The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #104322 Message #2139605
Posted By: John Hardly
03-Sep-07 - 08:56 AM
Thread Name: BS: Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho)- lewd conduct
Subject: RE: BS: Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho)- lewd conduct
"---and think the rest of the country should also be outraged"
That's the thing I find most amusing when I talk to my Republican friends. Many of them really have trouble seeing why scandal doesn't bother Democrats. They really can't see how a fifty-year-old president being serviced by an twenty-one-year-old underling in the Oval Office does not strike Democrats as outrageous.
If their defense, I think that it used to strike more Democrats as outrageous until the several years of holding out and spinning the story made the tide turn toward sympathy for Clinton.
I think that the tide is turning even further though. I don't think that the scandal up with which the Democrats will put (to torture the ending-in-a-preposition rule) is limited to sexual. The William Jefferson scandal is illustrating that it is now extending to any scandal.
I think that has more to do with my second point -- the internet. Back in the days of Rostenkowski and Wright, the right wing had a slight edge -- or at least more to gain -- by use of the fledgling internet. That is, up to that point, the power of the press wasn't really in what stories the press could and did run, but in the stories that they could spike.
Suddenly the internet popped up and several folks with right wing leanings -- like, for instance, Matt Drudge, beat the main stream media to so many stories, and with such accuracy, that a power shift occurred much like I've described the one that now favors the Democrats.
For a while -- mostly in the nineties -- the right wing got the upper hand with the internet and the ability to expose scandal. Things have balanced out again, and the left is at least as adept at using the internet as the right was.
I think that the main reason why the left fell behind in that use of the internet in the nineties was that there was no need for them to use it. The mainstream media was already, for the most part, telling them the side of stories that they were already interested in.
Like a good pendulum, the medium (the internet) that empowered Republicans a decade or more ago, is now a tremendous tool against them.
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