Apparently none of the soldiers responsible for the picture is going to get in trouble. If that doesn’t show the institutional animus the military bears towards Senator Kerry, then nothing ever will.

The junior U.S. senator from Massachusetts has been leaning on the military code of political/partisan silence for a long time now. He passed himself off as a portrait in courage, and the general reluctance of soldiers to say anything against him on the record allowed him to get away with it.

One picture of eight merry dissenters yanked that crutch out from under him, and now we all laugh, “The emperor has no clothes!”

(Here’s my latest post on the picture, with a link to Sykes.)

“Is it that the MSM are pulling out all the stops this time?”

Well, yes they are pulling out all the stops, but they started moving quickly in that direction right after the election of 2000. By 2004, they had already gotten to the point where they had pulled out all the stops. RatherGate was the most obvious example, and also recall the media continuously promulgated the idea that Kerry was ahead or the race was dead even. The phenomenon was even admitted by Newsweeks’ Evan Thomas So 2006 is nothing special in that respect.

“Is it that Republicans would be doing poorly in public opinion no matter what the MSM did?”

The Republicans have betrayed their base on many issues. They have gone soft and fuzzy on Iraq, failed to do anything about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, failed to take illegal immigration seriously, and passed welfare state programs comparable to anything the Democrats have done. Non-military spending has gone up faster than under Clinton.

I think the straw that broke the camel’s back was the Miers nomination. It was a completely unforced error, and the base for the first time really let it be known that they felt betrayed. (I think their reaction honestly confused Bush, who just thought the base would be behind him no matter what he did because they hated those dastardly Democrats so much.)

So, yes, the Republicans would certainly be suffering in public opinion, no matter what kind of press they were getting. In fact, they actually benefit from a biased media on a couple of those issues. The press agrees with the Republicans on illegal immigration, for example, so they don’t slam Bush and company on that issue even when the Republican base is upset.

“Is it that MSM power isn’t waning so much as moving to the Internet?”

One of implications of Stephen’s points about technology change is that just “moving to the Internet” won’t preserve MSM power. They are on a radically different playing field, and cannot block smaller players from gaining significant influence. Nor can they get away with the sloppiness and bias that have become endemic in the MSM. It’s too easy for others to point it out and make them look silly.

I don’t think any of us know what the long-term structure of an Internet-based media will look like, but it’s almost a sure bet that today’s dominant players will no longer be the dominant players in that world. They have too much baggage and their temperament and experience are not suited for the new world. They may survive (and I think most of them will, at least for a time), but they won’t be able to dominate the news cycle the way they do today.

“(Of course I am assuming that Republicans overall will do poorly in the elections. If they do well my questions become moot. But I think it’s unlikely that they will do well.)”

I’ve thought about that one a long time, and concluded that we don’t know enough to predict what’s going to happen. I believe elections in which a substantial portion of voters dislike both sides are inherently volatile. And we can’t really count on current polling, because of a number of flaws that it’s very tough for them to overcome. Did you know, for example, that the number of land lines in the US is decreasing 3-4% per year while mobile phone usage is going up by more than that? Now mix in the fact that the distribution of land line vs. mobile usage is not uniform. According to the AARP, at the end of 2003, cell phone penetration in the over-65 population was 38%, compared to 65% for 18-49 year olds and 58% for those aged 50-64.

The bottom line on polling is that it’s becoming harder and more expensive for the pollsters to get unbiased and representative samples, or to even know when they have managed to get such a sample. They were off something like 2% in 2004 on the presidential election, and I see no indication that they will be any better this time around.

After all, Kerry still became Senator of an important state.

But then, that’s why many sane people avoid politics altogether.

There’s another lesson here as well — a lesson in why one might choose to refrain from ‘going negative’ in politics (and other areas of life as well). It’s the risk of exactly what happened: screwing up the delivery of a snide, nasty, mean put-down so that it hits the wrong targets.

If one has a reputation for not going negative, for not repeatedly aiming for the lowest common denominator of human behavior; if one has a reputation for being nice and behavingly maturely, it makes it much, much easier to turn around and say, “Oops, I misspoke; I didn’t mean that the way it came out,” and have that accepted.

Likewise, it also makes redeeming oneself when one has criticized on the basis of false information easier. And so on.

It’s a simple rule of life, even in politics, that the nicer, more pleasant, more courteous, more respectful, more, basically, *adult* one is. . .

. . .the more inclined people are to take you at face value, to cut you some slack when you humanly err, to give you the benefit of the doubt, and, perhaps most importantly, take you, your points, your proposals, and of course your *candidacy*, more seriously.