By the late summer of 1977, Jimmy Carter had been president for only a few months, but if you knew which way the cultural and political winds were blowing, he seemed unlikely to win a second term. That’s because on May 25 of that year, Star Wars had opened, and its colossal success both foreshadowed and helped to revive a mindset that carried Ronald Reagan to the White House. That’s the word from Perlstein, who laid out his theory last Friday in The Washington Spectator.

On Monday, I posted on the virtually complete lack of establishment press interest in the story of Trevor FitzGibbon, the former owner of far-left PR firm FitzGibbon Media. Fitzgibbon folded on Thursday after allegations of serial sexual harassment and sexual assault were reported in the Huffington Post. From there, the establishment press did virtually nothing with the story.

It will surprise no regular reader that non-coverage is still the norm. Searches this evening at the Associated Press's main national site and at the New York Times returned nothing and no recent stories, respectively. While I'm also sure deliberate refusal to cover an obviously relevant story doesn't surprise the editorial board at Investor's Business Daily, it has infuriated them enough to write a stinging editorial justifiably decrying the situation — especially the press's double standard.

The morning after Washington Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes published (then unpublished) an illustration depicting Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz’s daughters as toy monkeys, calling them “fair game” since they appeared in a campaign ad, ABC’s Good Morning America ignored the story completely while CBS This Morning and NBC’s Today excused it as merely a “feud” and part of “increased scrutiny” for Cruz as he ascends in the polls.

Just over two weeks after the major network evening newscasts spent 24 minutes obsessing on December 8 over Donald Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims entering the U.S., the three programs returned on Tuesday night to devote ten and a half minutes to Trump’s declaration that Hillary Clinton was “schlonged” in 2008 by losing to then-Senator Barack Obama.

As Curtis Houck at NewsBusters reported this evening, the Washington Post published "a disgusting GIF early Tuesday evening depicting (Ted) Cruz’s young daughters as toy monkeys being played with" accompanied by a pathetic two-paragraph justification by cartoonist Ann Telnaes as to why Cruz's daughters "were fair game."

The Post withdrew the cartoon and the justification within a few hours, but not before the leftists at the Politico played their mean-spirited, agenda-driven hand, going into predictable passive-aggressive "Republicans/conservatives attack" mode while making it appear as if Cruz was making much ado about nothing: