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Are Democrats Born With No Balls, Or Does Someone Remove Them After They’re Sworn In?

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Democrats are a party made up of the biggest pussies in America. And we all lucked out bigtime, by getting the cream of the pussy crop in the white house. And the best part is that every time democratic voters come close to forgetting that they support a party of eunuchs, they generously remind us by pulling a Shirley Sherrod type fiasco.

If you missed the story, here’s the background on the Shirley situation. She was asked (repeatedly and vehemently) to resign from the USDA on Monday after Andrew Breitbart posted a video of her online, in which she seems to be a racist. In the video, she recounts a 25 year old story in which considered denying a white farmer assistance because of her own racial bias. The video was edited and the remarks that she made before and after the clip that Breitbart posted clearly showed that she was speaking out against racial bias. It was a story about getting past bigotry.

Once the Breitbart version of the video was posted, the right wing did what they do – they turned the whole thing into a shit storm. Fox “news” anchors were salivating like starving cats looking at a raw piece of tuna, as they told the tale of racism at the NAACP. The more vitriolic pundits turned it into “further” evidence that Obama hates white people.

Let me take a step back and fill you in on Andrew Breitbart. He started as Matt Drudge’s bitch and it’s been downhill ever since. The most significant thing that he’s done, was to release the incriminating “pimp and ho” videos of ACORN. You know, the videos that we now know were hacked to pieces to make it appear that ACORN employees eagerly participated in helping a pimp and his ho launder their money.

So what do Tom Vilsack, the United States Secretary Of Agriculture (Shirley Sherrod’s boss)  and the white house administration do when an incriminating video is released from a dubious source? They naturally spring into action to try and minimize the hurt that the video and Fox news are putting on them by demanding Shirley’s resignation. Was this the rational thing to do? Not even a little. Was I surprised? Not even a little.

We’ve seen this before with the Van Jones incident and with the ACORN incident. I was LIVID when the administration forced Van Jones out because Fox baselessly smeared him. I was livid because I know that what the Obama administration had done, was set a horrible precedent. They let Fox know that they would happily play the part of road kill every time Fox felt like steam rolling them. They should have stood up to Fox, stood behind Van Jones by reiterating his remarkable record in the area of green technology, refuted (or refudiated for my less literate readers) the ridiculous allegations, and shown Fox who their daddy was. But no, they instead chose to throw Van Jones and themselves under the bus by becoming Roger Ailes’ bitch.

By the time the administration caved on ACORN, there was absolutely NO chance Fox wasn’t going to use the power that Obama had given them over him, every chance they got.

So when another video emerges from Andrew Breitbart, the administration didn’t even have to bend over. They hadn’t had enough time to stand upright from the last reaming. It was all very convenient and really just a matter of letting muscle memory do its thing.

But then something truly bizarre and downright inexplicable happened – the truth came out about the video, and the media reported it! In America! I was dumbfounded!

So Tom Vilsack called a press conference and did a mea culpa. He took complete responsibility for fucking this up, apologized to Shirley, and offered her another position. That part was fine. Personally, I like it when people admit they wrong and take responsibility for their mistakes. I find it refreshing and trust inspiring. He went on to shield  the administration from this whole mess by taking sole ownership over the debacle, although anyone that believes that this didn’t go up to (at least) Rahm Emanuel is a foolish child. I can live with that part of Vilsack’s comments, even though they were blatantly untrue. But I had one major problem with the apology. I had a problem with the fact that Vilsack didn’t address the biggest fuck up that they had made. He rightfully apologized for not taking some time to investigate the matter before firing this poor woman. But what he should also have apologized for, is not considering the source before trusting the information. He should have drawn attention to the fact that Andrew Breitbart and Fox news are clearly not reliable sources for information. He should have apologized for making that rookie mistake, and promised that he would never do it again. But he didn’t do that, because the Obama administration will forever be Fox news’ bitch.

So after all of this goes down, what do Fox and Breitbart do? They bitch slap the administration for jumping the gun on firing poor Shirley Sherrod. And the left wing media is going ape shit over this, to which I say, why? This may possibly be the first correct assessment that Fox or Breitbart have ever made! Why go ballistic over this part of it? Did they expect Fox or Breitbart to apologize for their part in it? If so, are they stupid? Expecting an apology or a mea culpa from these people completely unrealistic and just plain crazy. Fox and Breitbart just did what Fox and Breitbart do; they attacked. Expecting that they wouldn’t attack is like expecting that a mosquito won’t bite you. It just doesn’t make any sense. I understand being stunned and confused that the attack is legitimate (who could have seen that coming!), but I can’t fathom being incensed that it came. Make no mistake, the administration deserves to be spanked over this. They fucked up when they set the door mat precedent with the Van Jones incident. They compounded the fuck up by not stopping the ACORN witch hunt. Shirley Sherrod was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. They deserve to be spanked for everything they did that led up to this incident. And most of all, they deserve to be spanked for being afraid of Glenn Beck.

Oh, did I forget the Glenn Beck part of the story? Vilsack’s office called poor Shirley three times to demand her resignation. She was in her car when the third call came in. They made her pull over to type out her resignation email on her blackberry. Why the urgency? Because they wanted her resignation before Glenn Beck came on TV. Yup, they were afraid that Glenn Beck was going to be really mean to them. UNFUCKINGBELIEVABLE!

The left wing should have joined the right wing in condemning the hasty and ill conceived actions by the administration. Maybe if we all joined in a chorus together, the Obama administration might learn a lesson.

But no, the left wing media is doing the same (albeit much more mildly) thing that the right wing media does for republicans. They’re apologizing for the unacceptable.

I want better from my president than to have him perpetually cower to right wing media. And the only way to help him to see the error of his ways is to point out that he’s wrong every time he does it. Shielding him isn’t going to do anyone any good. It just ensures that he’ll be crapping his pants every time Glenn Beck says anything about him.

No, I won’t stand behind Obama on this, and I don’t believe that anyone that supports him should either. If you want him to be a leader, you have to spank him when he fucks up. I have my paddle warmed up for a good spanking because this country can’t take another failed presidency. I suggest you all get yours ready for action as well.

ps – I just want to add an observation. If you’re a black person serving in this administration, and you’ve been paying attention, you should know that you have less job security than anyone in the world. Racist against whites, MY ASS!


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Fucking American Media

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Seriously, just when you thought it couldn’t become a bigger joke, they surprise you by showing disdain for actual reporting.

For some inexplicable reason, I always assumed that “journalists” in our media knew that they were ineffective hacks, but felt that they couldn’t do anything about it because they’re being muzzled by the corporate interests that pay them. I guess it was naiveté, or maybe my pesky sunny optimism rearing it’s ugly head again. But in watching the reaction by the media to Michael Hastings and his article in Rolling Stone about (former) General McChrystal, I realized that American journalists are actually proud of the drivel they create.

Fox news dismissed the article because Rolling Stone isn’t  journalism. HELLO, irony! Geraldo Rivera compared Hastings to Al Qaeda. Ummm, weren’t you kicked out of Iraq for disclosing troop movements, Geraldo? Newsweek’s Andrew Bast asked Hastings two very telling questions; “the entire article was thoroughly fact-checked, yes?” and, “Do you think your access will be cut in the future?”. The list of journalists that expressed “concern” that Hasting’s unprofessionalism will cost him future access is as endless as it is depressing. Lara Logan, who I used to very much respect, went off on a tirade. She expressed doubt that Hastings is telling the truth about ground rules that were (n’t) laid out by McChrystal and his team, slams Hastings for being “fake” with his sources in order to gain their trust, implies that Hastings is a “newbie” in the middle east, and attacks him for “not serving his country the way McChrystal has”. Because she apparently didn’t sound retarded enough with those comments, she agreed when Howard Kurtz asked her is there was an unspoken agreement that reporters wouldn’t embarrass the troops by reporting on insults and banter.

Are you fucking kidding me? You know what’s embarrassing to the troops? When they act like embarrassments! You want to know what else is embarrassing to the troops? When they’re too stupid or too arrogant to know that they should self censor their remarks in the presence of a reporter.

Let me, a blogger, deliver a newsflash to our “reporters” – your job is to report the news. Your job is not to edit or censor the news. And the only point of any access you may have, is to be able to report fucking news! If you don’t do that, then any access you may have is pointless.

When Hastings was asked if he was worried that he would lose access, he replied, “I went into journalism to do journalism, not advertising…. I’m not just a stenographer There is a body of work that shows how I view these issues but that was hard-earned through experience, not something I learned going to a cocktail party on fucking K Street. That’s what reporters are supposed to do, report the story.“

I say AMEN, Michael Hastings. You’re absolutely correct. And the rest of the media should be ashamed of what they do, and even more mortified in the pride they take for doing.

You’re all an embarrassment to your profession. And I’m alarmed by the fact that you’re all too stupid or too self-interested to know that you’re an embarrassment.

