Now you know how ppl right of center felt about " The Day After", or Martin Sheen or Geena Davis as the POTUS every week or Michael Douglas in a movie or " news" reports on Gary Sick's " October Surprise" conspiracy theory or faked documents airing on CBS, or anything by Oliver Stone or Michael Moore or innumerable examples of news and entertainment being presented from an elite left-of-center set of political and cultural premises and assumptions so deeply rooted and insular that half the time the creators view their biases as neutral objectivity. Irritating, isn't it ?

You'll get used to it or stop watching TV altogether like I did.

You don't really think The West Wing was intended to reflect actual historical events, do you?

Everything you complain about produced by a culture that has drifted toward what you might call leftward since the Enlightnment. Yeah, the rate of change went damn near vertical in the 60s but there was no calculated plan.

THIS is a calculated plan. THIS is as close to a coup d'etat as you get in the USofA. And it requires people to believe documented falsehoods to succeed.

No system based on lies can ever be a good thing.  Except the stuff on the Science Fiction Channel.

Sorry, zenpundit, but this excerpted bit from your post "...elite left-of-center set of political and cultural premises and assumptions..." is in substance the same type of charges that the right of center folks were making back in the day when state sanctioned racial segregation was still considered legal by most white Americans who also felt that blacks were moving too quickly - even after 300 years - to secure their rights as American citizens.

There is not now nor has there ever been an elite left-of-center cabal defining the parameters of American political and cultural activities. This is a right-wing fantasy that is always taken off the shelf and dusted off to smear and discredit folks. I am old enough to recall when folks like the late Dan Smoot use to broadcast nonsense like this every week on their syndicated television shows. Smoot was a guy who thought that members of the Council on Foreign  Relations were Communist sympathizers. 

ptcruiser,

I know you like to reference everything in the known universe with the context of the history of racial segregation but sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

There is a history to the Eastern Establishment -social, economic and political and it was a pretty cohesive WASP entity until the 1960's. It wasn't a conspiracy I agree but a class and its institutions -the Ivy League, major blue chip corporations, the three networks, the NYT, Wall St. law firms - reflected the values and attitudes of upper class, WASP, corporate liberalism.

The Establishment has fallen from its perch of cultural dominance and belatedly diversified but that doesn't mean that it didn't exist or it was a figment of unhappy segregationists ( I'd argue they segregationists were really mad about the end of the political pact conceding Southern regional dominance to a "white-man's" Democratic Party - they were basically ok with the establishment running the country until Civil Rights became a battleground issue)

This may be cynical but after reading an AP news report about how former members of the Clinton Administration are biting their foreheads about one scene or another in this so-called docu-drama I decided that I really don't have a dog in this particular fight. This depiction of the Clinton Administration's actions or inactions in the face of alleged terrorist threats is no more true or false than Bill Clinton's alleged leadership on civil rights issues during his gubernatorial and presidential stints.

Clinton and his folks are big boys and girls. If their fearless leader can take credit for things that he most certainly did not do to help black folks, no matter what the niggerati claims to the contrary (I am forever grateful to Zora Neale Hurston), then he and they can withstand a few backhand slaps for things they did not do too. In the immortal words of Stringer Bell, "It's all good."

This is a fight between folks who are not our friends. "When elephants fight only the grass gets hurt." We should stay out of the way and watch how it shakes out.

I know you like to reference everything in the known universe with the context of the history of racial segregation but sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Golly gee whiz, zenpundit! What an insightful and profound lad you are. I simply wasn't aware of this overarching tendency on my part. I mean right now as we exchange notes I am also reading an advance uncorrected page proof of a new book about Hannah Arendt that is due to be published in a few months. I guess I better break out my super-dooper racial segregation decoder ring and use it to explain just what the phuck Dr. Arendt wanted people to understand about politics and the modern world if I intend to write my assigned review of the book.

Look, my man, the point that appears to have eluded your own decoder ring is that these cries about a political-cultural liberal elite that set the agenda and boundaries of political, social and cultural discussion in the United States is largely a myth. What version of Time Magazine, Readers' Digest, the New York Times or the Ed Sullivan Show did you read or watch during the 1950s?

The Eastern Establishment was a "pretty cohesive entity until the 1960s.." and they never had to conspire about anything because all of them were in basic agreement about how things should be done. Folks who attend the same schools, eat at the same restaurants and summer at the same locations seldom, if ever, have to conspire about anything at all. These folks, however, were not making decisions about what movies Hollywood produced or whether "Beulah" should be shown on Tuesday or Thursday nights or if the novel "Peyton Place"was too racy for American readers. 

What began to fuel the right-wingers attacks on the Eastern Establishment was the view that it was not sufficiently militant in its opposition to godless communism or appropriately worshipful of Sen. Joe McCarthy and General Douglas MacArthur. And all the gloves came off when folks like Nelson Rockefeller actually began to give money and lend their names to the misguided efforts of southern Negroes to kill Jim Crow.

This depiction of the Clinton Administration's actions or inactions in the face of alleged terrorist threats is no more true or false than Bill Clinton's alleged leadership on civil rights issues during his gubernatorial and presidential stints.

I don't let those claims go unchallenged either. 

(I apologize for my tardy response, I tried to log on earlier today and it was no go. No doubt a problem on my end as my IT department is trying to shut off our contact with much of the internet on a piecemeal basis.)

Ah, PT, I know that a gentleman with such rarefied reading tastes as Hannah Arendt is already aware that other people with bad motives having made similar arguments ( or for that matter, contrary arguments) has no logical bearing on the validity of my argument - which was actually about groupthink and not cabals or conspiracies.

And in event, relating what will no doubt be a relatively crappy docudrama on 9/11 in 2006 to opposition to Civil Rights still is, I maintain, a rather large stretch

"These folks, however, were not making decisions about what movies Hollywood produced or whether "Beulah" should be shown on Tuesday or Thursday nights or if the novel "Peyton Place"was too racy for American readers. "

 Actually, they were applyng pressure on the cultural front. The motion picture industry had a morality police in the form of the Hays Office, there were Congressional investigation of (of all things) comic books, network censors for TV and so on. Everyone hears about the famous HUAC hearings on Communists in Hollywood but it was the moral censorship issue that had real sticking power.

Oh, and I'm pretty sure Henry Luce ( Hotchkiss, Yale) was a member in good standing of the Eastern Establishment which had GOP as well as Democratic wings ( John Foster Dulles, the ultra-anticommunist GOP hardliner, nevertheless rallied to the public defense of Alger Hiss no less than did Dean Acheson)

(I apologize for my tardy response, I tried to log on earlier today and it was no go. No doubt a problem on my end as my IT department is trying to shut off our contact with much of the internet on a piecemeal basis.)

They must be whitelisting sites. I can't believe this piddly thing is noticeable enough to get blacklisted. 

And in any event, relating what will no doubt be a relatively crappy docudrama on 9/11 in 2006 to opposition to Civil Rights still is, I maintain, a rather large stretch

Yes, it would be a stretch but I wasn't attempting to make any such connection.

Actually, they were applyng pressure on the cultural front. The motion picture industry had a morality police in the form of the Hays Office, there were Congressional investigation of (of all things) comic books, network censors for TV and so on.

I know you like to reference everything in the known universe with the context of the history of racial segregation but sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

You still need to explain and justify this accusation. All the rest of what you wrote avoids the issue posed by this statement. And sometimes bullshit is just bullshit.