The Poor Man gets it and shares it

The Poor Man rocks! He has some "Scattered thoughts on the Deborah Howell dust-up" which is well worth a read (link) but I really like his observations on the subject of a complicit media which I talked about earlier here and here. He finishes up with this:

Here’s the thing, though. Accuracy In Media, the Media Research Center, and the rest of the right-wing noise machine spent decades beating on the media, and they showed that constant, nasty, personal attacks - and only constant, nasty, personal attacks - will get the media to do what you want. If you are persistant enough, you can get the media to join in on any political smear you want, no matter how disgraceful or absurd. Hell, if you really put your mind to it, you might even get the ombudsman of eventheliberal Washington Post swearing up and down that Jack Abramoff doesn’t have a partisan bone in his body. Sounds crazy, I know, but you gotta believe.

Speaking of which: Howell. In the face of people pointing out that what she said was untrue, she stayed firm, and refused to back down. It was only after the Post’ s comment system was overwhelmed by days and days of hundreds and hundreds of angry posts - some apparently very nasty and personal - that Howell deigned to address the issue of her lying, and even to back down, grudgingly, from her orginal statements. Now, of course, it is not nice that people said not nice things to her (which is very bad so don’t do it), but if this is the only sort of treatment that you respond to, expect to see a lot more of it. And you can cry and moan about how nasty the people are who said horrible things to you are - and they are nasty, it’s true - but you have brought it on yourself. Instead of tossing off some facile crap about how now those usually well-behaved moderate liberals have gone all crazying like those nasty right-wingers (who you have learned to tread so carefully around), you might want to think a bit about cause and effect, and why it seems like everyone you listen to is treating you like shit.