Iowa Drowns While the MSM Mourns

It was epic bad timing for Eastern Iowa to disappear beneath the Cedar River around the same time as Tim Russert threw a coronary clot. I mean no disrespect; Mr. Russert seemed like a jolly enough soul, and his death is a tragedy to his family. I did not think he was a particularly great journalist, but increasingly there is no such thing. One would never know this from the nonstop electronic keening which has gone on over the weekend while the Cedar River crested at 31 feet during a 500-year flood.

Tim Russert was part of the mainstream apparatus which "manufactures consent," in the irreplaceable term coined by Noam Chomsky. It was Noam's sharp insight that the media tend to cluster around some median ideological point, wheresoever it is pushed by social and political processes. This point becomes the New Normal, and over the last thirty years in the United States, the New Normal is the New Capitalist Right. Mainstream, respectable journalists cannot stray outside the limits of a tiny bandwidth left or right of this point. So, for example, if the President sets up a regime which disregards the Fourth Amendment rights of American citizens, through felonious spying in contravention of the FISA law; or which breaches the norms of human decency in torturing prisoners in violation of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, TV guys like Tim Russert voice small but carefully inoffensive complaints in the form of "hard-hitting" questions of their Sunday morning guests. These questions are often directed to the miscreants directly responsible for the outrage at issue. Yet at the end of the interview, Big Tim (for years I thought he was Randy Quaid) would smile and thank Karl Rove or Dick Cheney for "comin' on the show," and we all felt better because the issue had been "aired out."

Herr Russert of Das Reich TV: Herr Eichmann, you've taken some real heat for setting up this train system for transporting all these European Jews to the gas chambers. I want to show you a quote from 1943 [shows quote]. Isn't that a little inconsistent with your claim now that you thought they were all headed to banking conventions in Poland?

Herr Eichmann: Tim, we can play these gotcha games all morning, if you want to. Both sides obviously have arguments they can make. At the end of the day, what me and the others in the High Command are all about is doing the work of the German Volk.

Herr Russert: I just wanna thank you, Adolf, for comin' on Das Show.

If Tim Russert had been such a "giant" of the Fourth Estate, why did he casually enable, like the rest of his colleagues in the MSM, the shredding of the United States Constitution and the entanglement of the country in a disastrous war of choice? So what's all this public display of grief about? What I think: it's another show, and it's self-aggrandizement. I would delicately point out that not long after Mr. Russert's heart went into fibrillation, he lost consciousness. From that point forward, he was unaware of anything Tom Brokaw or Barbara Walters or Chris Matthews had to say about him. So what these people were really doing in their orgy of hagiography was reminding us of what important honchos they are, because really, they're just like Tim, and this sort of tasteless, 24/7 oversaturated coverage (like the soils of Iowa) is what they do. They talk up, under and around any topic which comes into their cross-hairs, and they talk it to death. They even talk death to death. And the purpose of their talking is never to have a distinct or subversive point of view, but only to mouth over and over whatever consensus opinion fits within the Chomsky Bandwidth; in this case, that Russert was a Giant, A Unique Voice, The Indispensable Conscience of a Nation.

Probably not. He was a well-paid employee of NBC and MSNBC. He was the host of "Meet the Press." He went along to get along and played the fake controversy game to perfection, shot the breeze with both "sides" which are positioned about two nanometers left and right of the MSNBC midpoint. His family will miss him. The country will move on to the next manufactured hero.