UNDER A MORE IDEALISTIC SET OF RULES, THOSE RULES ARE WHAT THE SUPREME COURT ABOLISHED AFTER DEMOCRATS PASSED THEM INTO LAW.   To complain that Democratic politicians are forced to raise an effective amount of money by the mixture of pudding-headed sloganeering by "liberals" of the past and the REPUBLICANS on the Supreme Court, is to blame the only people who have any chance of fixing that.   What it will take are Supreme Court justices who will overturn those rulings AND THAT DEPENDS ON A DEMOCRAT APPOINTING THEM TO THE COURT.   And, the rules being in place, that depends on someone who is willing to game the system for that kind of change but you have to have the ability to fight by the rules as set, as they are.  

Frankly, the people on the left who pretend that isn't the case are even stupider than Douglas Feith, the man who General Tommy Franks famously deemed, "the dumbest fucking guy on the planet."  It is one of the lessons of the past sixteen years, confirmed in this one that a lot of the people on the alleged left are stupid enough to risk putting people like that in office again, not even a decade after they were voted out.   I certainly put Thomas Frank in that category as well as those who are providing him with his book tour bookings and PR.