On the Contrary

I am sitting here on my front porch overlooking the vineyard listening to some smooth jazz on satellite radio and wondering if the nation has lost all direction as I simmer in my own juices of discontent.  I have said for sometime that health care reform was dead since the single payer option has never been on the table, and a public option also now appears to be off the table.  What the hell are Obama and the Democrats thinking about?  Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, and Ed Shultz have chronicled this lunacy that the Democrats have created.  Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.

Last night on Keith Olbermann, Howard Dean put his finger right on it when he said, the Democrats are making the big mistake they did when the Republicans were in power, losing their nerve and trying to be more like them.   Remember that this pack of gutless wonders (except for a very few) voted for the Iraq war, the War Powers Act, and I could go on ad nausea.  They finally get elected by a landslide to carry out a progressive agenda and what do they do?  Well let’s just start with the Stimulus Bill.  Trying to get Republican support they watered it down and made it much less effective and then they got no Republican votes.  Lean anything boys and girls?  The climate bill has not even got close to the Senate and we are seeing the same effect.

The health care bill may have been a lost cause from the start because once again the Democrats cannot stand up for what they believe.  They invited forty something speakers to talk about the direction of the health care bill and not one was a supporter of a public option or a single payer system.  Apparently it was rigged from the start.  The panel that is going to tell us what we get in the Senate is loaded with half of the committee Republicans who are controlling the agenda.  Did they win the last election?  I guarantee you after all the compromises are made, not one of them will vote for it.  WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU PEOPLE THINKING?

Maybe my wife is right: Political party is not a discriminator, you all are scum.   What I can’t get over is that we came out and supported a clear platform and we won.  Then the Democrats caved on every issue.  President Obama is the biggest disappointment of all.  I am sorry Mr. President, but you came out and said that without a public option you would veto the health care bill.  Now you are wavering on it.  Et tu Brute?

You want to know where your support is Mr. President?  Where is that grass roots organization you built?  They are like me, seething with anger at your betrayal.  Oh, I know, you are just being practical.  You will “being practical” kill the Democratic Party, your support, and any hope for change.  This isn’t just some progressive rant.  This is a total failure by you to keep your promises.  We don’t need to win every battle, but we want every battle to be fought.  So far as I can tell on the big issues that will change the direction of this country, you have compromised away change.  Oh yeah, I can hear the equivocating by Gibbs now.  We are not morons.  We know when we are being patronized.  Where it counts, you have failed to stand up and fight when it was important to fight and that is all we asked.  Maybe you need someone on your staff who isn’t in the Washington bubble that can look you in the eye and say, “You are f*#king up Mr. President.”  Compromise and bipartisanship are not an end in itself.  Policies that work are what is important.

Here is what we know Mr. President.  The Republicans aren’t just wrong, they are dead wrong.  Worse, so-called responsible leaders of the present day Republican Party are sowing the seeds of violence and civil insurrection.  They are bringing out the fruitcakes who think it is okay to wear a semi-automatic rifle on their shoulder to your rallies.  They think it is the democratic process when you stop free speech by intimidation.  We are such a screwed up country that we think citizens should have that right.  The Republican Party is an extremist party that will destroy the greatness of this nation if you don’t finally stand on your two feet and fight back.

We elected you to bring about change and if you think that compromising with failure is change, then we elected the wrong guy.  Stop being diplomatic and call a liar a liar.  When you see despicable behavior identify it and challenge it.  Stand up for what you promised us as a candidate.  Attack back for God’s sake.  Quit giving their arguments credence when they have none in some wasted effort to be gracious.  Otherwise I will be one of many that just may not vote next time.  Why bother?  Yes I am very, very angry right now.  You are aiding and abetting the Republicans and their failed philosophy that is responsible for putting this nation on its knees.  The country’s very soul is at stake and you are letting it be stolen by a failed ideology.  Maybe we should have elected Hillary.  At least she has some fight in her.

