It’s a dirty job, and they decided to do it

Jim Goldsworthy, Columnist

I like Fox News, not because I particularly subscribe to everything it says, but because it serves a purpose that some people in the media seem to have forgotten.

The job of the American media (what used to be called “the press”) is not to be a cheerleader for the government. Quite the opposite. One of the media’s primary functions is to be a pain in the (beast of burden) for government, when necessary.

Thomas Jefferson said that most bad government grows out of too much government.

He wrote, “The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all.”

Jefferson further said, “The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary to keep the waters pure.” (On the other hand, he also wrote that, “As for what is not true, you will always find abundance in the newspapers.”)

Fox News is a wonderful agitator of the government, and the Obama White House has reacted to it much the same way the Nixon White House did to the Washington Post during Watergate — although with considerably less venom.

It was from Fox News that I learned Republican Scott Brown had defeated Democrat Martha Coakley in a special election to fill the Massachusetts Senate seat held for 46 years by the late Democrat Ted Kennedy.

Afterward, I turned for a few moments to MSNBC, which lies at the opposite end of the media spectrum from the one Fox occupies. (A friend of mine says he watches MSNBC for a half hour, then spends a half hour with Fox, figuring that the reality of what he needs to know will lie somewhere in between.)

There were more long faces than one would see in the starting gate at Pimlico, and one analyst said the Democrats had lost the Massachusetts race because of their inability to accomplish anything in Congress.

He just doesn’t get it, I said to myself, shaking my head. Many of them don’t.

A couple of mornings after the election, I turned to Fox just in time to see a clip of an interview some other network had done with President Obama.

He said Americans are angry about government, but not just about what’s happened in the past year. They’re also angry about what happened in the eight years before that.

I came to the same conclusion that Fox’s analysts did: The Democrats have found something else to blame on former President George W. Bush. It’s his fault that a Republican won the Massachusetts Senate election.

If you’re going to back-trail the anger, you probably can go back a lot farther than eight years. There still are people who are mad at former President Bill Clinton.

“I don’t like that (four-word Anglo-Saxonism),” they say. “He got his (censored) (censored) in the White House and lied about it!” It is possible that some of this can be attributed to jealousy or envy.

The likelihood is that Massachusetts’ voters didn’t react to what the Democrats haven’t done, so much as they reacted to what the Democrats have done and what they want to do, and the way they’ve gone about it.

Republicans were buried in a mass grave after the 2008 elections for the same reason.

If a county commissioner and a contractor conducted business the way some Senate votes were bought and sold for the health care reform bill, they’d both go to jail.

Ted Kennedy pushed for a national health care system for decades, but failed (probably because a majority of the electorate didn’t want it), and Brown was asked if he was willing to sit in Kennedy’s seat and block it for another 15 years.

Brown responded that it was neither Kennedy’s seat, nor the Democrats’ seat, but the people’s seat. One hopes that he and everyone else in Congress will remember that.

Health care reform is sorely needed. It’s likely that the only people who don’t want it are those who are sucking tons of money out of health care. There are plenty of folks who, for one reason or another, simply do not trust the type of reform that’s been proposed.

President Obama now says he’s going to try for a scaled-down version of health care reform that, according to The Associated Press, would keep insurance companies from denying coverage to sick people and help people with low incomes and small business to afford health insurance.

That’s a good start. People aren’t angry just with government, you see. Greed — unrestrained capitalism — is just as bad as unrestrained government, and there’s been too much of both.

Many of us common Americans are put off by an arrogant attitude that is present in the media, big business and other places besides Washington. It’s one of, “Whether you like it or not, we know what’s best, and we’re going to get it done, one way or another. If you’re not enlightened enough to see that we’re right, you cannot be very smart.”

Folks are fed up with the expansion, intrusiveness and perceived incompetence of government, the threat of even higher taxes and the worsening of our national debt ... and some of them are pretty bright folks.

Not everyone was surprised that Massachusetts, where Democrats vastly outnumber Republicans, elected a Republican U.S. Senator for the first time in decades.

Massachusetts was the birthplace of American independence.

Maybe it will be in Massachusetts that we begin to reassert the idea that in America, it is the people who control the government, not the government that controls the people.