If you’re interested in an artful takedown of Lara Logan for her dumbass remarks, and you don’t mind getting your news from a noncredible source like Rolling Stone, I highly recommend reading Matt Taibbi’s latest blog.

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Who’s Your Daddy?

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I love FOX News. I love the pundits, I love the “reporters”, I’m only mildly amused by the commentators (but that’s because they’re all dimwits). I mostly love them for their talent. Yes, I said talent. You have to be a pretty talented broadcaster to repeat the same talking points that have been repeated over and over again for the six hours preceding your show, and still make it fresh. Like it or not, it does take a high level of skill to parrot what you’ve been told to say, while making it your own. They’re talented in the same way that hosts on QVC are talented. Not everyone can talk about some worthless trinket for ten minutes, while still keeping the audience engaged.

Yesterday’s talking point was predictably, about how Obama was the loser in the elections on Tuesday. He lost big, because the two candidates (Specter and Lincoln) that the administration backed both lost. It was odd that they didn’t apply the same logic to McConnell’s boy losing in Kentucky, but that’s beside the point. All day on Wednesday, different pundits and reporters were bandying about the phrase “referendum against Obama”. Some of them spoke of this referendum authoritatively, others listened intently as their guest made this assessment, and yet others delivered their analysis as if they were making a brilliant point that had not yet been made. The entertainment lies in the different forms of delivery. It’s fascinating to watch it go on and on, hour after hour.

But style points aside, I have a newsflash for the people on FOX News. Obama is my president, not my daddy. I don’t take marching orders from him and I don’t consider a vote against the candidate that he supports to be a slight against him. He backed two candidates that weren’t liberal enough for democratic voters. If anything, Tuesday was a win for progressives who are doing what they can to move Obama leftward. He won his election by promising us change. We’re going to make him honor that promise whether he likes it or not. Voting for someone other than the candidate he stumped for is not a referendum on Obama. Voting for Obama’s opponent in the next election is a referendum against Obama.

Republicans have a hard time with the concept that your president isn’t your daddy because they generally go along with what their leader tells them they should go along with. Warrantlessly wiretap me? YES DADDY, I love small government! You’re going to drive up the biggest deficits this country has ever seen? YES DADDY, I’m a fiscal conservative! You want to funnel billions of my dollars to your corporate cronies at Haliburton? YES DADDY, I believe in the free market! They were happy to contradict every single tenet of conservatism because daddy told them to.

So now they’re left with nothing, other than to project. We’re not mindless lemmings, happy to go along with everything our president tells us to do, so we must hate him. We voted for candidates that were to the left of the ones he backed so we must all be turning against liberalism, thereby proving that we’re a right of center country.

Republicans don’t understand democrats and independents at all anymore, which is becoming problematic, since their voters don’t trust the establishment anymore. Daddy has slapped them around one too many times. When you simply don’t understand 60% of the country, and you’ve abused another 20% one too many times, you’re in deep trouble.

I sound like a broken record, but get it together republicans! I can’t have a country with only one viable party.

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Please Stop Wiping Your Ass With My Flag

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I am FED UP with the asshats among us using the American flag to spit on other people’s faces. This is an epidemic, and it needs to stop.

I can’t believe I’m writing about these idiots, but they perfectly exemplify a trend that pisses me off to no end.

I couldn’t avoid the story of five boys in a California high school being sent home from school for wearing American flag gear. Here’s the synopsis:

Five high school boys decided that it would be cute if they all went to school wearing American flag laden clothes to school on cinco de mayo. Their principal responded to this by completely ignoring the freedom of speech that we enjoy in this country, and sending them home when the boys refused to take off the “offending” flag apparel. This stupid response by the principal turned this into a national news story.

Let me be clear here, the principal was a jackass for sending them home, or even making an issue out of their clothes. He succeeded in turning five little shitbags into “national heroes”.And he succeeded in eviscerating freedom of speech.

These kids aren’t heroes. They’re shitbags. They thought they were being cute, by sending an “anti” message, draped in the American flag. There’s a Facebook page supporting these little assholes now, and they’re receiving undeserved praise in the national coverage they’re getting. They weren’t sending a pro-America message here. They used the American flag to spit in someone’s face which to me, is as anti-American as you can be.  And their parents, who called in the media are proof that the ass didn’t fall far from the cheek. Righteous indignation over a situation where your kid was an asshole is not good parenting.

Using the American flag to denigrate immigrants fundamentally ignores the rich history of immigration in this country. We’re a country that has, since its inception fought for equality and acceptance for everyone that lives here. In the grand scheme of civilizations, we have raced through issues like slavery, racial equality, gender equality, and now, gay rights. In 245 short years, we’ve leveled the playing field in ways that no other country has ever managed to do. Sure, there’s always opposition to equality, but that opposition consistently loses in America because we’re better than the least among us. Less than 80 years ago, the “loathsome” immigrants du jour were the Irish. Today, it’s Mexicans. The rhetoric is exactly the same then as it is now. We moved on then, and we will move on from this because we’re America. We don’t tolerate this crap against any group for very long.

I am so sick of people wrapping their intolerance up in the American flag. This practice is everywhere; the tea party, far right wing websites, militia websites, anti-gay sites, anti-Muslim sites, anti immigrant sites. You name the “anti”, and I will show you their propaganda wrapped in an American flag.

I’m so OVER people using my flag to be against something.

Why don’t you try being FOR something for a change? Patriots are PRO American. Using our flag as a weapon does NOT make you a patriot, and you should not be shielded from being labeled the asshole that you are, just because you decided to use it.

I understand that you’re so full of shit, that it’s pouring out of you uncontrollably. Can’t you find something to wipe all of that shit off with, other than my flag?

We need to take back our flag. We need to use it for good. I’m ashamed of the way it’s being used now.

And by the way, the situation in California is now spiraling out of control. Apparently, 85 Hispanic kids have staged a walk-out in response to what happened. Great, we’re going to have a race riot over one idiot principal and five jackass students.

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Ideological Handcuffs

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I’m depressed.

As you guys know, I’m a news junkie. I listen to right wing news, liberal news, conservative talk, liberal talk, you name it, I engage in it. My news addiction had become the bane of my existence.

I’m not depressed because of a giant oil spill in the Gulf Of Mexico. I’m not depressed because a lunatic tried to detonate a bomb in Times Square. I’m not even depressed because our financial system is hanging by a thread. I’m depressed because all of that media that I diligently take in every day is either batshit crazy, or utterly uninformative.

Let’s start with the BP oil disaster. The right wing media has been cooking up a conspiracy theory that the whole situation wasn’t an accident, but that it was sabotage. I’m not going to go into details about the conspiracy theories, because that would be a giant waste of my time and yours. But Media Matters has compiled a good synopsis. The crux of it is basically that the white house orchestrated the spill so that President Obama could renege on his offshore drilling plans.

Really? He created a monumental oil spill that will potentially fuck up three states so that he doesn’t have to risk expanding offshore drilling, which he’s opposed to, because it could fuck up nearby states? Has anybody ever heard anything more stupid? We just lived through eight years of George W Bush, and this is still the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard!

I’m not depressed because the right wing is crazy and stupid. Sadly, I’ve come to expect that they will be. I’m depressed because there is a legitimate criticism of Obama that we’ll never hear. Obama never should have consented to expand offshore drilling. We have mountains of evidence to show that it can’t be done with 100% certainty that something won’t go wrong. I’m not opposed to it because it sounds bad. I’m opposed to it because logic and reasoning tell me that when you’re drilling under 16,000 pounds of pressure per square inch, a lot of shit can go wrong. And with that kind of pressure, the tiniest thing that goes wrong, rips the whole pipeline open. The legitimate attack on Obama is that his administration didn’t do enough to impose stronger safety regulations on the oil industry and that, like Bush before him, he let the oil industry largely police themselves. But we’ll never hear that from the opposition because they are wearing ideological handcuffs. They want offshore drilling, regardless of the very real and now, demonstrable downside. This is an ideology that isn’t based in facts therefore, it is an an ideology that is impervious to cogent debate. The right wing, who hated Ted Kennedy never went after him for blocking the building of wind farms in his backyard. THERE was a legitimate criticism of someone they loathed, and yet they never raised it because they don’t want to get off our oil dependency. Ideological handcuffs are preventing them from taking legitimate shots at the opposition.

Let’s move onto the failed attempt to bomb Times Square on Saturday. As usual, the right wing was a bottomless pit of useless, uninformative, and crazy. FOX spent its time trying to prop up the Bush administration by falsely claiming that there were no successful attacks on US soil after 9/11. Brian Kilmeade had his panties in a bunch over the reports that the suspect was (OMG) white! Let me digress for a moment to say to Mr. Kilmeade, “Hey ASSHOLE, I don’t care what color this psychopath is. I just want him caught, and so should you!”. I have to admit that my initial reaction to this stupidity was to hope that the suspect was not only white, but was married to Brian Kilmeade’s cousin. But then I realized that my reaction would make me as guilty and stupid as FOX. I don’t have a racial dog in this race and neither should anyone else. I’m a New Yorker. The only thing I want is to catch this shitbag.

Based on the information that we had at the time, shouldn’t the conversation have been about the rise of domestic terrorism? Or maybe, we could have had a discussion about how people become radicalized. But no, we can’t have that from the right because implying that crazy doesn’t have a minimum melanin requirement would contradict their narrative that brown people are to be feared. It’s not terrorism if the terrorist isn’t Muslim. Guess what? Crazy doesn’t have a color. It’s not born, it’s created. We need to talk about how it’s created and why it’s created.

Now onto financial reform. I’ve realized that the worst sources for any sort of information on economic matters are CNBC, FOX Business, Bloomberg, or any other business channel. None of them will report what actually caused the collapse, or what needs to be done to ensure that it will never be done again. They can’t. Watch the commercials that air on these networks, and you’ll see why they can’t. When a company is spending $50M a month on advertising on your network, are you really free to report them in a negative light? Have you ever wondered why you see commercials on TV for products you can’t buy? Why would Dow Chemical, Lockheed Martin, or Boeing spend money on prime time ad buys when you can’t buy their products? Because they’re buying insurance. The networks they advertise with would never risk losing that giant pile of ad dollars, just to keep you informed.If you’re watching news or commentary on television, you need to pay more attention to the advertisers than you do to the content.

Here’s a great clip of audio from a comedian named Jimmy Dore, talking about NBC’s reporting on the financial reform bill. It’s thirteen minutes long, but well worth the listen:

Download

I’m depressed because a freaking comedian is more informative than any of the news outlets that are available to me. He makes an excellent point about how network news is completely devoid of anything resembling investigative journalism anymore. They have become stenographers, relaying information from both sides, making sure that they create a false equivalency in the process.

Our media is handcuffed by financial interests.

Ironically, the best source of legitimate criticism for the Obama administration on television comes from Jon Stewart. Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann come in second and third to the comedian.

My favorite source for intelligent, unbiased analysis is The Young Turks. Give them a listen. You can get the first hour of their podcast for free through iTunes. I didn’t love them when I first started listening two years ago, but they’re the first thing I listen to every day now. They aren’t handcuffed in the same way that everyone else out there is.

I’m depressed that comedians are doing a better job of informing Americans than traditional media is. These ideological and financial handcuffs that plague our media is the reason why most Americans have no idea what’s what anymore.

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The American Media Crapfest

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I spend an inordinate amount of time each day trying to remain an informed voter. Trust me, when I say “inordinate”, I mean that someone should organize an intervention! I spent every waking moment taking in and researching news from MSNBC, FOX, Limbaugh, O’Reilly, BBC, Al Jazeera, the white house press secretary, CSPAN (my favorite), The New York Times and the Washington Post. I have clocked enough time into listening to Limbaugh, that I actually qualify for admission into any bettered woman’s shelter in the country!  I have to say that it’s getting harder and harder for me to get all of the facts every day.

Both parties claim a media bias against them, which is a joke, while being completely true at the same time. It’s true because we can no longer get the whole story on anything from one single source. It’s a joke when conservatives (and FOX specifically) refer to “the mainstream media” bias. FOX is the number one cable news channel (from a viewership perspective) in America. That makes them, by definition the mainstream media. There is NO city in America where a radio listener doesn’t have access to Limbaugh AND Savage AND O’Reilly AND Beck. Not a single one. On the flip side, most of the country has no access to Ron Reagan, Tom Hartman, Randi Rhodes, The Young Turks, or Stephanie Miller. We have an overabundance of conservative talk with only a smattering of liberal talk which sadly, is an improvement over where we were just 6 years ago.

The access to liberal media, which started six years ago with Air America (RIP) was completely nonexistent on television five years ago. There was no Olbermann, and no Maddow. Phil Donahue had a short lived show on MSNBC, which brought in their best ratings of the day for that network. He was canceled despite his ratings because NBC didn’t want anyone on their air that would challenge the Bush administration “in a time of war”. Shouldn’t everybody have been challenging them in a time of war? When did “challenging” become synonymous with “making shit up”? If the war was what the administration purported it to be, wouldn’t critical reporting have validated its necessity?

The shitty thing in this whole situation is that we have to pick a side before we can even get any information. You have to decide of you fall on the liberal or conservative side of an issue before you can get even one single fact about it. That puts us all in the position of forming an opinion based on (at most) half of the facts on any given issue.

We are as divided as we are because we don’t know anything.

Let me give you some examples. FOX is FOX so I won’t spend any time talking about their distorted reporting. You can go to Media Matters for that. Since most of my followers are democrats, I’m going to focus on liberal media.

We’ve heard a tiny little bit about how much money Exxon pays in US taxes. Not nearly as much as we should, but a little bit nonetheless. In case you missed it (which was easy to do), Exxon reported $40.61 billion in profit last year. They paid 47% in taxes worldwide. They paid 0% in taxes to the United States, which clearly disproves that higher corporate taxes suppresses job creation. They will pay taxes AND create jobs if they have to. You know what you’ll never hear from Olbermann and Maddow? GE earned $30 billion in 2009. How much did they pay in taxes? Nada. Not one thin dime. What’s worse, they claim that they’re owed a $1.1 billion refund! You will never, EVER hear that from Olbermann or Maddow because MSNBC is owned by GE Capital. They had to stay relatively quiet on the tax situation with Exxon because their employers are getting away with the same type of murder. You’ll notice that I left out Ed Schultz. I left him out because he’s always been a shill for the DCCC. He didn’t have to sell out at all to join MSNBC.

The liberal media left out or distorted all sorts of facts about the health reform bill that was just passed. One point that I heard over and over again, is that every insured American pays and extra $1,000 per year in premiums to cover emergency room costs for the uninsured. This figure came straight from the white house and was reported, completely unchallenged by MSNBC. This was a figure that the Center For American Progress came up with. The CATO Institute (a decidedly right wing “think tank”) came up with a $200 per year, per person figure. I was completely unable to get to the truth. Politifact (which is really good at sifting through the bullshit) couldn’t come up with a “real” number either. I know with 100% certainty, that we’re spending too much to cover the uninsured. Bringing them into the insurance system is a no brainer. But because of my intellectual curiosity, I’d like to be able to attach an actual number to the problem.

Here’s another one that goes back to the 2008 elections. We repeatedly heard from (then) senator Obama, that 90% of all of the contributors to his campaign were ordinary Americans. Olbermann and several others repeated this. After doing a little research, I discovered that Obama was 100% correct in that assertion. However, he neglect to mention that the money raised by that 90% of ordinary Americans amounted to only 50% of all the money he raised. The other 50% came from corporate donors. I’m not saying that only 50% in corporate donations isn’t seriously impressive (and completely unheard of in modern politics). I’m just saying that what we were told paints a different picture than what the reality was.

The issues with our media aren’t just limited to the distortion or omission of facts. The byproduct of receiving distorted facts is that we end up with a severely skewed ideology.

I’m going to use hate crimes legislation as an example. I, like most liberals saw what happened to Matthew Shepard and supported hate crimes legislation 100%. How could anyone look at that event and not have a strong visceral response? I held onto this point of view for months, until I really looked at the conservative perspective. They kept asserting that we already have laws against beating and torturing people to death. Adding another layer of legislation to specifically protect the gay community would create a “special class”. Sorry folks, you can’t advocate for equality while demanding “equality plus”. I ultimately ended up agreeing with that assessment. After thinking about even more, I realized that supporting hate crimes legislation was directly at odds with my anti-death penalty views. Statistics show that having a death penalty doesn’t serve as a deterrent at all. In 2009, Dallas’ murder rate was 10 murders higher per 100,000 residents than New York City’s. Texas, of course loves their death penalty, where New York doesn’t have it at all. I realized that in order to believe that beating someone to death while hating them for being gay would prove to  be a greater deterrent, I would also have to believe that the death penalty is an effective deterrent. I already know that isn’t true. I had to eventually reconcile my beliefs to conclude that I really don’t support the passing of hate crimes legislation. My initial feelings were purely visceral and not at all fact based, much the same way conservatives’ views on the death penalty are. I never would have gotten where I did if I hadn’t proactively sought an opposing perspective. As much as I love her, Rachel Maddow was never going to give me the other side.

The current state of our media serves only to reinforce preconceived notions. It’s completely useless in informing us. Facts very rarely fit conveniently into an ideology the way they do in the American media.

My point here, is that we need to look at all of our news sources with a critical eye. You can’t just listen to one person or one source and have any sort of confidence in the knowledge that you’re well informed. That’s simply not true anymore. This applies to Olbermann devotees as much as it does to FOX News sycophants. If your news supports your ideology ALL the time, you’re not getting news.

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