On the Contrary

I watched Meet the Press this morning and it made me angry.  What is it about the mainstream Washington/New York media giants that makes them keep asking the same stupid questions over and over that does nothing to add to our dialogue about our future.  Maybe they are brain dead with their incestuous interloping with their colleagues and their same speak.  Frank Rich, in his column, calls them drama queens.  They focus on questions that would be more appropriate to the entertainment section of the paper, trying to elicit some kind of contradiction instead of asking in depth questions about issues that really affects Americans.

In the interview conducted by Tom Brokaw with Barrack Obama, Brokaw asked Barrack that knowing now that the violence is down now in Iraq would he now support the surge.  So what is wrong with that question?  First it assumes a direct cause and effect relationship.  The press has now assumed that the surge is primarily responsible for the reduction in violence.  The Sunni awakening which John McMean has reinvented as a result of the surge when in fact it started a year before, may be a larger factor than the surge in troops.  But the question misses the whole real issue.  The surge was a strategy to try to quell violence in a country where our invasion caused the crisis and it is now quite apparent that had nothing to do with our war on terrorism unless of course you assume we are the terrorist.  So standing back and looking at limited United States resources, the question is, is stemming the violence in Iraq worth pinning down our military there while our real enemy, al-Qaeda, grows and Afghanistan crumbles.  But the press would rather catch a candidate in a judgment error by focusing the question on the inner workings of policy than the policy itself.  It is their attempt to be entertaining by what they think are penetrating questions, when it misses the whole point.

Worse, and I know this is going to be a surprise to the media, but most Americans don’t care about Iraq.  They decided long ago that this war was a mistake and they just want us out.  So what is the plan to get out?  That is the only question that we in mainstream America care about.  Barrack has a 16 month plan, and John has a stay as long as it takes and nobody can get John to explain what “what it takes” looks like.  A good question is what is a long-term strategy against al-Qaeda look like?  There was an interesting story today in the Sacramento Bee (Afghanistan needs a plan, experts say)  that says just adding more troops in Afghanistan (kind of like a surge in Iraq) won’t help.  What we really need is a long term plan.  Do you suppose our TV media could read some of this stuff and ask what the plan is besides more troops?  That would really tell us who would govern better, but then that might require them to get out of the incestuous internal dialogue of Washington and really look at the important questions for our future.

What Americans really care about right now is solving our own internal problems.  Did Tom ask hard questions about what would stimulate the economy and what is Barrack’s 10-year plan for our economy?  Say we need more alternative energy is like saying I love America, it doesn’t mean much.  To borrow from that 80’s Wendy’s commercial, where’s the beef?  What would you propose ala T. Boone Pickens or Al Gore to really turn America’s energy future around?  What will that cost us and how are we going to pay for it?  Economist say that for the future the number one investment America can make is in its human capital.  They say we need a well-educated workforce that will allow us to compete in the world market place and maintain our standard of living.  What is your specific plan for this?

Oh but what we get is, were you wrong on the surge; do you think talking to world leadings makes you look presumptive; latest polls show….; who are you going to choose for Vice President; and endless discussions about political strategy, not real policy.  Our media isn’t just bad, it is horrible and should be re-titled Entertainment Tonight.  But we don’t need entertainment; we need real information asked by people who understand the details of the policies they are questioning.  Hopefully most of you read, because that is the only way we are going to find out the details.  My fear is that most of our population gets most of its information from our television media and as a result we may make another bad choice.