The Media - a Source of Madness

I have often wondered at the insanity of spending millions upon millions of dollars, not to mention millions of man hours, electing a president just so we can spend the next four to eight years driving the poor fool crazy. If he is kind and compassionate then he is weak and too emotional to be effective. If he is brilliant and coolly cerebral then he doesn’t care about people and the great issues of his day.

The other morning I heard Joe Scarborough - not one of my favorite people - expounding upon the fact that Obama isn’t good at symbolism. I had no idea that we needed an Ingmar Bergman in the White House. Also that morning I heard Anne Kornblum of the Times who seemed to imply that since the oil spill in the Gulf could not be stopped by Obama’s rhetoric this proved the limits of Obama’s talent. She must be delusional. No president has ever had the kind of power and control needed to stop an oil plume from pumping out of a badly maintained pipe deep in the ocean with or without rhetoric. If they had Congress would soon take it away from them in its infinite need to urinate on the Executive Branch’s parade.

Nonsense like this proves to me that one of the most corrosive elements in our body politic is the mainstream media. They promote the torture of presidents with cruelty, depravity, stupidity and speculation leading to guilt by association - all of which validates in the electorate a profound confusion, a dance of lunacy, a paranoid schizophrenic’s wet dream.

The 24/7 news cycle produces legions of news performers and precious little else. Their performance de jour often bleeds over into the print media. Thus, people like Kornblum engage in the theatrics and optics necessary to float with the other crap in the toilet. In my opinion these commentators and talking heads aren’t reporters or journalists. They are pseudo intellectuals impersonating experts in order to grind a political axe. Believe them, follow them too closely at your own risk.

Presidents like other societal victims often own a part of their victimization. Obama for instance is brilliant without question, beautifully eloquent and cares deeply for someone - although, I am not always sure who. Nonetheless, he persists with the tenaciousness of an angry teenager in impersonating Gandhi when he ought to try on a little Lucky Luciano.