The Unbearable Smugness of the Press

Almost every sentence in this piece is pure gold. Read it slowly and savor.

Journalist Will Rahn, much to his credit, gets it exactly right. He is one of very few able to even conceptualize a reality outside of the candy store on a cloud in which he works.

I woke on Wednesday to a surprising sense of encouragement, even though I had not been supportive of Trump. It wasn’t Trump I found encouraging but at least one other thing.

The American people had largely given the bought-and-paid-for-press the slap in the face for which they had so earnestly worked. The press told us, on the one hand, not to worry our little heads over all that innuendo and rumor, and tried to terrify us with forced birth, misogyny and nuclear buttons on the other.

We don’t appreciate being lied to and clearly said so. We particularly don’t like the cartoon level of discourse we’re expected to care about.

Have you ever been given a backhanded compliment and understood that the offender thought that you were too stupid to know that you’d been insulted? To most Americans, that was the last eight years.

The people who did buy into the script are understandably at sea today, but I find it hard to sympathize. In order to cuddle with your favorite TV hate machine, you must also buy into the smugness. You have to really think that you’re a more sophisticated thinker than all those other dimwits composing most of your country. We’ve all seen it and it’s remarkably unattractive.

And the candidate who unabashedly questioned why she wasn’t 50 points ahead thought that by literally buying the media, she would saunter into that Oval Office with the ease to which she was entitled. In spite of all the fixes we know about, and the fraud we’ve yet to discover, in spite of Springsteen and Cecile and Michelle and Obama Himself, in spite of the limited menu of information served to us, the voters said no thanks.

Or maybe because of.