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Kirk Walters with a spot-on metaphor for what happened in Iowa Tuesday and what it means for Rick Santorum and the next few weeks of the GOP Death March.
What I particularly like about it is the innocence mixed with cruelty. Little kids do this to ants, and it isn't nice but it doesn't arise to the level of pulling the wings off flies, much less more advanced forms of sadistic experimentation.
And it certainly is what the media does to candidates.
It's not always fair: I have said several times that I think the media were cruel to Dan Quayle and Al Gore to the point of being actually dishonest — or, at best, astonishingly incompetent — in furthering their popular memes about the men. It probably cost Quayle a second term as VP, while it helped substantially in the defeat of Al Gore.
But there is, and has always been, an element of "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen" in the electoral process.
As alluded to a few days ago, Jefferson was a much bigger fan of newspapers before he was president than he was once they turned the magnifying glass on him, not only throwing Sally Hemings out there for examination but indulging in pure partisan hackery over his policies and actions.
His famous quote, from a letter he wrote while in Paris, far from the Constitutional Convention, envisions a world in which curious, engaged citizens seek enlightenment from a press dedicated to providing it:
"The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them."
The partisan attacks he faced as president didn't fall under that vision of the role of the press, but he did more complaining than actual reversal of his belief in the value of a free press, and his founding of the University of Virginia may have been, in part, an attempt to correct the pragmatic shortfall.
It's an oversimplification — and a self-serving lie as well — to say that, if both sides are mad, the press is doing its job. It's certainly wrong to suggest that, if both sides are mad, the paper got it right.
One of the most galling things for an editorialist is to have a persuasive argument derailed by a factual error. It's particularly infuriating when the factual error has little bearing on the matter, more devastating when it is the lynchpin of the argument, but, in either case, it's your own damned fault and that makes the sting worse.
I've never really understood the ethical point that makes newspapers isolate the editorialist from the reporter. It has traditionally provoked laughter in the case of the Wall Street Journal, where the fiery rightwing rantings of the editorial page are frequently belied by the facts being reported on the front page of the same paper, but I also recall, at a much smaller outlet, when a bureau reporter drove an hour into town to hurl the day's newspaper down on the desk of the editorial writer, demanding to know why he hadn't bothered to call for a few facts before opining with misdirected vehemence on a developing story the reporter was covering.
In the long run, however, and in most of the short runs as well, the media get the main points right, and the fury with which they are attacked is largely a matter of whose ox has been gored.
The right will insist the media are liberals and cites its own studies to "prove" it, while the left inveighs against the corporate control that "makes" the press toe a conservative line. The Tea Party insisted they were being misconstrued and misrepresented by the media; the Occupy movement was sure the Koch Brothers and Rupert Murdoch were behind the fact that their demonstrations weren't national news until they consisted of more than a few hundred people chanting in a park on the East Coast.
And readers in South Africa must be shaking their heads over how oppressed American political types feel over all this. Everyone likes to think that the press exists to promote their clearly righteous cause and to attack their obviously dishonest and subversive opposition, but, in South Africa, the ANC enacts legislation to make it so.
Meanwhile, back at the ant hill, Santorum is having his moment in the sun. He's unlikely to prove as big a fumblemouth as Perry or as clearly a nitwit as Bachmann, but he's going to have to either duck some of his past positions or openly campaign on an extremist platform to avoid being fried by standing at the focal point.
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