The Blustery Screeching Death of Pundit Apartheid

Or maybe its the last of the big dinosaurs obstreperously bemoaning the looming evil terror of nascent Darwinism. Or the reactionary hysteria of extremely spoiled only children recognizing the implications inherent to the arrival of a new baby in the family. Or perhaps it's vampires cursing the rising sun. Regardless of whatever metaphor one might prefer, the bloviators and other resident establishmentarians have been shown that the end of their royal ride is fast approaching. And they really really really don't like it. And they certainly don't recognize any humor in the situation. And so they lash out, effectively pasting "kick me" signs on their own backs and giving the joke even greater force of authority. Stephen Colbert brutally confronted the self-anointed superior news media minds of the DC Bubble People. And in a (non-life threatening) way rather parallel to white-supremacists in South Africa seeing the end of their power arrive in the person of Nelson Mandela, their panic has unleashed a tsunami of vitriolic condemnation. (For the sake of clarity to the ambulatory braindead, this is not comparing Colbert to Mandela - duh! - it's comparing one set of self-designated cultural/political elites to another.) Richard Cohen is the prototype joke butt who totally fails to see anything funny when it's him that has slipped on the banana peel. Or when it's him that has been ridiculed for putting on lipstick and fake eyelashes to perform his services as a Bush fellator. But he's clearly not alone voicing pathetic crybaby whimpers. The death knell is sounding, and you can hear it in all the sturm and drang about the "incivility" of bloggers, the whining of Deborah Howell and Jim Brady and John Harris at WaPo, the pathetic attempts to marginalize opinions other than those displayed on the pages or in broadcasts produced by the prominent corporate news operations. Dailykos diarist DaveV has documented a list of petulantista defiance. Dan Froomkin asks the rhetorical question, Why So Defensive? As the man said, "you don't need a weather man to know which way the wind blows." People losing authority feel dispossessed, angry at the decline - and foreseeable loss altogether - of their power. So they gripe. As loud as they can. And some folks think that is funny. Being liberal means never getting any immediate gratification. In the past, it took decades to accomplish things like women's voting rights, and labor laws preventing locked doors on factories to allow workers to escape from fires. It was 100 years from the Emancipation Proclamation to mid-1960s civil rights legislation. True freedom of speech remains more a promise than reality, but it wasn't all that long ago that magazines would use asterisks when they published four-letter words. And voting rights, equality, and freedom of speech are foremost in all our "great American virtues" celebrated by triumphalist boasting conservatives (who would turn back the clock in an instant if they could). But there has been a notable time compression factor in effect the last couple decades or so, with an ever-faster decrease in the span of time from a progressive idea's inception to the time it becomes cheered as one of the hallmarks of Americ'as greatness by conservatives. It may still seem painfully and unnecessarily slow - and, of course, it is. Innocent thousands die and suffer needlessly. And the future is never certain, nor will it ever achieve utopian perfection. Still, progress is quite definitely being made. And sometimes it advances in particularly notable ways. For example, the reaction to Jerome's and Kos's Crashing The Gate. Stephen Colbert was not thought to be funny, by many at the White House Correspondents Dinner, because he basically functioned rather like a doctor notifying his group of patients that their time was nigh. Could be 6 months, could be 6 years. No specific forecasts. But their medical condition plainly indicated that they had better start preparing for their demise. It's understandable that they might not see reason to laugh. Colbert, though, is only one nail in the coffin the establishmentarians see being constructed for their burial. The dollar cost per word ratio, which once upon a time was the surest indicator of superior media authority, simply doesn't matter any more. At least with respect to opinion mongering, money is no longer power. Now it's Broder and Matthews and Russert and Friedman and Cokie Roberts, et al, competing with Atrios and Kos and Digby and Billmon and Josh Marshall. In the marketplace of ideas, power accrues to those with a larger capacity for brain function. Who has the bigger audience right now? Who will have the bigger audience in the next two years, the next four years? Will Washington Week invite Bill Scher and Steve Soto and Christy Hardin Smith to sit on the panel? Will Washington Week have any relevance at all? Will the Lehrer News Hour update its fossilized Shields and Brooks editorial combat to feature the Rude Pundit versus Michelle Malkin? However it ultimately shakes out, the vampires have seen the glow of the approaching morn. The spoiled children have recognized they'll no longer be the center of attention. The dinosaurs are stuck in the tar, agonized by the portents of evolution. The supremacists have been shaken by the conquering arrival of equality. You can see it, and hear it, happening. Not as fast as you might like, and not all at once. But it's happening. You can tell by the churlish tone of the whine.