THE LOW POST: Not Better Late Than Never

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Anyone out there see the Letterman-O'Reilly dust-up last week? On the surface it looked like a seminal moment in modern television history, a Godzilla v. Megalon monster epic in which Godzilla was finally toppled just outside the Tokyo city gates. Keeled over, its rubber eyes flitting dumbly against the cardboard landscape, we finally saw the great lizard's vulnerable side. It was almost possible to feel sorry for Bill O'Reilly, who had trotted out on set with the peace-offering of a plastic sword and shield, expecting to make nice with his fellow overpaid TV icon -- but who instead ended up skewered and turned over the video-spit by the end of the segment, with an apple in his mouth and Sumner Redstone's massive billionaire foot wedged firmly in his ass.

For the rest of his days, few people will forget the image of O'Reilly sitting glumly and taking it while some smug ex-weatherman called him a "bonehead" to raucous studio applause. Which is too bad, because Bill O'Reilly wasn't even the dumbest person on the set that day. For that honor my vote goes to Letterman. Here's Letterman's explanation of his initial position on the Iraq war:

I think I sort of felt the way everybody did. We felt like we wanted to do something, because something terrible had been done to us. We did not understand exactly why, all we knew was something terrible, something heinous, something obscene had been done to us. So, while it didn't necessarily make as much sense to go in to Iraq as it did perhaps to go into Afghanistan, I like most everybody else felt like, yes, we need to do something. We need to do something. And as the weeks turned into months, turned into years, and one death became a dozen deaths became a hundred deaths became a thousand deaths, then we began to realize, you know what, maybe we're causing more trouble over there than the whole effort has been worth.

That's a hell of a speech -- back to it in a moment. For now, consider the context in which it was delivered. We are in the last week before midterm elections in George Bush's second term, five years after 9/11, three and a half since the beginning of the Iraq war. By now we can say without much hesitation that the media establishment has turned not only on George Bush, but on the public attack-dogs of his right flank who dominated the national political media for so long. There's no more free lunch for the likes of O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, the latter of whom also took an unusually savage fragging in the national media last week for his attack on Michael J. Fox. That incident basically moved Al Franken into the national mainstream, with even a normally gentle humorist like Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Muke Luckovich (from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution) calling Rush a "big fat idiot" last week.

What's happening is that these talk-radio pit-vipers who for a decade or so had us all wondering, "How the fuck do these guys get away with this stuff?" are now no longer getting away with it -- there's now a mechanism in place in the national media that is poised to savage these guys for the same kinds of tactics that for the last ten years were mostly left to the likes of FAIR and Eric Alterman to bitch about.

And it goes beyond beating on O'Reilly and Rush. All across the media landscape, once-reviled liberal or Democratic figures are being rehabilitated and celebrated by the same national media that, at best, habitually described Democrats as soft on defense or as unelectable political losers throughout most of the Bush years. This process actually began some time ago, around the time the Iraq war really started to go sour; I remember in particular one week in May when Good Morning America had a fuzzy-warm bit on Al Gore's "comeback" and a laudatory piece on the Dixie Chicks on successive days. Could that have happened in 2003? I doubt it. And it's continuing today; Chris Matthews last week called Nancy Pelosi "stylish" and compared her to Joe DiMaggio, of all people, while David Gregory went on the campaign trail with Michael J. Fox for the Today show. Can you imagine NBC news throwing a tow-line to a liberal Hollywood actor before the 2000 presidential elections? 2004? No way. But this year, it's possible.

Last week we also saw Wolf Blitzer, before the war one of the chief cheerleaders for the invasion, finding himself arrayed in an antiwar pose in another Japanese monster-movie debate situation with Lynne Cheney, with whom he had a fierce exchange over the broadcast of unpleasant footage from Iraq. And of course there was Bob Woodward, who a few years ago published one of the all-time Electrolux suck jobs for the administration with Bush at War, reading the writing on the wall and doing a complete about-face in his new book State of Denial, which came out to much fanfare and an uncompromising 60 Minutes segment last month.