Here's my little contribution to the bitstream for the day. Think we can do any better?
Dear Morning Joe faces:
Re: Palin Op Ed discussion, 12/09/09
No sound or video bites in this screed:
Are there some requirements in your programming protocols that require you to give your bit of incremental validation to Palin’s speechwriters' sound bites, by spending all that time back-and-forthing over the piece? Is there some reason some of you just have to find "something good to say" about that dreck the WashPost (maybe in anticipation of protecting its "access" in the event of another conservative anschluss?) put out there as part of its Long March to the Right? Which one of you said, almost apologetically, "Well, it’s a valid story"?
Geez, not only multiple simplistic knocks on Obama ("It’s the jobs, stupid!"), about whom I admit unhappiness but not surprise (unlike many of his partisans at the liberal end of the rainbow,) but even the weak-kneed "Well, because we get 6,000 angry emails when we 'do Palin'" and "everybody else is yakking about Palin-speechwriters-political operatives (who don’t even believe it)" BS, you have to do the first part of Fiddler on the Roofer Tevye’s Rejection Lament: "On The Other Hand," and spout some "Good-Thinking, Girlfriend!" Kind Words you can somehow find grounding for in that ignorant demagogue figurehead's hot-button-punching garbage. Remember the last phrases of Tevye's ruminations? "NO! There IS no 'other hand!'"
What’s the deal? You doing like the media in various declining dictatorships and kleptocracies, preserving your personal stations in life at the expense of the culture? This nation probably needs a perceived (however inaccurately) common enemy, or at least a common goal and purpose. The Bush League has bequeathed us the former, and it might be the case that we are so fractured into know-it-all bits that without that, we will very shortly be just a collection of warring city-states and feudal domains. But where’s the latter? The Fourth Estate used to carry some of the burden of keeping commonality and comity in the public eye. Not any more.
We already have the "aristocracy of obscene wealth," and a huge population of wage serfs (the ones that have jobs.) We have our "80-inch class" and Internet-porn bread and circuses, and a mercenary military mostly concerned with expanding its own share of the take. A corrupt hereditary political class, perverting the legitimacy the Founding Fathers so carefully built, into good old "Laws R Us," where the ruleoflaw is for hire, cheap (lobbyists assure their clients that the ROI on political purchases is like 22,000 to 1.)
Is there some reason for you and so many others to be afraid to take a stand, to use your brains and your senses that tell you that Palin and Gingrich and Rove and DeLay and all the others, are selling the rest of us down the river, sucking out the wealth that is created by so much hard labor and inspiration by this and many future generations? That what they preach appeals to long-cultivated ignorance and prejudice, augmented by every little act of air-time validation and intentionally activates the worst parts of the human brain and behavior repertoire, and by the maybe inevitable weakness of those on the squishy Left, who are burdened by some residual iota of fellow-feeling and decency, though are increasingly coming to resemble the Pigs on the Porch down on the Animal Farm?
On the other hand, I squawk about stuff like this knowing that the tiny squeak I make is not even a sneeze in a tornado. Maybe I should learn to glory in this downhill rush to species suicide, where our leaders do their poll-surfing and pretend that they are steering the board and the wave, and push the Juggernaut even harder toward the precipice! Hey, humans also have long had this idea that when they die, the world should die with them. Ask Hitler and Goering and lots of ancient emperors and pashas how that was supposed to work. Any of you run across the concept of "Ragnarok?" and I am not referring to the musical group of that name.
So there is my exercise in futility for the morning, and now I am off to my low-paid nursing job to have my nose rubbed in another day’s worth of the waste and idiocy and cruelty that have some folks thinking the system is "in need of reform" and many other folks just thinking about how they can carve a larger slice off the cooked goose in the Great Sausage Making in the Capitol.
In the spirit of Christmas (not the one that animates Black Friday), "God bless us, every one."
Sincerely, and in the knowledge that Resistance Is Futile,
Your humble viewer and fellow American,
jm214
By the way, you go on and on about how the Administration is responsible to create jobs. Maybe you wise people could tell the rest of us, or just Google up a talking head or three to tell us how, in present circumstances, those jobs can somehow be magically created. Hey?