January 27, 2004
I intend to watch coverage of the New Hampshire primary tonight.
I can remember in 1992, I didn’t have cable, so the only coverage available was Nightline or the occasional 10 minute update before the 11:00 news. In 1992 I supported Jerry Brown, but liked Clinton. Oh how times have changed.
Now I have more channels than I could ever have imagined:
Fox News
CNN
MSNBC
CNBC
C-Span
C-Span2
CNN International
And those are just the cable channels. New Hampshire primary news is fun. Add to that the Carolina Panthers in the Superbowl, and I have a very rare week where all the news political and sports is interesting to me. This year I like almost all of the candidates, in the following order:
Dean
Kerry
Edwards
Clark
And then there’s Lieberman. I would probably vote for him if her were the nominee, but I would probably emerge from the voting booth a wreck. Crying and mewling because of the immense shame I felt voting for Republican light.
Dean's Disturbing Speech
Dean's opponents, Republican, Democrat and unaffiliated, are pretending to think the speech was noteworthy. They know it wasn't, and they know they are pretending. Those members of the public who are reacting similarly also know they are pretending. They know the others they have heard reacting are pretending.
Everybody who has publicly reacted has agreed to pretend Dean did something extraordinary. Their reasons for pretending range from amusing themselves to gutting the Dean candidacy.
But they all know they are pretending and, despite the affected puzzlement or concern in the voices of cable news media whores delivering the story, they all know that they, themselves, were not "disturbed" (or puzzled or concerned) by Dean's speech. They know Dean did not betray profound mental incapacity or lack of political savvy in the speech. Had they not heard someone else pretending the speech was noteworthy, they would not have noted it even if they had seen it.
The above essay from Media Whores Online is exactly right. The media pretended that this was an issue. I don’t know why though. Everything I hear in the media is that Dean can’t beat Bush. I don’t believe that – because I am actually a Dean supporter, and have sent a little bit of money to his campaign. It can’t be that the scream was such a big issue, because – outside of the media – it wasn’t.
It takes me back to election 2000 where the media did everything possible to harm Al Gore’s reputation in the press. And to be honest, Al didn’t help his own case. He didn’t fight the onslaught hard enough.
I am not running for president, but if I were Howard Dean, and the media were to ask me about the scream speech, I would simply make a comment along the lines of:
“Well, I find it curious that you would find it newsworthy to bring up my yelling at the end of a speech at a campaign rally, when you never mention that the current pResident can’t seem to string together a complete sentence. This is a non-issue and I think it is far more important to discuss the difference between me and the other candidates running for the Democratic nomination.”
Another interesting thing that I saw last week was the debate in New Hampshire. Peter Jennings asked Wes Clark about a comment that Michael Moore made about Bush’s being a deserter when he was in the Air National Guard. Clark’s answer was great – because he essentially refused to give an opinion about the comment – but did support Michael Moore’s right to make any comment he wanted.
I thought that it raised the issue of Bush’s whereabouts as a campaign issue. Now technically, I don’t know that Bush was a deserter, but it seems pretty clear that he was AWOL. This is one of those non-issue issues. It is an issue to us Democrats, it is a non-issue for the press. I guess they feel like that since he is currently the pResident, that all stories regarding his past have been fully investigated. But outside of a story in the Boston Globe, I don’t know that this story has ever been addressed in the national media until the debate last week.
Here’s hoping that we hear more about Bush’s whereabouts during his stint in the Guard.
Without these sites the past few years would have been very dreary.
Most of these sites are published by a few people on a shoe-string budget. It is hard for them to put up new material daily. To that end, I thought I would maybe try to help others in the same fashion that the folks mentioned above have helped me.
Bush's voice sounded funny to me. Not funny "ha-ha" but odd. It sounded wrong. There was one word in particular that started catching my ear that seemed to some up the wrongness of his entire voice. Whenever he tried to say "America" it came out "Murka". I thought that I must be having hearing problems, because this man had just been selected pResident by the Supreme Court of the United States. Surely the leader of the free world was not a man who could not pronounce the name of his own country.
I conferred with my wife, who confessed that she too heard the odd-sounding word coming from the mouth of Bush. I couldn't understand what was going on. The United States of America had just finished a presidential election where the most qualified person to run for the office in my lifetime, Albert Gore, had received more votes in an election against possibly the most unqualified person to run in the history of the republic. Due to a little situation in Florida, the election results were overturned, and a Republican majority on the US Supreme Court had made this man Bush pResident.
It became clear what had happened. I had entered a parallel universe. I no longer lived in the United States of America. I now lived in Murka. Murka is very similar to the United States of America, but there are some seriously messed up differences.
I made the following chart to help myself understand the differences:
+Our leaders are qualified to hold office
+Our president can prounounce the name of the goddamned country
+Leaders fight terror by arresting the terrorists and putting them in jail.
+President is forced to endure the most dispicable attacks in the history of the country from his political enemies.
+Leaders lead country into war by lying
+Say "Murka" when they mean America. Never ever say "United States of America"
+Leaders fight terra by provoking wars of choice and implementing restrictions on civil liberties.
+President criticizes the patriotism of those who oppose him.
So, I have resigned myself to living in Murka until the next Presidential election, barely 10 months away. At that time, I hope that I can somehow find the way back to my own universe where I live in a country where freedom and democratic values are more important than the greed and hubris of a few evil men and women.
If you like this site, I would welcome your input as to what things you would like to see here in the future. I will do my best to provide what you want to see.
www.bartcop.com
www.buzzflash.com
www.mediawhoresonline.com
