“Evening News” Weekend Edition (April 23, 2023)

Why Recent Books Seem Dated

Let me pre-editorialize by stating that I generally dislike the standard book review. Is it the format, the formality, or the formula? All of the above. 

Here is a recurring theme that I will recycle from time to time: Something happened in Obama’s runup to the presidency that marked a change in Western Civilization. The biased news media cranked up the partisan thermostat and memories of a pre-inferno living room are but a memory.

It was as if the hometown refs had tired of their brittle-boned team’s anemic efforts, and they took it upon themselves to perform lay-ups in the Visitor’s basket. The victorious fourth estate would never abandon their referee jerseys. They would scrub their silliest, gushiest, most inane Obama praise from YouTube and feigned objectivity would stage a comeback from time to time. But when summoned, the player-refs would sink as many baskets as needed to raise another banner to the ceiling.

The self-adoring press flexed its muscles in 2008 and let the world know that they would decide the outcome of America’s presidential election. They would establish the divinity of Barack Obama and identify the organic racism festering in even the gentlest of his critics. The hive media would hammer home the illegitimacy of the 2016 presidential election and the hyper-legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. They would decide all that was significant about COVID, from its origins to its dispersal to its likelihood of infection to its severity of infection, from the efficacy and safety of the newly-created vaccines to the incompetence, stupidity, and criminal recklessness of Pfizer skeptics, from the efficacy of masks to…the rules of the game had changed. The before and after photos prompt the query: Is that the same model?

This brings us to two interesting books that try to make sense of the Obama coronation. I recently gave away my copies of both of these books. I can recommend them highly but…they do not age well. 

The first epistle is “A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media” by Bernard Goldberg.

The second journal is “Obama Zombies: How the Liberal Machine Brainwashed My Generation” by Jason Mattera.

Both of these works pierce the bullseye. If you want hard-hitting media criticism from a self-professed liberal, Goldberg delivers. If you want vignettes of shamelessly-stupid adoration for Barack Obama, Mattera delivers. The question in hindsight is, are any of these things revelatory?

Both Mattera and Goldberg seem to believe in a return to normalcy. There seems to be the wish, even the expectation, that the subjects will wake up to a Kevorkian-level hangover, take the pulse of the mysterious person in bed next to them, and with a sigh of relief asks aloud, “What was I not thinking?” The Jimmy Olsens would rededicate themselves to truth and objectivity and the Obama Zombies would cultivate the subtle joys of common sense. Hah!

Corrupt media and mindless followers are now fixtures of the American landscape. Not ubiquitous as cell phones but plentiful enough to photobomb every other snapshot. Goldberg and Mattera harken back to an era when shame was possible, and redemption was desirable. For these reasons, the aforementioned books seem hopelessly dated.

The Editor.

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