Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Fourth estate sale . . .

John McCain is all over the news outlets today saying that he is going to go after Wall Street and the financial institutions and get them straightened out. For anyone who has been paying attention for the past few years, this claim is just bizarre. The straight talker has been a deregulator for years. That would include deregulation of Wall Street and financial institutions.
So that is ridiculous. Absurd. Bizarre.

But watch the news. Read the papers. To find out the truth about McCain as a deregulator, you really have to dig. You won't hear or see it on major network programming. You certainly won't read about it in AP reports in the Birmingham News or most regional newspapers. And you have to really look for it in more lofty newspapers like the New York Times or Washington Post.

What you will see or read is column feet and sound bite after sound bite featuring McCain, making maverick statements about how he knows how to "fix" the problem now, and he will set about doing it when he is elected. You will see him or one of his spokespeople talk about how McCain is ready to take on the good old boys in Washington.

But you won't read the facts. How he votes. What he supports.

That is even more bizarre. What happened to our free press? Where is the watchdog of our liberty and freedom, our protection against tyranny, to borrow a few good lines from Ben Franklin, who would be a great guest panelist on today's talk shows because he was always good for a catchy turn of phrase.

It doesn't exist, apparently. What the present generation knows as "news" is not "news" at all. It is just alternating opinions, polls, free political ad placement, talking heads and entertaining jabbing and sparring that has no substance at all.

The result is that most of us don't know the truth about who we are voting on. I would be willing to bet that a great number of voters are presently convinced that McCain is a maverick who will fight for the little guy against Wall Street and big business from his power position in the White House with all the power of the U. S. Government. And the media does nothing to dispel that lie. In fact they encourage it, by giving the McCain pitch huge amounts of time. Not time in which his real position is disclosed. By giving this preposterous assertion by McCain such prominence without presenting any factual analysis, the "free press", which I think we still trust to give us the truth, gives credence to fallacy.

I hate what McCain has become. But that is not what I am hacked about tonight. It is the journalists that I am supremely disappointed in.

Another example, Obama is an elitist? Occasionally a talking head will challenge the statement. But more often than not they just repeat it. Then they let someone else repeat it. Then they talk about how Obama needs to do something to refute it. Refute it? His whole life refutes it. What about the facts?
You know, or maybe you don't. Obama was born to an 18 year old mother, never in a family of any means, was raised by his grandparents, went to school on academic scholarships, worked in the neighborhoods of Chicago. Eventually he did get to be a professor. That used to be the great American succes story. Now it is elite. Elite. Elite. Elite.

Or Palin. She is exciting. She has energized the campaign. She is drawing crowds. But we don't really know her. The facts are not hard to find. Documentation is available on the internet with one pass at Google. But nothing was reported for weeks. What in the world is going on? I suppose Palin's personal life is important to a point. It became more important when she shared it with the world. But more important in picking a vice president is her education, intelligence, judgment, and record in her government service. She continues to lie. Yes I said it. She continues to lie, about her official activities. But most people don't know it, because the mainstream media had rather report at the same depth as Entertainment Tonight.

It is a shame. It will be a shame if people vote based on lies. Or information and facts that we depend on the free press to deliver.

But that's only half the problem. More later.

3 comments :

  1. it seems in all truly deceptive and complex proceedings between people, the best weapon of any opposition is to show how you don't defend your own argument or ideals. So the terrorist is the hero, the martyr is a scapegoat, the hard worker is lazy - you get the idea.

    Even white can look black in the right kind of light.

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  2. Actually I'm not sure white can ever look black, just based on physics, white being the absolute reflection of all spectrum, black being no reflection. But I could be wrong.

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  3. Sure white can look black. Take a white piece of paper and hold it up in front of the sun. It will look black.

    Take anything white at dusk and hold it up against the sky, it'll look black.

    In the ocean, BRIGHT fish are bright because from below, they don't look bright, against the brighter water above them, they look dark.

    You have to have a comparison - obviously white doesn't look black by itself.

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