Where’s Rush Limbaugh?
He is still doing his talk radio thing, of course (and Media Matters is monitoring him daily) but his profile is now greatly diminished from what it was several months ago. That’s without doubt not simply a matter of accident or of the media’s fickle-swarming tendencies. The RNC and Limbaugh both clearly understood that if Limbaugh’s profile remained large and central and if he were to continue to be associated with control of Republicans that it could only damage the Republican brand because of his extremism. Better to return to his former lower profile function of tossing meat to his activist demographic (older white people who don’t much like colored folk).
Where’s Dick Cheney?
I put this rhetorical question to Greg Sargent’s blog last week as the recent CIA/Cheney story was getting a lot of coverage. Previously, we’d seen Cheney (and daughter) mount an aggressive propaganda campaign to defend his decisions/policies against emerging revelations and to attack the Obama administration (and Dems generally). But, last week, not a peep from either one of the Cheneys. So far as I can tell, Liz made only one media appearance on the weekend where previously she’d been ubiquitous across the networks on a daily basis. So this one is odd and I don’t yet understand it.
Time being spent behind the curtain and working media coverage covertly? The recent CNN “Cheney gets bum rap” bit would be an instance. Likely, the broader narrative of “it was only an assassination program never implemented” is part of this initiative as well (it’s being forwarded by Matelin, Cheney’s PR chief in the administration). We’ll see whether further revelations show that the program(s) in question (which Panetta just found out about and ordered cancelled and which apparently made Holder “feel sick”) reach further and more immorally or more criminally that the fowarded narrative. That would seem likely at this point.
Cheney is quite masterful at the information/propaganda game as well as at behind the scenes manipulation of persons and institutions so the next bit of time ought to provide a good study in how pathologically authoritarian personalities function in a modern (relatively democratic and relatively transparent) governmental situation.
