As I noted in a comment yesterday, the takeaway headline on nearly every national media site with respect to Paul Ryan’s first solo speech referenced not the size and enthusiasm of the Iowa crowd, but rather the “heckling” Ryan suffered for his hatey, white, anti-woman, anti-black, anti-immigrant, pro-slave owner references to unalienable rights and the limits on the state’s great moral goodness — which, if Ryan and the other severely conservative Republican extremists had their way, would be replaced with the kind of unregulated, corporate-enforced social Darwinism that will leave the unfortunate and the aged and (somehow) every authentic member of every minority group out in the street to die, forced to fend for themselves in a climate that abhors “social justice,” with no safety net to help them when they stumble momentarily.

The narrative was being set: Ryan spoke, and the champions of the poor and middle class reacted, with passion, to his attempt to take us backward. When everyone with a heart or a soul knows we should be going forward.

Except, well: this is the left we’re talking about, and attempting to create an “archetypal” moment or image is more important than allowing such a thing to happen on its own, organically and spontaneously — particularly when it just stubbornly won’t. We can’t wait!

Which is why rely again and again on the same tired retreads — confident that the mainstream activist press they’ve relied upon to be their propaganda arm has no interest in doing anything other than helping them spread the image and solidify the narrative.

Fortunately, the alternative media is willing to do the job our mainstream reporters just won’t.

Which, I guess we’re like the noble illegal immigrant that way. So we’ve got that going for us.

(h/t sdferr)