And despite Dean’s warm welcome to Senator Hagel, I think the Nebraska senator has figured out that Senator McCain’s campaign is fading fast and that the “maverick” vote needs a home.  If Senator Hagel gets in, it will indeed draw some votes from Senator McCain and give the Buchananites a home as well. ~Hugh Hewitt

In addition to not understanding that the Politico story on Richardson is not a “take-down story” (just as the Romney ancestor story is not an attack on Romney), but simply a reporting at the national level of facts that are well-known to New Mexicans, Hewitt doesn’t seem to understand much of anything about GOP primary politics.  Hewitt’s confusion of a news story with an attack piece is understandable, since the “new media” do not actually report anything to inform people for the sake of having an informed citizenry but selectively and even more tendentiously report on only those things that serve the turn of the “new media” celebrities.  I suppose we should start calling people like Hewitt members of the MNM (mainsteam new media).  In the world of the MNM, news stories that reveal potentially embarrassing details, even when they are common knowledge and of no great political importance in the candidate’s home state, cannot be anything but attack pieces, because the MNM cannot conceive of something called “journalism” that does not have a malevolent angle to it.  In this they are even more myopic than the biased journalists they presume to replace.

It is bizarre that Hewitt doesn’t understand that McCain’s appeal, really his only appeal at this point, is his position on the war and his potential credibility as a suitable leader in wartime.  It is especially bizarre since Hewitt is constantly lecturing everyone about how important the war is to “the base” (i.e., it is really important to him and therefore must be important to “the base”).  The position McCain holds would be, incidentally, the same position that Hewitt holds, and both seem to hold out that position out of the same wild-eyed ideological zeal that makes both of them so worrisome.  McCain is also the most reliably pro-life of the Terrible Trio (which may not be saying much, but there it is), which would also apparently jibe with Hewitt’s own stated views.  So what is not clear at all is why Hewitt is pretty openly backing Romney the dancing fraud and not the man who is much more clearly in agreement with him on the two issues (the war and judges) that he says transcend all other issues. 

But this post explains why: McCain is a “maverick.” You see, he has been tainted by the MSM’s love and is therefore untouchable by the likes of Hewitt.  He is tainted unlike, say, Romney, who is entirely a creature of the MSM and would have no name recognition at all if it weren’t for the MSM.  In any case, Hewitt’s deep and penetrating analysis amounts to this: 1) the MSM likes McCain, therefore I, Hugh Hewitt, don’t like McCain, so I accept that he is a “maverick”; other silly people in the MSM say that Hagel is a “maverick,” and therefore Hagel and McCain must both represent the “maverick” vote; Hagel has criticised the war and opposed the mighty “surge,” which would probably be punishable by death if I, Hewitt, had my way, and therefore he falls into some vague category of “White Flag Republican” which actually stands for “anyone who disagrees with me [Hewitt] about any aspect of the war.”  The “Buchananites” (translation from Hewittian: real conservatives) naturally fall into this category, since we certainly disagree with him and oppose the war, so Hewitt seems to think that we “Buchananites” want to support Chuck Hagel.  On this last point, while there is an occasional exception here or there, he could not be generally more wrong.  In all of this, he has shown himself to not only be a first-class dunce of a political analyst, but someone whose every opinion about any number of topics related to the war and the primary contest has been completely shaped and dictated by the MSM and its “narratives” about McCain and Hagel.  Amusingly for someone who so fervently hates the MSM as he clearly does, he is completely taken in by their descriptions of all these things and shows literally no ability to scrutinise or criticise the claims that they make except when it comes to making broad, sweeping statements about partisan bias or a failure to report the “good news.”

Update: Hewitt then criticises a post (the link Hewitt gives is broken) by my former EM colleague, Leon Wolf, for circulating a story about a couple of Romney’s sons being at a Brownback event and supposedly “crashing” it.  Mr. Wolf claims no such thing, but simply remarks on the Spartanburg straw poll results: “It is perhaps no wonder, then, that Romney’s campaign folks were apparently busy trying to discover Senator Brownback’s secret at a recent campaign stop in South Carolina.”  Mr. Wolf makes no claim that Romney’s people are “crashing” the event or that they weren’t allowed to be there.  The point Mr. Wolf is making is that Romney’s campaign is doing so badly that he has his sons out there doing research on Brownback to figure out how he is appealing to more people in South Carolina than Romney.  Besides rather blatantly misrepresenting Mr. Wolf’s post, Hewitt doesn’t seem to grasp the signal of the Romney campaign’s weakness that this story about Romney’s sons at the event sends out. 

Mr. Wolf (my link, unlike that of Mr. New Media, is not broken) linked to the Prowler piece I linked to earlier.  This is incidentally accompanied today by Philip Klein’s pretty thorough takedown of Romney.  The Prowler refers to the Politico “rehab” story about Romney.  The Prowler link to this story would be bad enough, but the Prowler then comments on another element of Romney’s campaign: 

The fact that Romney is apparently tweaking his message, moving toward “family” issues, is also interesting, particularly since it puts him in the position of parroting one of his competitor’s longstanding issues. Sen. Sam Brownback has been running on a platform of saving the family from a culture of death and depravity for months. Suddenly Romney has discovered it?

The Prowler concludes sarcastically, referring to Romney’s sons at the Brownback event: “We hope Mitt’s boys were taking notes.”  This follows the remarks on the Politico story, which note about Romney’s ad buys: “Such buys are unheard of at this point in the campaign.”  In other words, the campaign is sending out a warning signal: “Help! We’re drowning!”  In his madness, Hewitt also regards the Politico story as “very favorable to Romney.”  It is a story detailing how Romney hopes to recover from one of the worst months in recent presidential campaigning!  It is a story that talks about how Romney is planning to fritter away his money at an absurdly fast rate.  If that’s favourable coverage, I’d like to know what Hewitt thinks a hit piece looks like.  Oh, we’ve already covered that.