Republican politics and America’s stunted media
Glenn Greenwald has just written a new book, Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Myths of Republican Politics. He has released a long excerpt on Huffpo. Here is a sampling. Great American Hypocrites
examines the deceitful, personality-based election tactics the Right uses to build absurd cults of personality around their leaders while demonizing liberal and Democratic candidates. Accompanying that, as always, is the vital role the establishment press plays in disseminating those vapid though powerful themes. This excerpt is from the chapter concerning John McCain’s candidacy and how those themes will be deployed by the right-wing/media monster to transform him into a principled, honor-bound American icon . . .
If one examines America’s presidential elections beginning in 1980 to the present, what one finds is a consistent and unchanging pattern. The Republican Party dresses up its leaders in all sorts of virtuous personality costumes. The establishment press, driven by the vapid dynamics of high school personality complexes, digests and then promotes that iconography. National elections are dominated by personality imagery and smears and are almost completely bereft of consideration of substantive issues. Worst of all, the personality images that dictate our election outcomes are not just petty, but entirely false, grounded in pure myth.
