When Unity Trumps Wisdom

One of the media's favorite themes today involves unity. The Repubs have it, the Dems don't. And it certainly does seem true, as the Rebubs stick doggedly to their party line, while the Dems are much more fractured.

The big problem is that the media lapdogs (thank you, Eric Boehlert) value unity over thoughtful disagreements, and this is patently absurd.

Let's say it again: Iraq is the quagmire of quagmires. No one knows how to fix it. So is it really surprising that thoughtful people would disagree on the best way to proceed? It seems perfectly reasonable that a group of smart people would have different solutions to one of the most complex military/political puzzles we've ever faced. But the Dems are getting killed in the media for not all having the same vision, while the Repubs have their praises sung for all having the same misguided and vacuous slogan (“stay the course”) posing as a strategy.

Carl Schurz once wrote: “My country right or wrong; when right, to keep her right; when wrong, to put her right.”

Whether you agree with their plans or not, what the Dems are trying to do is put our country right. What the Repubs are trying to do is ensure their reelections by corroborating Bush’s absurd and untrue claims that progress is being made in Iraq.

One side is struggling with the issue and showing the strains of dealing with such an impossible situation (that was caused by the other party, mind you). The other is sticking to talking points and mindless rhetoric. And why shouldn’t they? As long as the idiots in the media continue to equate consensus with strength and wisdom, there is no incentive for the Repubs to abandon their threadbare talking points of “turning the corner” and “we won’t cut and run.”

So why doesn’t the media condemn the empty sloganeering of the Repubs and hail the honest deliberations of the Dems?

I guess unity makes a better story. In one of the best examples of Republican-spun articles that I’ve seen in a while, the NY Times had a cover story on 6/16/06 by Robin Toner and Kate Zernike rubbed the reader’s face in the fact that the Dems are divided and the Repubs unified. A few excerpts:
“Democrats, divided over the wisdom…” (graph 8);
“Democrats have been divided over the issue…” (graph 18)
“Republicans mocked the democrats for their divisions…” (graph 19);
“…this resolution…left many Democrats in a bind…” (graph 22).

Hey, do you think the Dems are divided on this topic? Do ya? Do ya? Huh?

In the same article, Tom Cole, Repub Representative from Oklanoma, is quoted as saying, “Whether we are right or wrong, we…do have a unified position.”

Compare this to the quote by Schurz above. According to Cole, being unified is preferable to being thoughtful or right. Maybe it makes more impact when the sentence is shortened to: Being unified is preferable to being right. That’s Cole’s argument. That’s the media’s implicit stance. And it’s so backwards that I can’t believe it’s even happening in the United States in 2006.

Kerry tried in vain to portray our political problems in nuanced and complicated terms, and the media killed him for it. Bush talks in moronic black/white terms that are totally divorced from reality and he’s called a man of conviction. It’s completely backwards.
Yes, I hate Repubs, but by deeper disdain is for the media. They admire pols who can stick to their talking points (Ken Mehlman), but blast pols who are willing to have an honest discussion and risk occasionally saying something a bit outlandish but well-intentioned (Howard Dean).

And the media keeps glorifying unity among dishonest, fatuous slogan-slingers on the right while disparaging the honest, thoughtful, difficult deliberations occurring on the left.

Profligate, really. And so sadly typical.