The very title of his latest syndicated column is a groan-inducer: "Rathergate confirms the media's left bias." Liberal bias, that poor strawless scarecrow with which conservatives can't bear to part. He uses the panel report about the 60 Minutes II Bush National Guard debacle to once again decry the leftward slant of the elite media in general and CBS News in particular. Proof of this endemic bias being the fact that CBS did "ad-hominem investigative stories" on the Swift Boat vets instead of an "examination of the charges," but it doesn't matter what CBS did, because if they had debunked the debunkable charges (as so many other outlets did), that would have been damning evidence of liberal bias too. Everything in Krauthammer's column is paint-by-numbers, he can't even bother to twirl it up a bit. So we get the standard saw about the "liberal media cocoons" of New York and Washington--as if any cocoon could be more snug and self-reinforcing than the studios of Fox News or the think tanks of DC. And how's this for a starchy paraphrase of a Dylan lyric? "[You] do not have to be a weatherman to ascertain wind direction." Open snuff box, sniff.
I suppose it was entirely predictable, though nonetheless ridiculous, that given everything going on in the world right now conservatives should spend the last weeks concentrating on CBS' mishandling of National Guard memo story, a story whose main lines still appear to be largely true. It almost seems that responding to The Machine's well-orchestrated Rather offensive accords the story a status and significance that it really doesn't deserve. It's a great example of the win-win situtation which the Right has created for itself by flogging the myth of the liberal media all these years: Respond to their attacks, and grant them legitimacy. Ignore them, and you're part of an elite media conspiracy of silence. Or something.
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