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Off today to Pennsylvania to catch a joint McCain-Palin appearance. That should be fun. McCain's latest tactic is to cast himself as the last electoral bulwark America might ever have the chance to employ against the inevitable socialist takeover. I can't wait to see the applause he gets from all those Pennsylvanian anticommunists.

The reason I even joke about this is — well, let me just make this one small point before I hop in my car. If, as expected, Barack Obama wins, we should all get ready for the emergence (one might say re-emergence) of a powerful new storyline in the right-wing media. There are going to be many stories circulated about the rise of Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann and other in-the-tank-for-BO media types. Complaining about media bias was already a national sport before this election season, but now that one of America's top TV commentators is an affable lesbian who rolls her eyes every time she reads a Republican talking point, you can expect the howls from the hills to be louder than ever.

It's started already and you can expect it to get worse. The basic theme is that Maddow and Olbermann are only the tip of the iceberg, symptomatic of a more broadly-ingrained media bias that infects the less obvious propagandists as much as or more than that notable twosome. This same complaint will be made in print and on the air roughly 500 million times between now and the next presidential elections, camouflaged in different forms. When I have time I'd like to categorize all the different types of media-bias whines — it'd be a pretty funny exercise — but here are a few basic subgroups:

1. The press covered Barack Obama doing something really boring and made it seem like he was curing cancer! This is one of my favorites. Some paper somewhere will run a stand-alone photo of this or that politician tiddling a wink in the middle of nowhere — purely a way of squeezing some value out of the paper's Reuters photo subscription by filling space with some asinine picture and sticking a header on it — and immediately either the conservatives or the lefties will start yelping about how the paper never runs pictures of their heroes cutting a ribbon in front of a Jack in the Box or leaning over to inspect a prize-winning pig at the Iowa State Fair. The news editor probably chose that photo over a stand-alone of a three-legged kitten with a yarn-ball purely by accident, but you'll never convince Mr. Bias-Hunter of that.

2. If my candidate had done this/said that, the press would be going batshit! Instead, just look at them, sitting on their webbed communist hands while this explosive story goes uncovered! This is a favorite rhetorical tactic of both sides. What's interesting about this is that it shows how the anti-bias whiner believes he is entitled to have the press go batshit across the board about something. People don't seem to have a problem with the press making mountains out of molehills — they have a problem with them making mountains out of the wrong molehills.

3. The New York Times/Washington Post/CNN has never once reported this fact, which I personally find interesting, which reveals their extremist bias! One of my favorite examples here was Ed Whelan of the National Review, who recently posted a blog complaining that the Washington Post had never reported Joe Biden's comments about an Obama presidency being tested by an "international crisis, a generated crisis." As Glenn Greenwald at Salon pointed out, the Post had actually reported that fact not once, not twice, but six times.

What's funny about all of this is that all of these people who are supposedly anti-communists act like the "national media" is a public trust that is somehow obligated to adhere to some uniform general standard. I recognize this attitude from my time in Russia. There were lots of people who had legitimate complaints about the changes in the country after the fall of communism — the loss of access to doctors and the evaporation of their life's savings were good examples — but there were also plenty of old communist holdouts who were always complaining about something the rest of the world wasn't doing for them.

It's the same thing here. This "bias" issue is exactly why America has a free private press. If you don't like the New York Times, start your own goddamn newspaper. I can see complaining about PBS, but MSNBC? CNN? The Washington Post? They're private companies and they can say whatever they hell they want. Get over yourself. Neither the government nor anyone else is obligated to provide you with an inoffensive psychological environment in which to live. This is America. Fend for yourselves, you assholes.

This new flair for whining is just taking this country by storm. Every time I look up I see someone whining about bias — even sports fans do it. Check out fan blogs and see if you can't find whining about "media bias" against the Illinois Illini or against the Cleveland Indians or even the Yankees. In one fan site devoted to the Patriots you'll actually find people complaining that ESPN showed too many Rams highlights last weekend, and not enough Matt Cassel highlights, after a totally boring game in which the Pats beat the Rams. Apparently there should have been several seconds more Pats highlights.

I actually found a Georgia Bulldogs fan site that complained of "sickening" anti-Georgia bias at ESPN because Sportscenter only listed the now-way-too-famous highlight of Knowshon Moreno leaping over a Central Michigan player as #3 on its "top plays" list. Or how about a Notre Dame fan site in which posters noted that if you needed evidence of anti-Notre Dame bias at ESPN, one need "look no further" than the fact that as of 12:22 p.m. on national signing day, the network had not even mentioned Notre Dame on its live blog. Or check out a Dallas Cowboy site in which bias against America's Team — the most relentlessly over-hyped, over-covered sports organization, given its recent win total, in history — was found when ESPN failed to put coverage liability Roy Williams on its totally speculative list of potential future Hall of Famers.

Since when did America turn into the biggest collection of pussies ever created? Where did all of this whining come from?

My personal theory is that Americans have become so pampered, so conditioned to having their every consumer need met by the retail market, that they've lost the ability to deal with the slightest discomfort. They walk into their local Chase or Citibank branch and if one of the tellers hesitates for five seconds before kissing his ass, they angrily demand to see the manager. They think the outside world exists to give them endless supplies of $2 Hot Chili Pockets and pills to stiffen their flagging wieners and 0.0% financing for whatever brand new cars they don't need but might feel like buying anyway. And I think they actually think that politics is somehow the same kind of bargain — that if they don't get exactly the society they want, there's some kind of ass-kissing customer service department in the sky they can complain to.

But who knows what it is, really. All I know is that when I lived in a communist/formerly communist country I could identify the communist true believers pretty easily. They were the ones who were always whining. If they had low salaries, obviously that was the government's fault. If their neighbors had a nice TV and they didn't, clearly the system was unfair. The idea that nobody owed them a damn thing simply never entered their heads.

People in America are acting the same way with regard to this media bias issue. Let's just say, hypothetically, that the media is biased. Let's say you're a conservative and you're just convinced CNN's management wants the Democrats to win. And let's say that's true (it isn't — the only true allegiance any of these companies has is financial in nature — but that's another issue). Okay, then, fine. So what? So patronize another media company whose views you do agree with. It's not like there's a shortage of them out there. If your complaint is that these companies have undue influence on the rest of society, and therefore undue political influence over you, well, then, whose fault is that? Yours, clearly, because you didn't do anything about it. If you don't like being subject to the leftist tyranny of CNN, you're free to organize people like yourself in political parties and free to build and support your own media sources to combat that "bias."

Who's stopping you? Nobody is stopping you. Clearly, however, most Americans think that the way to go is not to deal with their problems like grownups, but to lobby publicly for someone up above to fix their TV programming for them. Since when did we Americans try to solve our problems by complaining all day long to Mommy and Daddy? If you don't like your situation, fucking do something about it. Stop whining. Jesus!