Natasha says a lot of what I’ve been trying to say here re Edwards and the media. One comment really struck me:

Edwards is a little too goodlooking for my taste. He should have a scar across one cheek, maybe grease up his hair and comb it back.

And this at a progressive political site for “high information” voters.

Seriously, I don’t even know what to say to that. Except, if this is how a majority thinks, we’re doomed.

Anyway, Natasha isn’t quite as misdirected:

Because it isn’t that people just want to feel good, it’s that they want to feel in control. The establishment political class have learned how to make people feel they’re in control without giving them any. Reagan was sunny, yes. He also had a message of ostensible empowerment that people liked hearing and that wasn’t a threat to anyone powerful. It was just snake oil. ’I will empower you to shop and not give a damn about your neighbor, who will in turn not have to give a damn about you.’

That’s the sort of empowerment the corporate media likes. The kind that keeps the peasants happy, but still peasants.

Yet Reagan, too, trafficked in fear and anger. Fear of brown people, poor people, and foreigners. Which somehow never made him a ’negative’ candidate, because he had happy things to say about a social order dominated by racist, sexist, authoritarian corporate aristocrats. Anger at a supposedly interfering government that was keeping the rich man down. And you, you could be rich, too, if it wasn’t for the frakking Fed.

The establishment press continues to be the main, if not only, source most people have for political news. And we know who they work for. Their function is not to inform, it’s to narcotize. Not to challenge society, but to reinforce its existing authority structures.

Edwards’ message threatens their paymasters. It’s never going to get out on their watch.

Exactly.