Sunday, July 27, 2008

Mountains, molehills and big piles of crap

Investor's Business Daily gives us another lesson in making the trivial sound terrible in order to sell the truly awful. Barak Obama, you see is just another Dan Quayle and you'd know it if it weren't for those damned Democrat Liberals.

Obama with his constant linguistic blunders has them all with hands waving in the air wailing "oh my god" about how he mentioned "his" banking committee, which of course he doesn't sit on. If you Google it, you'll find more mentions of this gaffe than you can or should bother to count, but never mind, we're not talking about truth or sanity or anything like a sense of proportion here: we're talking about the Investor's Business Daily trying to sell a dull-witted man of dubious ethics and a demagnetized moral compass as being suitable material. I don't recall them dancing like vaudeville clowns at the gaffes, misstatement and bald faced lies of Reagan, Nixon or either of the Bush's, do you? I don't remember any laughter at the statements by Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, or the posse of Bush advisers who insisted there would be no cost at all in pursuing this three week war and who punished everyone who questioned.

I don't know why he said it, nor do I know why John McCain makes so many gaffes. Perhaps it's a natural consequence of a brutal travel schedule. Every president and most every candidate has been guilty of it, if you want to call it guilt. IBD however, would like you to think that as they say:
" the reporters who can't get over Dan Quayle's misspelling of "potato" have little to say about their man's slip-ups."
Of course that isn't true, as a simple search of the news will show, but the purpose of this faux cynical tirade is revealed in the phrase "their man." They would like to make you believe his popularity isn't real, his education isn't real, his eloquence isn't real and his intelligence isn't real or is at best the result of bad reporting. By pretending, as they do, that the abysmal estimation of Quayle's intelligence is based on nothing but a misspelling of Potato, Obama comes out looking pretty bad or at least just as stupid. Only the slimesmiths and shitslingers of the Corporate Media who gave us the most irresponsible administration in history could make a case for Obama being stupid: "he doesn't even know what committees he's on!" and unfortunately, only the American public is stupid enough to join in a mockery that rivals medieval paintings of Jesus tormented by Conservatives in the streets of Jerusalem.

But of course it's all designed to distract from the substantive misstatements of McCain; the constant, mutually exclusive restatements of what he's been saying all along. It's not a coincidence that the deliberate lies and deceptions of "their man" are ignored. It's designed to make you think a continuation of the most disastrous policies the country has ever engaged in are a far better choice than change, that a man who never made an honest buck, who sleeps with lobbyists and got to where he is by lying, buying and peddling influence should be President.

Take John McCain's recent suggestion of higher Social Security taxes, for instance. Take his insistence that he bitterly fought the White House Iraq strategy when he praised it to high heaven in front of the world and smeared those who didn't. What about his insistence that he supported Bush's surge -- an absolute lie, and that the surge produced the "Anbar awakening" -- another absolute lie. The man spends half his time weaseling out of yesterday's lies and the rest telling the desperate remnants of our darkest hour what they want to hear. But people believe what they want to believe and obviously the Investor's Business Daily wants you to believe the man whose father got him into the academy after he was rejected, and who graduated at the bottom of his class is smarter than the Harvard Law Review editor. Frankly if there are more than ten people in the United States who buy this crap, the United States does not deserve to survive. I'm afraid there are millions.

No comments: