I know, I know, that was puerile. But this Foley thing is making all us Democrats a ... um, uh, a little horny!!!!

I feel like it's Christmas in October. Thank you Jeeee-sus!

Next to Jeff Gannon, Woodward was the Bush administration's favorite punk. What happened?

Yes, it could be that he's just another ass-kissing sycophant who senses a change in wind direction. OR it could be that this book just writes itself. I mean, not since Nixon has Woodward had such a broad and ludicrous target in his sights.

I think it might have been Dick Cheney behind the shooting today in Amish country.

I begin to feel depressed when I read a good essay like yours Gary, and when I reach the end and you still have not mentioned anything about how opinions come to be in this land.

Have you been out of the country for an extended period recently Gary? One of the things that shocks me most when I return to my home shores after a trip of three weeks or so is that when I flip on the tube I get a feeling I am looking at a country that is stark raving mad.

How can 300 million people make any rational decisions when everything they see and hear comes at them through no more than a dozen narrow pipes? Sure, there is "alternative" media, but it quickly becomes a partisan sugar tit that people suckle in order to reinforce their own particular bias, from Democracy Now! with sour doomsayers on the left to the government propaganda channel Fox 'news' with fascist screamers on the right.

At least in the early days of television when there were just three networks there was a mutually accepted baseline "truth" that provided people with a means of understanding that we are all talking about the same thing.

Yesterday on CNN at about 10 a.m. I glanced at the screen to see a bird's eye view from a helicopter hovering over a white schoolhouse in Pennsylvania. Terrible tragedy, but no context. For hours upon hours, on each of our narrow information pipes, from CNN to Fox to MSNBC to ABC and so on, was the same information-poor video looped over and over again. No real information -- just a picture of people standing around. I understand the television news media have a word for that now. It's called "wallpaper."

So for about eight hours yesterday 300 million Americans had a view, if they tuned in, of something frightening happening. But in terms of real information, the situation could be summed up in a paragraph.

And so it is every day in this country that no matter where we turn for information, we get frightening images of a tragic local event conflated into a sort of dominating national "wallpaper" that displaces almost everything else that goes on here.

For so long I've been the cynic. I formed an opinion that the American people are a bunch of stupid sheep. I even gave them a collective name. I refered to them as "the Great American Dumbass." But more and more, I know I was wrong. How can people be anything other than uninformed and scared shitless when nearly every means they have of gathering information is processed and packaged not to inform, but to stimulate?

One minute you are watching the dull pictures of people standing around in the aftermath of a horrible school shooting, the next minute you're watching a car commercial or a network trailer about an exciting new comedy show that's guaranteed to make you laugh your ass off.

Everything is given nearly the same relative value. It all comes flying out at you from your TV screen like bats from a belfrey -- from the sublime to the bizzare to the horrific to the idiotic, all swirling around us constantly like pieces of paper in a whirlwind.

This is how we try to make sense of the world around us. Is it any wonder then that we can't seem to come to any consensus about anything? Meanwhile, the people who benefit from this madness are the ones in power. Not that they control the messages that reach us. Quite the contrary. All they have to do is keep the whole mess swirling around in utter confusion.

Chairman Mao said all power comes through the barrel of a gun. That was then. Today, all power comes through the images and impressions we get of our reality through a television set.

I doubt that if the Democrats were in power, it would be any different.

And if you think nothing is going to come of this, just wait until Nov. 7.

Let's say for the sake of argument that this one incident is as she decribed in her indignant defense (by the way, Condo's defenses are always indignant, combative.) She has a world-class case of amnesia about a host of information given to her that could have saved this country from attack.

If anybody wants to see it all: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0408-04.htm

Democracy Now! is not "marginalized" by anybody but the marketplace of ideas. Amy Goodman is a self-righteous bore. She is a humorless idealogue of the whacked out left fringe. You can't name a single interview she's ever done, nor a story she has produced, that didn't have a left tilt to it.

I didn't lump DN and Fox, I offered them as examples of the extremes. You nitpick one sentence out of my post to "take issue" with. Well, you've got some "issues" all right if you think Amy Goodman is any more "fair and balanced" than Sean Hannity.

Bah!

Let's get those jerk-offs out of the White House.