McCain success a defeat for New Media?

Despite serious claims, mainly by 'old media', that 'Talk Radio' and Right-Wing blogs and Pundits have been put in their places by the voting public, the truth remains that they can't, and never could, elect anyone on their own.

I submit two arguments to buttress that opinion:

1. The Lieberman/Lamont contest.
- despite overwhelming rants raves and lies spread by anti-Lieberman 'new media' including DailyKos, HuffPo and Air America wonks like Randi Rhodes, Joe Lieberman is the Senator from Connecticut

2. Ann Coulter/Sean Hannity axis of nit-wits.
- yeah I betcha you didnt expect me to name those two... but neither one of them could elect a local dogcatcher on their own; that is, based on what they say on the air. Well.. MAYBE they could elect a dogcatcher if folks didnt realize there was an election for it in the first place.

I'll explain the second first - Coulter is in the business of writing and selling books. I hear she actually makes sense in the books. Second, Coulter expresses publicly the 'daydream' mood of the voters she represents. Note that this was illuminated quite well by James Thurber in his writings on 'Walter Mitty'. If I have to explain the connection then I failed, but it hinges on 'Reality' vs 'pipe dreams'.

Hannity, on the other hand, is the 'Dick and Jane' proponent of conservative politics. His political rhetoric, almost exclusively consisting of pointing out hypocrisy and flip-flopping from the Left, is aimed at those who just crawled out from under a rock or wakened from a 40 year coma. I'll guarantee that any 'liberal' he converts to 'conservative' didnt understand the meaning of the terms in the first place.
An additional advantage is that he provokes Alan Colmes into saying the stupidest things just so he can have a 'counterpoint'.

So while Coulter addresses, and allows me to exercise my darker thoughts, (wouldn't it be great IF...) there's no way I want Hillary to be president just so the Republican party goes back to some mythical 'Reagan Purity of Purpose'. And neither will most anyone else.

Now we come to Limbaugh. I've been uneasy about John McCain's politics for a long time.. and that came about from observation. Helped along, to be sure, by Rush pointing out WHY I was uneasy about him. But that is exactly what I get from Limbaugh. He never told me WHAT to think, he explained why I thought the way I did.

In fact, on the old Matchnight, after being accused of being a 'dittohead', I made a game of posting Rush's showprep for the day before he went on the air. I was almost always right. Neither Rush nor Hannity had to tell me what to think about Huck-a-buckle, either. The evidence of that is right here on this site.

But what the 'new media' IS good at is dealing with Issues. Just from the conservative side; RatherGate, Harriet Myers for SCOTUS, and the Immigration 'Reform' act are great examples.

Nope... if Rush had 40 million listeners instead of 'just 20' he STILL couldnt have gotten Romney nominated.

Any more than Randi Rhodes can get Dubya impeached. And that brings us back to the left new media. The reason, IMO, that Randi Rhodes, Kos, and others are widely read is, to a great extent, because it comforts the average liberal who can point to some of those outrageous views and opinions and satisfy themselves that they really are 'centrists'. {ref: Coulter, again}

And that COULD backfire to some extent, because the real role of 'new media' is to make people THINK, whether or not those sources realize it.

That's about all anyone can ask, aint it?