the media

So now we have our president-elect. Yeah!  SO happy that he is not McCain.  I just wish he were Dennis Kucinich.

And naturally, today, less than 24 hours after the results of the election are announced, CNN’s Campbell Brown gets on my teevee and solemnly swears that she will remember Obama’s campaign promises. She reads from her list of bullet points in the background (“Tax breaks. Health insurance. Energy reform. Etc.”) and states she and CNN follow him closely and make sure he keeps his word. Because they are doing their job of “keeping them honest.”

So let’s get this straight: after 8 years of the media sitting around idly picking their noses until their heads caved in, while Bush and his gang of thugs trashed the law of the land, broke international treaties, and passed dozens of secret laws without a peep of protest from them, they take one look at the young black president-elect who got his start as a Constitutional lawyer and decide NOW is the time to get all watchdog on our behalf. What breath-taking hypocrisy.

Update May, ’09

Now that Obama has been in office for 4 months, I think that someone (i.e., us) had better watch carefully.  He seems to be continuing with some of the more awful of the Bush policies and adamantly refusing to look into the lawlessness of that administration. This does not bode well for the future.  I suspect that the ongoing Cheney/Obama “dialogues” regarding torture, Guantanamo, and the legalities of same are actually good cop/bad cop routines designed to lull the public.  Cheney looks “wrong” and criminal, which makes Obama look “good” and reasonable – but if Obama continues the same policies of state secrets, military commissions, looting the treasury to enrich the wealthy, preemptive strikes on Middle Eastern countries (do not kid yourself: “Af-Pak”, or the “Long War”,  is about a natural-gas pipeline and oil, not terrorism or American freedoms), if Obama continues these policies and actions unquestioned by the public just because they see him as the “good guy”, we have not changed anything at all.  In fact, it may be the more dangerous to our liberties and freedoms as it comes in the guise of “doing what is reasonable” and is being promoted by such a “nice guy”.

I don’t think, however, that Campbell Brown (or most of the media) is cluing in on what the problem is, though.  I watched her once or twice and then discontinued  as I found her to be anti-Obama for the sake of it, rather than to take a hard look at actual policy.  I, quite frankly, don’t give a rat’s ass if it’s Bush or Obama, a Democrat or a Republican: bad policy is bad policy and lawlessness is just that.

 

Jeebus, help us.

Where is this country going? It’s bad enough that McCain picked that twit Palin and the GOP allowed her nomination to go through.  And that his health insurance plan is guaranteed to cost everyone more money and make the insurance companies raise their rates and lower the number of people they will cover, leaving only the wealthy with health insurance.  And that he wants to freeze government spending, which, when Hoover was in office, directly led to the Great Depression.  It wasn’t funny when he addressed a crowd as “my fellow prisoners”; one doesn’t need to know too much about psychology to recognize that there is some problem going on there – I mean, he was released from POW camp 40 years ago, so where did that artifact come from?  But now we have Joe the Plumber.  Joe, whose name is not Joe and who isn’t a licensed plumber. Joe, who is too dumb to figure out that even if he did buy his boss’ plumbing business (which he never intended to) and even if the business did net 250 thou a year (which it doesn’t), he would get taxed at about the same rate under either candidate.  And if he simply kept his current job (which he intends to do), he’d receive a huge tax break under Obama’s plan and not have to pay for his own health insurance. Joe, who owes back taxes and has been charged with domestic violence, that Joe.  Joe, who now has a publicist and thinks he is going to write a book and make a country music recording (and I am leaving for Hollywood myself because it is high time for me to be discovered), that Joe. I get why Palin repeats Joe’s pithy words all the time (“Joe says Obama’s plan sounds like socialism to him!”) – she’s an idiot.  Okay, if all that weren’t sad enough, yesterday, McCain introduced Joe to a crowd as his “role model”.  He told another crowd he was going to “take Joe to Washington” with him.  What the hell? This is what we’ve come down to?  People in other countries must think we have collectively gone insane.  Now “Joe the Plumber” is qualified to go to Washington and be the role model for a man who has served in the Senate for almost 3 decades?  Joe told a McCain supporter that he thought Obama did not support Israel.  (Now, I personally don’t find support for Israel too compelling, given their human rights record against the Palestinians, but that’s me.  Obama seems to blindly support Israel as much as the next guy in the Senate.)  When asked why he would say that, Joe replied that “well, people can just look at Obama’s record for themselves” – because, of course, Joe has no clue why he said that at all.  It was just a thing to throw out there. Like “socialism”. Fool.
But my point is, this is too stupid to even take any more.  We have entered the theater of the grotesque.
Did you know we invaded Syria’s territory and killed some people the other day?  And we have since invaded their air space repeatedly, leaving them to complain to the UN?  Done the same in Pakistan.  Bush is deregulating everything he can before he leaves office, although one wonders how he can do that with Congress out of session; not only has no-one quite explained that, I haven’t even seen it addressed. Did you know that for the first time, a brigade of our armed forces has been taken from duty in the field and stationed in the US for the sole and stated purpose of “handling civil unrest and crowd control”?
And we have Joe the Plumber giving his pearls of wisdom to one of our presidential candidates. Does this kinda worry anyone else?