I'm catching a little late-night C-Span and it's pretty amazing. A raucous, lively debate between Sam Donaldson and Bob Novak, on February 20, 1993, before an unidentified (but clearly conservative) banquet audience. It's like a kind of pundit hip-hop battle. Donaldson talks about the disastrous "la-la land" economic policies of the Reagan years--how this new Clinton guy's going to finally make millionaires (including Donaldson himself) pay their fair share--and gets roundly booed.

Novak comes on and (by way of discussing the problem of "media bias") claims that if Bush had won the election, the media "would have had a cow." Wild applause. He then claims that if cuts need to be made in the budget, they ought to start with NEA grants (wild applause), Head Start (vigorous applause), and welfare (wild applause).

He then accuses Donaldson of following the rest of the media in "parroting" the demagogic Clinton/Panetta response to conservatives: "What would YOU cut?"

A guy from the audience just asked the panelists whether they would accept Rush Limbaugh's "$1 million Challenge" and bet against Limbaugh's claim that under Clinton's new plan the economy would go down the tubes.

Haha. Ha.

Before that, he asked (derisively) whether they thought New York City's economic plan ought to be the model for the rest of the country.

I wonder how much that guy's apartment is worth these days...

Another audience member just asked why they didn't say anything about conservative media bias, and Novak's response was "I don't even understand the question."

This footage is amazing. You can see the naked impotent outrage these people felt when Clinton won the election. The bitter scorn (even Donaldson, to much applause, "admitted" that he thought Clinton "might not be that bright." Haha. HA) they felt in losing power--even though that power had clearly failed in its job. They make reference after reference to what "the majority of the American people" think and believe, in contradiction to all of Clinton's plans, as though Clinton had not just been ELECTED president but had seized power in some sort of coup, and the American people were just too slow to recognize it.

Now Bob Novak's talking about the extreme ideologicism of liberals; says re Donaldson: "He has no idea that he's being a social democrat; he just believes he's doing what's right for America...."

It's 1993, and the country's just been taken over by socialists, apparently. My, how times have changed.

We should look back and pay attention to this stuff. It may be happening again very soon. And we ought to be prepared.