A Republic Lost?

After five hours of fitful tossing and turning, I rise to see that the planet still exists, the sun is coming up, there's still air to breathe, my family is still alive and well, and my house still stands.  Even my 401(k) account still exists, if shrinking like I wish my gut was.  But for how much longer?  And for how much longer will my job still be there?  Or my ISP without which these words can no longer be conveyed to our vast and countless readership, nor other ISPs to enable them to read them?

What Nancy Pelosi did yesterday was criminal.  Between deliberately antagonizing the Republicans whose votes every Dem has spent the past week insisting were crucial to the passage of any Wall Street bailout and her "failure" to whip up enough of her own caucus to put the compromise bill over the top, she is personally responsible (and by rights should be personally liable as well) for the destruction of a trillion dollars of private sector wealth.  She may as well have stolen it out of all of our wallets.  And STILL a third of House 'Pubbies voted "yea".

I believe the Speakerette made sure enough Democrats would vote "no" to offset however many yes votes House Minority Leader John Boehner could come up with.  If he had delivered his entire caucus, the bill STILL would have gone down.  She is, as I alluded last night, committing extortion.  She is holding the entire American economy hostage in order to compel the American people to abandon their opposition to a bailout, removing the electoral threat to her vulnerable Members, after which she can take the hard(er)-left Donk version of the bailout with all its extremist, Big Labor, "community organizer" goodies, and ram it through on a party-line vote, thereby taking all the credit from a sobbingly relieved public for "saving the economy," while smearing Republicans with the blame for the compromise's failure.  But if the public won't be turned around on the bailout, she'll just extort panicky Republicans into flipping another dozen Members and make them take the heat for it with their angry constituents while she continues to shield her own - and STILL take credit for passage and smear Republicans with the blame for yesterday's debacle.

I honestly don't know in which direction this will go.  I want to believe Hugh Hewitt that the American people are smart enough to see through all the spin, all the lies, all the Enemy Media propaganda and recognize what Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are doing to the country for their own personal enrichment, empowerment, and aggrandizement.  Yet that optimism is not borne out by the polls of late and their recent Obama-ward (and panic-driven bailout-favoring) shift.

Yes, the Enemy Media monopoly is a thing of the past.  Yes, the mainstream media of the blogosphere and talk radio and isolated center-right publications (of which today there is one fewer) does fine and heroic work getting truth out to the truth-starved masses.  But as I analogized a few years back, the Enemy Media and mainstream media are comparable to a grizzly bear and a swarm of bees.  Yes, the bees can swarm, and yes, the bees can sting and otherwise make a nuisance of themselves at the bear's expense; but ultimately they can't stop him from going wherever he wants and doing whatever he wants.  The bear, in other words, doesn't have the woods to himself, but he's still dominant within it.

This election cycle the Enemy Media has compensated for its absent monopoly by the simple expedient of exploiting its dominance.  They've dropped any pretense of objectivity that they may have had left and have ratcheted up the volume of their extreme Left bias to deafening proportions.  What was once "just" bias is now active vendettas of public defamation against their political enemies (just ask Sarah Palin) while the numerous and gaping vulnerabilities of their own party and its presidential nominee are guarded and protected as jealously as...well, as a mother bear protecting her cubs.

Maybe Rathergate four years ago was the point of no return for this dynamic, but it is now actively undermining the foundation of the American Republic itself.

I write all of the above as prelude to this Jim Geraghty lamentation from yesterday: