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John's Blog

Give a man a fish and feed him for a day....Teach him to use the internet and he won't bother you for weeks!

Monday, September 20, 2004

Today's Election Reflection

Election Matters Eclipsed
"The presidential pageant has now risen full in the sky and is blocking out the sun. Until November, we dwell in a weird half-light, stumbling into spooky shadows but shielded from the harsh glare of the nation's actual circumstances. Down is up, fiction is truth, momentous realities are made to disappear from the public mind. The 2004 spectacle is not the first to mislead grossly and exploit emotional weaknesses in the national character. But this time the consequences will be especially grim.

The United States is "losing" in Iraq...Careful readers of the leading newspapers may know this, but I doubt most voters do.....So this presidential contest resembles a grotesque, media-focused war in which two sides skirmish for the attention of ill-informed voters....public opinion has moved much faster against the war, but perhaps not fast enough. People naturally are reluctant to conclude that their country did the wrong thing, that young people died for a pointless cause....

FRANK RICH: This Time Bill O'Reilly Got It Right
"What much of the other news media have offered as an alternative has not been an alternative at all. At some point after 9/11, the news business jumped the shark and started relaying unchallenged administration propaganda -- though with less zeal and showbiz pizazz than Fox. The notorious March 2003 presidential news conference at which not a single probing question was asked by the entire White House press corps heralded the broader Foxification to come....the failure of the American news media to apply proper skepticism to the administration's stated rationale for war in Iraq is "one of the most serious institutional failures of the press" since our slide into Vietnam. .... the net effect was that the entire press came off as Fox Lite. The motive to parrot the administration line may not have been ideological, as it was at Fox, but since the misinformation was the same, news consumers can't be blamed for finding that a distinction without a difference."

Open Secret—Utter Failure
"Bush is touted as Mr. Super American and Kerry as unpatriotic malcontent. Call me crazy, but I’ve always kind of thought an American exercising his or her First Amendment right of free speech--as did Kerry before the Senate committee and in his tireless efforts to help Vietnam vets--is as basically American as it gets.

What, then, in my book, would be un-American? Funny you should ask, ‘cause I’ve kind of put a list together. Not that any of these things would ever happen, mind you, but I would think it un-American if an administration were to, say: attack a non-threatening country under false pretenses in a cynical bid to secure power and profits; ........ lie to Americans by telling them they would receive a phony “average” $1083 in tax savings and that the new tax cuts would help the “vast majority” of lower-income citizens when in fact the vast majority of the benefits would go to the wealthiest Americans; compile record deficits, the main contributing factor to which would be those very same tax cuts; undermine democracy by appointing a House majority leader to push through an incredibly sleazy mid-term redistricting in an unabashed grab for more congressional seats; direct the Environmental Protection Agency to falsely inform residents of an American city the size of, say, New York, that their air was safe to breathe within days after a devastating attack there; deliberately withhold cost information from Congress about legislation involving prescription drug benefits—maybe something to do with, oh, I don’t know, Medicare--until the law was passed by the barest of margins; fail to produce a coherent, intelligent US energy policy, thereby unforgivably hampering America’s national security by forcing us to continue licking the oil-soaked sandals of the Saudis and others of questionable ilk; uncover a CIA agent and then cover up the whole sordid episode; seek “legal” ways to engage in torture; choose religious doctrine over scientific research;.... and just generally treat the Constitution like one big sheet of Charmin. "

Portrait of George Bush in '72: Unanchored in Turbulent Time By SARA RIMER
"This year of inconsequence has grown increasingly consequential for President Bush because of persistent, unanswered questions about his National Guard service - why he failed to take his pilot's physical and whether he fulfilled his commitment to the Guard......"
Too bad all the scrutiny is now focused on "Rathergate" instead of what appears to be a pretty pathethic record of commitment and service.
|| JM, 8:57 AM

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