Next blog I will try to be more rational, but right now my feeling of betrayal is just too overbearing.  I don’t mind losing a good fight, but we have capitulated from the beginning.  It is time to quit turning the other cheek Mr. President.

We all know bias in the press when we see it don’t we?  I am not so sure.  Sometimes it is very subtle and unintended, yet powerful.  The biggest problem in spotting it is to be able to put aside your own biases, which in my case are powerful.  But in my professional life, I spend most of my time finding solutions to the needs of the government whose only criteria is that it will work (and sound better than anyone else’s solution).  So one would think I could push aside my biases and try to evaluate how the press is doing.  I think not well.

Now we could start with Fox Noise, but except for some bright spots on their staff, most are working off Republican/conservative talking points and there is little dissent about their biases.  Then there is Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, and O’Rielly, but they don’t even pretend to not be totally biased and driving every interview to one point of view.  But what about the rest of them?  Okay I will give you that Keith Olbermann is obviously biased, as is Rachel Maddow, but is it the same as Fox Noise?  I don’t think so and here is why.  If you have two competing points of view do you give them equal time and consideration even though one point of view is more in question than the other?  If you do, you lend equal credence to both points of view and in fact you are biasing the argument in favor of the less accepted or credible point of view.  The classic example is a debate between evolution and intelligent design.  There is no scientific evidence ever found to deny evolution, and intelligent design has been debunked as religion numerous times.  Yet when we have a debate and both sides are given the same status, uneducated viewers would assume that there is good evidence on both sides.  See how this is biased toward intelligent design?

So what happens when this involves a political discussion?  The same thing.  When one political advocate states something that is known to be inaccurate and the moderator of this he said/she said shouting match does not push back on what are known incorrect statements, as in the above case, they level the playing field for the party who is spewing falsehoods.  That is pretty much what we have today on cable media news where the moderator is along for the ride.  The Republicans are very good at this game fanning out like storm troopers with their talking points, and so the bias has been in their favor in this medium.  The answer is not for the Democrats to adopt similar tactics, but for the moderator to act like a real journalist and push back against obvious falsehoods before the other side has to waste precious airtime debunking the claims (on the defensive) before making their own points.

There is a variation to that when the moderator pushes back on one side only and I saw Wolfe Biltzer do that in an interview between a Republican and Democratic strategist.  The Republican made a claim and Wolfe turned to the Democrat and said “what about that” and when the Democrat responded, he followed up with several tough questions.  Good follow up so what is the problem?  The problem is that he then throws out a whole another new question and never follows up the Democrat’s point with the Republican.  After watching about five minutes of this, whether Wolfe meant to be biased or not, by only attacking one side he was once again skewing the playing field in favor of the Republican.  As one commentator has observed we have defaulted to conservative  points of view over the last 20 years or so and this defaulting is biasing the discourse by making the progressive debunk conventional wisdom instead of treating it as an equal point of view.

So back to the question of whether Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann are as biased as most of Fox Noise.  Well they have a progressive point of view, but I have yet to be able to question any facts they have put forward, in contrast to many things I hear on Fox Noise.  Could it just be that these progressives are just presenting the truth and the conservatives are unable to garble their message so it must be biased?  Many have accused The Daily Show or The Colbert Report as being progressively biased, but aren’t they just really showing the hypocrisy of our political world and there is whole bunch more of it on the conservative side?

This election is about two very different ways of seeing government and policy.  There is massive data to show that conservative policies in most cases have failed miserably and we are living through the aftermath, yet our media still defaults to the conservative story line and makes progressives somehow go the extra mile to explain their views.  It allows all the misdirection about terrorists, socialists, and un-Americans instead of pushing these spurious claims aside and focusing on the issues.  It puts progressives at a disadvantage in almost every argument, but reality is creeping in and most people just know what we have been doing hasn’t worked.   Maybe facts or biased coverage doesn’t count anymore.  Maybe finally reality will be the great equalizer.