COLUMN: Boehner, McCarthy and the big bad media
Learning the news through the prism of the 24-hour cable news channels is rapidly becoming an exercise in futility. For the most part, you are neither learning, nor getting the news.
I’m actually starting to yearn for the good old days when Dan Rather only had 24 minutes a night to try to push his agenda on the nation rather than the 24 hours a day that are granted to CNN, MSNBC and Fox News.
Case in point was last week’s collapse of the “smooth transition” of power in the House of Representatives from the widely despised John Boehner to his second-in-command Kevin McCarthy. According to the news brokers at the Big Three cable outlets, government business in Washington, D.C., had ground to an absolute halt as a result of McCarthy announcing he didn’t want to be speaker after all. This was painted as the biggest crisis in the federal government since the assassination of JFK, if not Lincoln!
It was almost as if some of these “news” people had gotten a memo saying, “McCarthy is our guy. Life is going to be good going forward.” Then when McCarthy was out, they panicked. Shepard Smith on Fox was absolutely dumbfounded, if not just dumb, in his repeated assertion that the crisis could not get any worse. Megyn Kelly, Donald Trump’s favorite provocateur interlocutor at Fox was no better, although she looked more able to weather the collapse of Western civilization than poor Shep. Of course, CNN and MSNBC were just as worried about how the poor muddled Republicans could possibly put Humpty-Dumpty together again. Crocodile tears were spewed liberally as commentators bemoaned how “right- wing nut jobs” had sabotaged the candidacy of the anointed one.
As for McCarthy, he looked happy as a clam. He didn’t feel he owed an explanation to the pack of journalists baying at his heels. He said he didn’t think he would be able to put together the votes to win, which is probably true. He said he thought the House could be better served by a “fresh face,” which is definitely true. But the capital press gang wouldn’t take no for an answer. They were convinced that McCarthy was Boehner’s divine choice to ascend to power. Or maybe they just thought McCarthy would be a disaster in the role of House speaker, and they couldn’t believe such a prime GOP catastrophe had been narrowly averted.
Face it, McCarthy, having accomplished virtually nothing, and having done it extremely well, was the perfect shadow to step in and do the bidding of the establishment power brokers. At least he was perfect until he opened his mouth and said one of the stupidest things any politician has ever uttered. I’m sure you heard of this one! In an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News, McCarthy described how he would be different than Boehner:
“What you’re going to see is a conservative speaker that takes a conservative Congress that puts a strategy to fight and win. And let me give you one example. Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s un-trustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened —”
Hannity stopped McCarthy at that point and changed the subject, but the damage was already done and totally self-inflicted. In less than 30 seconds, McCarthy had accomplished what no Democrat had been able to do for the last three years — pin the blame for politicizing the murder of four Americans in Benghazi on the Republicans who have been trying to get to the bottom of what really happened before and after the attack in Libya.
McCarthy had single-handedly handed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton a “get out of jail free” card as she prepared for her appearance before the House Select Committee on Benghazi later this month. Committee chairman Trey Gowdy had bent over backwards for the last 18 months to avoid any taint of partisanship. The committee has mostly done its work behind the scenes, far away from the 24/7 headline-making machinery of the cable-news outlets. In fact, Gowdy has been so conscientiously considerate of appearances that he has angered conservatives such as myself for seeming to be dragging his feet instead of doggedly pursuing the truth.
No wonder the opinion makers at CNN, Fox and MSNBC were sorry to see McCarthy go. This guy promised to make Boehner look like a true statesman, and would have turned the GOP base even more apoplectic than it has been. In other words, a win-win for the media pundits and the D.C. plutocracy.
This weekend, the same power brokers who gave us Boehner and tried to give us McCarthy are hard at work trying to convince Paul Ryan he is the only possible savior of the GOP establishment. The only problem being that trying to save the moribund GOP establishment could very well mean his own political death sentence. Rest in peace, Eric Cantor. Rest in peace, John Boehner. Rest in peace, Jeb Bush? We shall see.
Frank Miele is managing editor of the Daily Inter Lake. If you don’t like his opinion, stop by the office and he will gladly refund your two cents. E-mail responses may be sent to edit@dailyinterlake.com