Letters to the Editor
smartalec
Published Letters: 51 Editor's Choice: 4
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Republicans have clearly learned to ape...
[Read the article: Quote of the day]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...moderate, middle-of-road, or even some of the lighter center-left rhetoric, in pursuit of votes. ("Compassionate conservative." "Uniter not divider." "Different kind of Republican." "Reach across the aisle." "Maverick.") In W's case it was of course complete, total, and unmitigated lies. If you think it's going to be any different w/McSame, well, you're welcome to your wishful thinking.
But when any Democrat (Lieberman. Hillary.) throws the traditional red-meat Rethug rhetoric, why do I get the feeling that they actually mean it, and will act accordingly once in office?
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Interesting how many posters here...
[Read the article: McCain defends comments about Hamas, Obama]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...seem to be assuming that Salter / McCain actually took Obama's words to be a coded ageist attack. Why, because they said so? And what fraction of Rethug pols' / spokespersons' communications in general do you think are actually honest, hmm? I'd put that down as a single-digit %age. If a Repuke told me the sun was shining, I'd pack an umbrella. But that's just me.
There was a great blogpost somewhere (I'm really sorry that I can't remember who / where, cuz they clearly deserve the credit for this; I'm guessing HuffPo, digby's Hullabaloo, dailykos, or even right here at Salon) that suggested that the McCain campaign is deliberately lying about what they took Obama's phrase to mean. The point of the post was that McCain's narrative has two major weaknesses, and shoring up one could make the other vulnerability greater. That is, either he's a disingenuous sellout, a garden-variety reichwinger who's been very successful at convincing the MSM otherwise, with his "maverick" and "different kind of Republican" persona -- or he's so old and scatterbrained as to warrant a pass from the media on all his "misstatements." According to this theory,McCain will presumably have an easier time dealing with age bias -- or at least be at greater risk from the possibility that he'll be called out for what he really is: just another standard-issue radical-right Republican hypocrite (but I repeat myself).
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I think you mean "fear-monger"?
[Read the article: Newt Gingrich, supreme fear-monger]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"fearmongerer" would be a worser choice, as there is no such word
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Sometimes it really is just stupidity
[Read the article: This Modern World]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Mannix, thanks for posting that link to the clip (from FauxNooze, ironically) about the Obama sock puppet. However...
Despite already having previously heard about the "will we still call it the White House?" button at the Texas GOP Convention, I still was surprised that anyone would be quite so blatantly disgusting, so I followed the links to the source. On the way, I was thinking, "well, if the company is claiming it wasn't racist, and was meant to be 'fun and educational,' then if they really mean that, there'd better be a McCain sock puppet too..."
And guess what? There is -- with equal billing on the selling site.
(Funny how the Fox clip didn't mention that. Could it be they're looking to make nice with their new Democrat overlords? Or just so used to making up lies that they don't even think to check for the truth?)
Every now and again I get reminded of the wisdom of that old line -- wish I knew whom to credit, or the proper wording -- something to the effect of, don't necessarily assume evil what could possibly be explained by mere incompetence.
Cheers.
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Good News
[Read the article: Matthew 25 Network takes its message to Christian radio]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's about time that the majority of Christians started to take back the political and cultural ground from the unholy trinity of Christianists, the media, and the Republican party.
It's one of the most bitter ironies of the last few decades that the reichwing propaganda machine has convinced too many citizens (and way too many voters) that the Republicans are the party of God (which in Arabic of course is "hezbollah"), and the reviled Democrats the party of atheists and Christian-haters. (I can't remember which of the various tell-all books by former members of the Bush/Cheney administration revealed how the White House would laugh and sneer at the religious right, and glory in how successfully they'd been co-opted and exploited. Was it DiIulio? O’Neill? McClennan? All of the above?)
The analogy to the two parties' relationships with the military is near-perfect. The voting public often perceives the Rethugs as supportive and the Democrats as anti-military, when of course it's the Democratic Congresscritters who vote to support better pay, better education, better health care, and of course more rational, effective, and "conservative" use of the military when it's necessary to deploy them.
Since the mass-market media clearly can't be trusted to make the truth clear in either case, the more independent groups that help to clarify the realities, the better.
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"Why... the national media... give[s] Lieberman a platform"
[Read the article: Senator Sanctimony]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Strangely Enough and Big Cheese nailed it.
The "national media" are, and have for a long time, been a wholly-owned subsidiary of the same corporatocracy that owns and operates the Republican Party. They are the GOP's Ministry of Truth.
People who explain their coverage of the current election -- supporting McCain by what is reported and how (and more important, of course, by what isn't reported); attacking and discrediting Obama; and presenting poll results as if they were neck-and-neck -- as attempts to maintain viewership and readership, a pursuit of ratings, are completely missing the point. Not only are "ratings" not the whole exaplanation, they're not even part of the explanation. (There's a nice bonus to the media when they do grow, of course. But the ratings are just the icing, not the cake.) When Donahue's show was pulled in '03, at the height of war fever, his ratings were better than those of any other political show then on MSNBC, including Chris Matthews' Hardball. It's not about ratings -- it's about results: throwing the election to the Republicans.
We like to style ourselves "the reality-based community." But anyone who hasn't fully internalized the reality that the mass media are quite literally the Republican propaganda arm is missing a key part of the reality in which we're living and operating.