By Daren Jonescu ——Bio and Archives--February 28, 2012
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"RASMUSSEN POLL: Obama Approval at 45%, Lowest in Month—Falls Behind Romney, Paul...."As it is now widely acknowledged that the Paul campaign is working together with the Romney campaign to wedge out any challenger to Romney—that is, any anti-Establishment candidate—this poll, coming from a source at least as much in the tank for the Establishment scenario as TDR, is right on cue. Notice that, as with the Gingrich headline, in can only help one person. Paul, like Gingrich, is out of contention in both of the states up for grabs on February 28th. Producing a poll result at this moment that shows both Paul and Romney beating Obama in a head-to-head matchup does little or nothing for Paul, as the result will be nullified by any contrary result released before a primary or caucus where Paul is considered a contender. On the other hand, the result creates bad optics for Santorum—Romney's only rival in these two states—suggesting that even during his big "surge" of the moment he "cannot" defeat Obama. Let me state clearly that Matt Drudge is free to support any candidate he likes. The problem is not his personal preference, but his pretense of merely presenting "the news." The conservative "new media" has always prided itself on being different from the mainstream liberal media in one crucial respect: Honesty. Rush Limbaugh does not pretend to be without biases; Mark Levin and Glenn Beck have openly stated their preferred candidates. This is as it should be. The problem arises when an alleged news source takes steps to avoid the appearance of editorializing, but then presents (i.e. cherry-picks) the news in such a manner as to influence perceptions and opinions. This effort to create optics that favor one result over another, without the source ever openly clarifying its preferences, demonstrates precisely the lack of integrity that the conservative media was supposedly constituted to redress. That the optics being presented in this case are so perfectly and consistently calibrated to help the Republican Establishment achieve its goals is the most disturbing element of TDR's manipulations. Though you won't find this story linked on TDR, here is how the Establishment's man defines his candidacy:
"'The reason that I’m going to beat Barack Obama in Michigan in the fall is because this is going to be a contest about who can strengthen the economy,' Romney told a rally in Royal Oak last night."Socialized medicine is being not-so-covertly foisted on the American people—a policy which, if allowed to stand, will functionally end the United States of America as a constitutional republic founded on natural individual rights. The unfunded obligations of Social Security alone constitute an $18 trillion sinkhole—larger than the current, irredeemable national debt. The nation's independent regulatory agencies are usurping congressional legislative authority, and slipping socialist violations of property rights and globalist subversions of American sovereignty in under every door. The President is apologizing to, and begging for forgiveness from, people who are murdering American citizens in cold blood because someone burned a copy of the Koran which was being used to transfer covert messages between enemy prisoners. And Mitt Romney says the defining issue of the 2012 election concerns "who can strengthen the economy." Is it any wonder he is the Establishment's pick? Here is a dream for the future of American politics: Someday, the majority of citizens will prove so rational, so principled, and so serious about the fate of their freedom, that cheap manipulations such as that being perpetrated by The Drudge Report, and other Establishment toadies, will immediately be recognized for what they are, and ignored, to the point where such "new media" sources become as irrelevant as their predecessors, the New York Times and CBS News. The problem with dreams is that they all too often run up ahead of us, so that we never quite catch up with them. The survival of the civilized world depends on America catching up with this one before it's too late. Run hard, run fast, constitutionalists—run as if your life depended on it. It does.
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Daren Jonescu has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He currently teaches English language and philosophy at Changwon National University in South Korea.