I said yesterday that Beltway journalists aren't reporting on where political money is coming from probably out of sheer laziness. But I was wrong. As an interchange on MSNBC's Keith Olbermann showed last night, many of them want the public to believe hundreds of millions of dollars of special interest campaign cash buys absolutely nothing - that, in effect, K Street finances candidates out of the goodness of its heart. Yes, here was Washington Post political reporter on Olbermann's show last night, deflecting a question on where Mitt Romney's $20+ million in campaign cash came from, and whether it buys anything:
"History has taught that where money comes from doesn't matter all that much."
That's right, folks - all that Texas oil money flooding into the RNC and the Bush campaign has absolutely nothing to do with, say, the Energy Bill that gives away massive tax breaks to - shocker! - Texas oil companies. Hell, the Bush pioneers gave all that cash to Bush just because they thought he was a swell guy.
Congress, it's the same thing. All that pharmaceutical industry campaign cash had positively no relation to lawmakers allowing the drug companies to write the Medicare bill. Oh and all that New York money from Wall Street flowing into Democratic campaign coffers? Yeah, that has nothing to do with Democrats still refusing to, say, reform America's lobbyist-written trade policies.
I thought I had seen it all from the media when the Washington Post's Richard Cohen declared that the "use of violence could be therapeutic" or when the New York Times' David Brooks declared that "voters shouldnât be allowed to define the choices in American politics." But I have really never seen such public proof that the media is fully, knowingly and calculatedly complicit in the Big Money takeover of our government until I saw Cillizza's comments last night. The media really has gone from important watchdog, to transcription service to diversionary propaganda machine.