Let’s Cut Through The Crap

Cutting through the crap is not as easy as it should be nowadays, not because it has suddenly become perfumed chocolate, but because so many people get paid so much to tell you it is.  Pay no attention to the stench, either your eyes are going because you’re old, or you’re too young to know crap when you see it.  The fact that neither proposition could ever possibly be true is irrelevant, that’s the premise everything in the media is predicated upon, so, sadly that is their, and our, basis for “truth.”  It’s still bullshit, though.

American University professor Richard Benedetto makes that very clear in his Politico piece today; giving the media a failing grade for it’s fawning fluffing of the Polebritician currently holding the office of the president hostage:

Last week, I asked my journalism and political science students at American University to grade the news media covering the Obama administration for the first 100 days. The consensus fell between a C+ and a B-.

However, if I asked President Barack Obama’s media strategists to grade the press corps covering their boss, I bet they would mark their cards with an A.

Why? With few exceptions, the mainstream news media have been dutifully pushing the Obama message, burnishing his carefully crafted image and offering few challenges when he makes questionable or misleading pronouncements, gestures or policy statements. In short, they seem mesmerized by the glamour of this new and different president. He is keeping them so busy with skillfully staged daily travel, speeches, meetings and photo ops that they hardly have time to ask tough questions or add context to their stories. Whatever Obama says, or doesn’t say, is usually good enough for them.

Benedetto’s analysis doesn’t go quite far enough in my opinion.  Not only has the mainstream media crawled up the Spokesmodel-in-Chief’s boxers or briefs, (a preference he won’t divulge, while the fact that he thinks he looks good in whichever ones he wears flows from his mouth freely) by extension, they find themselves equidistant up the butts of anyone favorable to him.  Thus, today’s “surprise” move of RINO Arlen Specter’s move to the DINO side of the aisle is being characterized as a death-knell for the Republican party, when it it likely no such thing.

First of all, who paid him and how much did it cost?  Second, the fact that 200,000 Republicans in his state switched party affiliation in last year’s election, while being touted as significant, just might not be.  How many of those switches are the result of Obama’s Democrat for a Day push that proved insufficient to throw the primary his way?   If they simply switched to attempt to defeat Hillary Clinton and just never bothered to switch back, can they be said to have essentially changed position?

Maybe not.  Yesterday’s Washington Post breakdown of party identification represented in their poll shows that while only 21% of those polled self-identify as Republican, a larger percentage call themselves (35%) “conservative,” while 38% say they’re “moderate,” and only 23% claim to be “liberal.”  So, what is the real net effect?  Depending upon which party runs which candidates in upcoming elections, a lot of votes just might be completely up for grabs.  Besides, the Republicans couldn’t count on Specter to vote with them any more than the Democrats can rely on Lieberman.  Or, Specter, for that matter.  On top of that, the guy’s damned near 80, just how much long-term benefit does his move anywhere effect?

The whole, “we’re getting close to a flibuster proof majority” thing is kinda bogus, too.  The Obacrats, having tied all of their major policy proposals to the budget, already had more than enough votes for freezing the Republicans out with their reconciliation threat.  So, how does this ensure policies like, health care reform, will pass, and how does it effect what form the reform will ultimately take?  We know Specter’s for it, but how far is he willing to go?  HuffPo says we can be sure single payer will be on the table, but reports that Wishy Washy Gibbs claims Wishy Washy Waffles Obandini is completely open to suggestion.

Moving on to the current “swine flu that only kills Mexicans” froofraw, we now have stories pushing immigration reform, revealing rises in stock prices of pharmeceutical companies, and rallying for immediate confirmation of “embattled” Obamacrat Kathleen Sebelius for Secretary of Health and Human Services.  Reminiscent of the hysterical push to confirm Treasury Secretary Turbo Tax Timmy Geithner, tax cheat, (TTTG,tc) on the grounds that the economic crisis mandated ignoring his shortcomings in favor of his “strengths,” the media mania seems manufactured, even if the flu threat isn’t.  This last point, questioning the legitimacy of the threat, is itself a legitimate one, given that so far it only seems to kill Mexican people, and making everybody else only as sick as any other flu, as I said earlier.  What kind of virus is that?  Who knows, but it sure moves that Tamilflu.

Meanwhile, shhhhh, pay no attention to the move to roll back Civil Rights reforms; we’ve got a BGINO (black guy in name only) in the White House, so black people don’t need the protection provided by the Voting Rights Act anymore.   At least, that’s what people think, even though we just recently learned that the unemployment rate among black college grads, being twice as high as their white counterparts, just might mean that race relations in America are not quite the peachy-keen lovefest they’re proclaimed to be in the Age of Obama.

Looks like when we cut through the crap, all we find is more crap underneath.