Media double-standard, part infinity

http://www.aei.org/article/29262

There's a natural tendency among large groups of people to assume that the "leaders"--that's in quotes for a reason--are smarter than the rest of us, and know what's going on and what to do to keep things running smoothly.

This, of course, is complete and utter nonsense.

Not only are our nominal leaders generally not significantly smarter than average (think of Joe Biden, or Nancy Pelosi's "we have to pass the bill to find out what's in it"), the mere fact that they managed to win a few elections imbues most of them with the belief that whatever they did must be right, and thus that whatever they do must always be right.

Hopefully there's no need to point out how ridiculous this "thought process" is (and calling it a "thought process" is being pretty generous).

So pols of both parties make bad decisions--and we're talkin' not just suboptimal here but really, hideously bad. Like, bankrupt-the-country bad. Like trading our relatively great medical care for that of the U.K. or Canada--delightful countries but year-long waits for plain-vanilla medical procedures that Americans get in two days.

Now if you're a Republican senator or rep or president, and you make one of these outrageously bad calls, the liberal media will ask tough questions, cross-examine everyone in your administration and rake you over the coals. And I'm fine with that; I like an adversarial press--as long as they're adversarial to all candidates.

Ah, but if you're a Democrat, you never have to worry about any of this, because the media won't ask you any tough questions, and will in fact write stories praising your decisiveness and talking up how well your decision is working out. Everything is jus' wonderful.

Case in point: Libya.

Now, the War Powers Act specifically bars the president from ordering the use of military force overseas without congressional approval. The one exception is if the folks we're taking on represent an "imminent threat" to the U.S. And as far as I know no one has ever argued that Libya represented a threat to the U.S.

So we have a clear breach of a duly-passed law--and the media just yawns.

Or compare Obama's criticism of Bush for using "signing statements," and his promise when campaigning in 2007 not to resort to that practice. Now, four years later, he uses a signing statement on a bill de-funding 4 of his "czars" to announce that he...well, when you strip out the gobblespeak it's hard to know for sure what he said, but the gist was that he had no intention of obeying any restraint imposed on him by congress.

And the mainstream media? Big yawn.

The mainstream media: Shilling for Democrats since 1939.