On the Contrary

Since I am an old fat white person I feel I have some insight into this topic.  But to tell you the truth, I can’t claim any allegiance to these wingnuts that apparently now make up the majority of the Republican Party.  And what I find even more befuddling is that their leaders, those giants of pandering for power, have taken up their cause with rudeness and abandon fitting a drunken sailor.  It would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous.  Let’s just consider their latest frolics:

• The President wants to speak to school children on the first day of school about hard work, getting ahead, and staying in school, and the faithful think this is a plot to instill socialism in our school kids.  When the President can’t speak to children we have reached a new low in paranoia.  What is next, political credential checking of Principals? This speaks volumes for the problem with local control of our schools.  (NBC)
• Glenn Beck, on his FOX Noise show, claimed to see socialist and communist symbols in the buildings in Rockefeller Plaza.  According to him it is everywhere and is creeping into our psyche.  I wonder what he sees in his cereal bowl every morning.  Note this is the guy who called President Obama a black racist and Sarah Palin recommends her followers watch.
• In a Town Hall Meeting in New Jersey, these are really lynch mobs, a woman in a wheelchair is heckled by, you guessed it, fat white people, when she tried to speak regarding how her debilitating disease was bankrupting her.  Oh, how debate and civil discourse has sunk to a new anti-rational low with these morons. Long live the Republican base.  They have established the baseline for crazy in this country.
• A young woman in a Iowa Town Hall lynching, tried to ask Representative Lynne Jenkins what she would do about someone like her, working full time as a waitress with a small child, to allow her to afford health care.  Representative Jenkins laughed at her and told her to go be a grown up.  This is a real demonstration of how un-in-touch these people are with the real America that is suffering.  In the true Republican ideology, their plight is because they are lazy. Having been protected and removed from suffering themselves, they have no empathy for it.  Their whole psyche is about judgment and blame.
• Worse, leadership in the Republican Party has begun putting out falsehoods and working to incite violence.  We all know the death panel statements from Newt Gingrich, Senator Grassley, and Sarah Palin (and others).  But most egregious are these quotes from the nut who is a senator from Oklahoma (Senator Inhofe):  “I never dreamed I would see an administration try to disavow all the things that made this country different from all others…  Every Institution that has made this country the greatest nation in the world in under attack.” Is this not a call to arms and I mean real arms especially when he said, “President Obama is obsessed with turning terrorists loose in America”?  In the meantime as the evidence for global warming becomes overwhelming, he tells his constituents, “More and more, with each month that goes by, more scientists agree with me (that global warming is a hoax)”.  This is the state of leadership in the present Republican Party which is inciting violence against a duly elected President and denying reality.  Let’s hope they never get in power again. (The Ed Show)
• Meanwhile in la-la land in the House, Eric Cantor wants to give back the rest of stimulus money to pay off our debt because it is failing to help the economy, while the conservative Wall Street Journal indicated that it was in fact helping to restore the economy.  If they could just get their facts straight instead of letting their ideology define reality, we might be able to have a real two party system.
• Most of the more strident opposition to government involvement in health care are Republican Senators who have had their health care, and serious operations provided for by the real single payer system, Bethesda Naval Hospital.  That would include John McCain and others.  I wonder why it is okay for them, but not for the rest of us. (The Ed Show).

My son thinks this just shows how out of touch the Republican Party has become as the party of crazies and bodes well for the 2010 election.  I am a little older and it scares me to see supposedly respected elected officials (shall I remind you of Michelle Bachmann’s  comments about becoming blood brothers to “do whatever it takes to make sure this doesn’t pass (health care)” ?) are fomenting violence much as the pro-life group did in the assassination of Dr. George Tiller.  They have no agenda but the status quo which is rapidly degenerating and they are stifling rational debate about the issues.

Probably the best way to understand all this is a quote from Dwight Eisenhower about irrational debate (Ike’s Other Warning).  In a letter to a constituent he  “points out that dictatorial systems make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems — freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning these tremendous complex and difficult questions.” In other words we are seeing this kind of craziness and irrational approach to debate and our problems because it is too hard for fat white people to wrap their minds around them.  I think Ike hit a philosophical truth here that we should all think about.  Remember the Jim Jones suicides?  Group think.

Related blogs:  The End of Rational Debate, Democracy means Never Have to be In the Minority, The Republican Party is in Real Trouble or we all Are

Okay, I admit it.  I am a news junkie.  Usually while I work in the afternoon I alternate between MSNBC and CNN depending on which one has interesting guests, or is not engaging in banal banter, or is not giving me advice about my health or my money which I don’t have any of.  Fox News I avoid like the plague because it does really represent a very biased point of view and the amount of miss reporting far exceeds the other two.

But in a New York Times article on Monday I find I am fairly out of step. The gist of the article was that with MSNBC tilting left, and Fox right, CNN, who they claim holds the middle, is losing viewership.  What was shocking if we look at the April numbers is that CNN has been fourth. Fox has 668,000 viewers; MSNBC has 300,000; and CNN has 271,000. HLN has 277,000.  Fox has over double the numbers of MSNBC.  So let’s do some critical thinking here.

First, is CNN really in the middle?  They get this label by claiming that they give both sides a fair hearing.  But as pointed out in yesterday’s blog and by Fareed Zakaria and others, we have 1 ½ political parties and the ½ are the Republicans.  So if you give the Flat Earthers the same credence in a debate with Round Earthers, isn’t the debate slanted?  If you are giving the Republican No Machine the same footing with the policies put forward by the Democrats, are you not actually giving more weight than is due to their arguments?  By not being aggressive enough at challenging these Republicans and their ideas and having the two pundit debate, CNN is actually more conservative leaning than middle of the road because they are lending credence to the arguments having equal weight.  Besides, remember where Glenn Beck came from, that Lou Dobbs continues to bash immigrants, and the business interviews are decidedly conservative and the net result is a right leaning news organization.

My point here is that if you are conservative you will watch Fox News, and if you are independent or liberal, you are probably going to watch MSNBC where old thinking is challenge by new thinking from Rachel Maddow, David Schuster, and Keith Olbermann.  Instead of just accepting their guest’s statements, they are well informed and ask penetrating questions.  CNN is really competing with Fox News for viewers.  Now in all fairness, this does not apply to CNN’s international reporting, which I don’t think anyone does a better job.  Lets just hope they continue to hold on to these reporters and journalists because they do a great service for us.

The article implied that one has to pick a bias to gain readership.  Is MSNBC really that left leaning or has the middle shifted which leaves CNN looking conservative?  I will give you that Keith Olbermann does very definitely have a bias, but Rachel and David reflect more what I think the younger nation is thinking.

But there is something else to consider about these numbers.  News junkies are old like me but the majority of our nation is younger and does not watch these shows.  What the 2:1 ratio of Fox watchers to MSNBC watchers tells me is that we have an older generation that is mostly conservative watching these shows.  Old people find change much more difficult to deal with and Fox reassures them that nothing is changing and the old ideas still are viable.  It’s a lie of course, but in the world of making money, it is profitable.  In the world of let the market place decide, if lies, shrillness, conflict and misinformation sell better than truth and rational consideration of reality, then that is what we get.  But some of us still like to use our brains, and MSNBC usually is better at questioning the conventional wisdom so it is my choice, the exception being Chris Mathews.