From a diary by Copernicus at Kos:

What has been done to Dean with regards to media distortion is shameful. It is shameful the degree to which alleged progressive "thinkers" and media commentators have joined the usual gaggle of whores in pursuing this campaign against Dean. For a party that has recently witnessed a president being impeached over an extra- marital affair, after 6 years of pervasive "Get Clinton" media opposition to that president, we should all be ashamed to see such a cheerful participation by some of our own people in a smaller version of the same behaviour.

Dean was just trying to pump us his volunteers after a painful night. The axe job that has been done on him is nasty, vindictive, cheap, and, ultimately, a sign that some very powerful people in this party are genuinely threatened by Dean's power and support.

This blade is double-edged. Even if Dean has ultimately been done in by the media campaign against him, the low level to which the Democratic campaign has sunk will mock what comes next: the exact same level of cheap, tawdry negative campaigning against WHICHEVER Democratic candidate emerges into the general season by a vast media machine that, as we will discover again, favors a Republican over any Democrat no matter what.

And noone on this side will be able to say that Democrats don't engage in the exact same sort of behaviour when it suits our power players.

So true. Whether we believe Paul Wellstone was a saint whose name can never be invoked in the same sentence as another Democrat or not (I don't), the same techniques that were used to pervert the coverage of his memorial have been used against Howard Dean. They will be used against whoever the next Democratic frontrunner is, as well. Those of who decry the corruption of our political dialogue enabled by an RNC-fax-fed, ratings-driven media must stop stooping to their level and making excuses for them. It is not enough to simply sit there and say "Well, that's the media, gotta' play their game." Is that what progressives have been reduced to? When John Kerry, for example, joked about Al Gore inventing the Internet, my gut twisted -- he's bought into the whole contentless spin machine and will not seek to call the nonsense-spewers out on their nonsense.

In 2000 Phil Agre wrote several pieces exploring the toxicity of our political rhetoric and the application of twisted public relations tactics to politics. [Try here and here for starters.]

By "jargon" I mean the systematic application of public relations methods to the language of political debate, both by political parties and by privately funded think tanks. Jargon systematically twists language in order to subvert rational thought and reduce political discourse to the making and breaking of mental associations among vaguely defined symbols, often by means of extreme emotional manipulation -- thus the shouting. In the process, political discourse is reduced to the most primitive psychological level, and the toxic rhetoric that results can be best understood using psychological ideas such as projection. [...] I believe that jargon is incompatible with democracy, not to mention mental health, and it will only retreat if citizens develop antibodies to it by learning to name it when they see it.

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Most of these people didn't even think of themselves as liberals -- at least not until they learned, for example, that Al Gore didn't claim to have invented the Internet, wasn't lying when he described his childhood farm chores, didn't grow up in a luxury hotel, didn't falsely claim to have been the model for Love Story, didn't hold a fund-raiser at a Buddhist temple, didn't propose abolishing the automobile, didn't propose to outlaw guns, and so on. They had been genuinely shocked to discover that the cult members had been lying about these things, and they were even more shocked to discover that they and everyone around them had been living in a media bubble whose ranting and raving had shut off the oxygen from even these very simple truths. Some of them described the paralyzing despair that they experienced during the post-election controversy when they found themselves surrounded by angry and irrational people who display no respect for logic.

The media's only gotten worse since 2000. I predict that in November of 2004, another laundry list of right wing lies like that above will have been spread like so much mad cow manure through the 'mainstream' press. Will Democrats, independents, and reasonable Republicans stand up against the madness this time?

After what I've observed in the last few days, I deeply doubt it.