More notable than McCain's "Rovian demonization themes" is the media's spouting them

[DeepModem Mom]

Salon: Thursday July 31, 2008
Karl Rove's media birds chirp about Obama's "arrogance"
Glenn Greenwald

....There's obviously nothing surprising about the McCain campaign's reliance on the standard, personality-based attacks that the GOP uses every election year. It's long been obvious to everyone outside of The TNR Circle that McCain's only prospect for winning would be to move the election away from debates over issues (where his positions are widely rejected by the public) and instead demonize Barack Obama as an effete, elitist, effeminate, far Leftist, terrorist-loving radical, and it was equally obvious that McCain -- "drooling for power like a fruit bat with rabies," as Matt Taibbi put it in November, 2006 -- would eagerly employ those Rovian tactics....

What is far more notable than McCain's now almost-complete reliance on Rovian demonization themes is how obediently the establishment media has been spouting and disseminating them. Five weeks ago, on June 23, Karl Rove appeared at a breakfast with Republican insiders at the Capitol Hill Club, mocked Obama as "the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by," and labeled him "cooly arrogant." Ever since, that Obama is "arrogant" -- and the related sin: "presumptuous" -- has become standard, mandated media script.

It's now literally difficult to find a discussion of Obama in the establishment press that isn't based on this personality-based theme -- with media stars either expressing the opinion themselves or repeating it as a McCain talking point....

This is exactly what happens every single election cycle. The Right spews some petty, personality-based attack, and the chirping media birds then mindlessly repeat it until it's lodged into our discourse as accepted fact. That's the media strategy on which the Right is relying to win the election this year again -- dictating the songs sung by the vapid, chirping press birds -- even as they petulantly and incessantly complain that the same media stars who serve this strategy are stacked against them....

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GOP operatives whisper insipid, petty, snide (though highly coordinated) gossip into the hungry ears of Beltway reporters about the effete, girly, arrogant liberal. Reporters then -- uncritically and endlessly -- repeat what they hear until it completely dominates and overwhelms our political discourse, and then -- "fair or not" -- becomes entrenched narrative. This is what happens over and over and over. Media stars love to be used this way. The themes never change and neither does the process. Still, it's amazing how fast it travels from Karl Rove's lips and then out of the mouths of the vast bulk of "journalists" covering the presidential race for establishment media outlets....

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/07/31/mccain/