I know that we're supposed to talk about presidential politics, including the debate, like it's a sporting event--Obama "held serve," McCain threw a "hail mary" pass, etc. Here's the thing, though...these are creations of pundits and "experts" who then report them as if they were real things. They weigh in on the contest as if they're only reporting something, while in actuality they're creating it. Reality disappears. It drives me nuts. McCain, I guess, was strong because he knew some hard-to-pronounce names of countries and leaders and Obama was good because he made eye contact and didn't say something to humiliate himself. Listeners, innoculated to pundit-speak, may even mirror these silly judgments. It's like a giant echo chamber or house of mirrors, a sort of political Truman Show in which generalizations and metaphors are thrown around and offered up as if they were something real.
McCain, by all accounts, including a recent "off-the-record" account by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, is an angry and bitter guy with a hair-trigger temper who recently said to Senator Diane Feinstein to "get the fuck out of my office, you stupid bitch." He's a reckless war-monger. If he'd been President during the Cuban Missile Crisis, we'd all be radioactive today. And yet Wolf Blitzer and Andrea Mitchell can talk about how McCain was "strong" on international politics because he boasted of his travels and knew the names of the breakaway province of Georgia. What the fuck? They think they're analyzing a public perception, or speaking on its behalf, while in reality they're just reinforcing--if not creating--the goddamn thing.
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I could not agree with you more. I actually have had to stop watching the news because I become too enraged by the pundits--who,if you think about it, are the same ten fuckwits recycled over and over again for different shows. This struck me hardest in relation to Bush's political policies. He's a veritable idiot but the media, up until about a year ago, talked about his policies as if he were a reasonable man. The media's major crime in the last decade has been to make insanity seem reasonable. I've thought it would be nice to start up a new news show, run entirely by plebs, and interview random people on the street about current events. My theory is that we would get a much broader and deeper range of opinions on the state of the world that would actually represent some form of reality instead of the fantasy world created by these rich cake-faces who wouldn't know reality if it strung them up by the balls (that's my fantasy....).
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