The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

GA-6: ‘The Big Short’ and the Establishment Media Bubble

Posted on | June 21, 2017 | 2 Comments

 

Tuesday night, I monitored election results from Georgia’s 6th District special election on my phone (via AoSHQ Decision Desk) while finishing up a day mowing lawns for my son’s contracting business. We were leaning on the truck and enjoying cold beverages while Jim chatted with his business partner when the Decision Desk called it for Republican Karen Handel — a sweet moment. Democrats had poured an estimated $30 million into “Pajamaboy Carpetbagger” Jon Osoff’s doomed campaign and came away with another “L,” their fourth consecutive special-election defeat since Trump’s election.

Democrats’ hope of returning to power by riding a wave of anti-Trump “backlash” has been exposed as a delusion based on denial. Along with their media allies, Democrats simply refuse to accept the reality that American voters have rejected them. Democrats are the ex-boyfriend who refuses to move on, and voters are the girl getting stalked on Facebook by an obsessed loser who can’t take a hint. It’s creepy.

The now iconic image of the CNN crew at 9:43 pm ET Tuesday is a perfect distillation of a problem we can call the Establishment Media Bubble.

Those pictured were CNN’s political director David Chalian, CNN’s chief political analyst Gloria Borger, CNN’s executive director of Political Programming/Sr. Political Analyst Mark Preston, and Chief Political Correspondent Dana Bash.

The pretense of journalistic objectivity, which is the Establishment Media’s stock in trade, has become so transparently implausible that no intelligent viewer could be deceived by it. Beyond that, and perhaps more importantly, the media’s pretense of political expertise was even more brutally exposed as a fraud — a hoax as bogus as “Haven Monahan.”

If Mark Preston is such an insightful political analyst, why couldn’t CNN accurately predict the outcome of this election? For the same reason that CNN was so disastrously wrong in 2016: They are no longer a news organization, but instead are a Democrat propaganda operation. Mark Preston is a partisan Democrat who, as a University of Massachusetts student, worked in Ted Kennedy’s office. Ask yourself this question: In his role as a CNN executive, would Mark Preston ever hire a reporter who had worked for Rand Paul or Ted Cruz? Answer: Fuck no.

CNN, like every other Establishment Media organization, actively discriminates against Republicans in its hiring decisions. Mark Preston’s network is a sort of political cult that only employs True Believers. The organization’s journalistic standards are subordinated to its political mission, which is to persuade viewers to vote Democrat. Period.

 

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When my son had finished up talking with his business partner Tuesday night, we went to my son’s house and watched The Big Short on Netflix. My son had already seen the movie twice, but I never had, and I kept trying to shush him and my brother, who were talking during most of the show. Because a lot of my son’s business involves “repo flips” — rehabbing properties that have been repossessed, so that they can be resold — he has a direct familiarity with how the housing market operates at the practical level. And he’s been doing this kind of work since he was a teenager, during the final years of the bubble, so he can tell you what it was like from the ant’s-eye view. The Big Short is a fascinating movie, but the “moral of the story” at the end of the film is badly flawed. The filmmakers want to sell the audience an “Occupy Wall Street”/Bernie Sanders left-populist myth, that the subprime mortgage industry was a result of deregulation and/or Bush-era Republican corruption.

“Stop the movie!” I shouted at Jim, when we got to that payoff scene, after Mark Baum (who in real life is actually Steve Eisman) has made the final decision to sell his short options. “The people who got those mortgages were as guilty as the people who gave them the mortgages!”

If you were buying a $400,000 home with a zero-down ARM for which you could not qualify under any normal standards of credit worthiness, you weren’t the victim of a fraud, you were an active accomplice. People who “bought” homes with so-called NINJA (no income, no job) loans were engaged in an immoral enterprise, and it is wrong to exempt them from blame for doing something they must have known was wrong.

To repeat what I’ve said before: If something seems too good to be true, it is either (a) not really true, or (b) not really good. The notion that any random loser could (and should) become a homeowner was always dubious, and government policies intended to promote minority home ownership By Any Means Necessary played a huge role in the housing bubble, a crucial factor that The Big Short does not acknowledge. The filmmakers want to exempt from blame the people who became “homeowners” by getting ARM mortgages they knew (or should have known) they would not be able to pay back. If you want to blame “greed” for the housing bubble, isn’t it true that the people who bought homes with NINJA loans were as greedy, in their own way, as the bond hustlers whose collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) financed those loans?

Well, what does this have to do with CNN’s pathetic excuse for political journalism? It’s this — the people who watch CNN are as much a part of the problems as the people who run CNN. Just as the housing bubble could never have happened, had there not been so many uncreditworthy borrowers willing to buy homes with no-money-down ARMs, there could be no Establishment Media Bubble, if there weren’t so many people willing to consume the blatantly biased “journalism” produced by CNN (and NBC, and the New York Times, etc.). You will never go broke underestimating the intelligence of Democrat voters, and the Establishment Media’s business is based on exploiting this stupidity.

The Democrat viewers who let CNN convince them that Jon Osoff was going to win GA-6, and thereby vindicate the anti-Trump #Resistance, learned nothing from Tuesday night’s results. Those viewers woke up this morning and turned on their TVs to watch the “experts” on CNN explain to them what went wrong and what this means for the future. But why should anyone believe the Establishment Media’s explanations for another Democrat defeat, when the Establishment Media failed to predict this defeat, in the same way they failed to predict Hillary’s defeat?

 

Mark Preston is not an omniscient political genius. He is not really that much smarter than the average Democrat, or else he wouldn’t have been sitting there Tuesday night on the CNN set looking like a guy who just got home from Vegas and has to tell his wife how much money he lost.

Stephen Miller at Heat Street summarizes the result:

Herein lies the Democrats’ problem, just as it was a problem when Hillary Clinton bellowed about a basket full of deplorables during the 2016 campaign. The Democrats and their base (Hollywood) think the key to winning elections is to insult voters. “They don’t vote for us because they are bigots” is not a strategy I would employ as a campaign manager but they are welcome to keep trying this, and they are welcome to keep losing.

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)



 

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

 

 

Category: CNN, Democrats, Election, Media Bias

Comments

2 Responses to “GA-6: ‘The Big Short’ and the Establishment Media Bubble”

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