If the current pre-emptive strike by Rush Limbaugh against the senators who will attack Bush AG nominee Alberto Gonzales tomorrow was not co-ordinated with the White House, it should have been. In bold language, Rush characterized liberal senators such as Patrick Leahy of Vermont as “racist,” the first time in memory that this charge has been made so strongly and directly against Democrats by a prominent Republican. (It is possible that this was also said in the nomination of Miguel Estrada, after the Daschle memo — which said that Estrada had to be stopped precisely because he was hispanic — was leaked, but that’s not what your correspondent recalls.)

There may well be other examples of this pre-emptive framing of an issue by the New Media, but the Gonzales situation strikes us as a new tactic in the ongoing war to assist the Old Media in their decline. If we are right, a new chapter in that story is being written in 2005.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 5th, 2005 at 11:11 am and is filed under General, MSM, New Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.