Reminds me of:
The Democrats are in a bind on this, as many of us tried to tell some of the more nervous types here during the Miers near-debacle. People kept saying President Bush needs to nominate a stealth candidate with unknown views and no record of standing firm on the Constitution because the Democrats would Bork a truly great nominee.
But they can't Bork a nominee when they don't control the Senate, and may not even be able to if they did. Borking only works for sure when the Democrats control the Senate AND when there's a liberal media monopoly. Bork was successfully Borked because when he was nominated there was no FOX News, no conservative talk radio, no internet, and limited cable penetration.
Yes, the Democrats controlled the Senate when Bork came up, which helped the left, but they also controlled the Senate when Thomas was nominated a few years later. But the vicious smear of Thomas failed. Why? Because by then cable was more deeply ingrained in our culture and people actually watched the hearings, plus by then the Rush Limbaugh-driven talk radio revolution had blossomed. The Rats smeared Bork and there was no way for Bork to fight back. Not so for Thomas
It's even worse for the Rats now with FOX News, the internet, and other outlets which have broken the liberal media monopoly the Rats need to Bork someone. Imagine Teddy Kennedy's CAP smear being unleashed in the mid-80's. It would have gotten enormous traction since anyone trying to counter his lies would run into a brick wall trying to find an outlet to get their message to the public. All the public would hear would be CBS, ABC, NBC, Time, Newsweek, the NY Times, AP, and UPI repeating the smear over and over. But in 2006 the smear was exposed as a smear within hours. By the next morning, millions upon millions of Americans knew that Ted was lying.
These hearings, which the Rats once benefitted from, are now detrimental to them. Most people, upon seeing the likes of Dick Durbin or Chuck Schumer grilling someone, will side with the person being grilled. The Rats have lost their media monopoly, which they relied on the spin the hearings their way. Today, people not only hear another spin from guys like Rush, but they see the hearings themselves. This is why Biden wants to scrap the hearings.
This is exactly the result of the de-massification of the media that Alvin Toffler prophesized way back in 1979 in his book The Third Wave. Toffler said that as communications technologies improve, the hammerlock hold of information dissemination by the mass media will come to an end. The rise of conservative talk radio since the late 1980's, the rise of proprietary online services in the late 1980's then the public Internet since the middle 1990's, and the near-universal availability of cable TV has made it possible for people to do end-runs around the MSM.
You'd think the MSM would have learned that lesson after the Jayson Blair fiasco at the New York Times that brought down Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd there; the inability of Senator Kerry to stop the Swift Boat Veterans during the 2004 Presidential campaign, the Rathergate fiasco in September 2004, and fall of Eason Jordan at CNN late in 2004 has shown how woefully out of touch the MSM is nowadays.
Reminds me of: