The Haunted Campaign of Jeb Bush

Last week Jeb Bush filed for the New Hampshire ballot as Pat Buchanan looks on from two of his 1996 presidential campaign photos.

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Buchanan won New Hampshire in 1996. Will Donald Trump take the Granite State in 2016?

Buchanan writes this about Trump:

Millions now regard the media as ideologues who are masquerading as journalists and use press privileges and power to pursue agendas.

Even before Nixon and Agnew, conservatives believed this.

At the Goldwater convention at the Cow Palace in 1964 when ex-President Eisenhower mentioned “sensation-seeking columnists and commentators,” to his amazement, the hall exploded.

Enter The Donald.

His popularity is traceable to the fact that he rejects the moral authority of the media, breaks their commandments, and mocks their condemnations. His contempt for the norms of Political Correctness is daily on display.

And that large slice of America that detests a media whose public approval now rivals that of Congress, relishes this defiance. The last thing these folks want Trump to do is to apologize to the press.

And the media have played right into Trump’s hand.

They constantly denounce him as grossly insensitive for what he has said about women, Mexicans, Muslims, McCain and a reporter with a disability. Such crimes against decency, says the press, disqualify Trump as a candidate for president.

Yet, when they demand he apologize, Trump doubles down. And when they demand that Republicans repudiate him, the GOP base replies:

“Who are you to tell us whom we may nominate? You are not friends. You are not going to vote for us. And the names you call Trump — bigot, racist, xenophobe, sexist — are the names you call us, nothing but cuss words that a corrupt establishment uses on those it most detests.”

What the Trump campaign reveals is that, to populists and Republicans, the political establishment and its media arm are looked upon the way the commons and peasantry of 1789 looked upon the ancien regime and the king’s courtiers at Versailles.

Yet, now that the fourth estate is as discredited as the clergy in 1789, the larger problem is that there is no arbiter of truth, morality and decency left whom we all respect. Like 4th-century Romans, we barely agree on what those terms mean anymore.

Live free or die!