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Showing posts with label Drudge Report. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Drudge Report. Show all posts

Friday, February 05, 2016

Bias On Drudge?

I had a friend of mine tell me that the Drudge Report wasn't in any way biased. It was merely a site with a bunch of links to other news sources. Then I showed him this.














He stopped talking after that.

Thursday, January 10, 2013

R.I.P. The Right Wing Blogger

It amuses me to no end when my oh so enlightened right wing friends refer to the Drudge Report as "simply a page of links to news stories."

Really?
















This was the front page of the Drudge Report yesterday. As soon as Hitler comes up, that's when you know which side is losing.

And take a look at this recent poll from Rasmussen Polling (a right leaning poll). Just 8 percent say they are members of the Tea Party with 49 percent of voters saying they have an unfavorable view of the movement. I recall being assured as recent as last year that The Tea Party movement would always be around, eternally robust and ever a beacon of conservatism. It seems to me that the American people are plumb tired of the crazy and would rather listen to people that live in the real world.

Of course, this speaks to a much larger issue. Right around a decade ago, the blogsphere really began to burst to life. Political hacks from all ends of the spectrum started their own sites. The Right took particular advantage of this and, in the 2004 election, were part of the reason George W. Bush won reelection. After issuing imperial edicts that John Kerry was a French war criminal, the American people, still timid from 9-11, bought all their lies.

But the two years after that election were illustrative of what happens when you vote with emotion and belief as opposed to thought. And, in 2006, the Democrats took over both houses in Congress. In 2008, they saw more gains and America elected Barack Obama president. It appeared that the influence of the right wing blogger was a flash in the pan.

The 2010 election showed us that they did have a death rattle left in them. The House swept back to the GOP based on irrational fears over health care and over reaching government intrusion. Even in that election, though, the Right blew it, running very conservative candidates in the Senate and reaching too far. By all rights, they should have taken back the Senate as well because if you take a look at the House victories from that year, not all were hard core Tea Partiers. Some were merely moderates elected by a center right public who thought the president had gone too far. These same voters certainly did not want the far right either and so, the GOP didn't take the Senate. Since the Right's main conviction is their vanity, they saw 2010 as a great victory and continued to push more and more crazy ideas in the 2012 election, pulling political philosophies from far right web sites and incorporating them into their main platform.

It didn't work. The president easily won reelection, the Democrats gained two seats in the Senate, adding more progressive candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin, and the House saw a net of seven seats for the party of the donkey. Add in the recent astronomical polling numbers for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and the message the American people are sending is clear: moderate or else. 

All of this leads us to the conclusion that the right wing blogger, and any influence they may have had over public policy, is essentially dead. Sure, they'll still have their followers similar to the old short wave radio days and they'll be trotted out on talk shows here and there but, for the most part, the days of them having any sort of substantial effect on policy are over. We're going to see this with the debates on guns, the budget, immigration and climate change over the next few months. Either they can moderate or be left out of the conversation. If the trends in the last few elections are any indication, it may even be worse for the Right in general. I suppose they didn't have much of a choice after 2008 to hitch their wagon to the star located in the Moonbat Quadrant. Now, they are paying the consequences.

I wonder just how many times Hitler and Stalin are going to come up in the next month...