Simple solutions

One of the benefits of moving back to the tundra and semi-detaching ourselves from the grid has been that we're no longer news junkies. The S.O. has figured out how to live stream MSNBC so once in awhile we'll catch a little of "Hardball" or "PoliticsNation," but we don't do that often. I've even managed to kick my C-SPAN addiction. The news we get tends to come from NPR or from reading various newspapers online. End result? Our reaction to a lot of the MSM bloviating tends to be "They've got to be kidding" or "Do people really take that shit seriously?" It's hard to get too worked up about something if you're just hearing an occasional sound bite.

If, however, you hear the same crap over and over and over. . . the mainstream media have been blathering on about the supposed threat posed by North Korea and its nuclear weapon (does anyone with a brain truly believe they have more than one?) for many weeks now. End result? When a friend who lives in West, Texas, heard the explosion from the fertilizer dealership located a couple miles away, her first thought was "well, that little asshole North Korean does have a bomb." She was caught off guard. She's a smart woman who knows that quite logically West would not be a strategic target for anyone -- it's a nice little town but skunk eggs and kolaches aren't exactly high value targets for any foreign powers or terrorists hoping to knock the U.S. to its figurative knees -- but when you hear a piece of propaganda repeated enough times you internalize it. You may not believe it on a conscious level, but it's lurking back there along with a whole lot of other internalized garbage. We've been getting told for months to that North Korea has a bomb so what's your first thought when there's a really big bang? Shit, the North Koreans actually did it.    

Of course, now that we're (or at least those of you with 24/7 cable news) are being blessed with all Boston, all the time, the next time something weird happens, you're going to look around for one of those Chechen fanatics who have been terrorizing the Russians for the past decade. Kim Il Un has become yesterday's news.

Hey, George, it's not high school

Good Morning America's only been on for about 10 minutes, and I'm already sick of listening to George Stephanopolous blather on about President Obama's poll numbers dropping.  So what?  Does this mean Barack won't be able to sit at the cool kids' table anymore?  No doubt if the poll numbers were climbing it would make it easier for various pieces of legislation to make it through Congress, but dropping poll numbers at this point in a presidency isn't exactly unexpected.  Every President enters the White House blessed with high approval numbers -- obviously.  There's always a honeymoon period.  Then the numbers inevitably drop as the public figures out that there isn't some magic switch in the Oval Office that the new guy can flip and instantly solve all our problems. 

Gin and Tacos has an interesting post up comparing Obama's numbers with St. Ronnie's -- the curves look very similar at the same points in time.  One difference, though, one that we can all look back on with true longing:  back in the Reagan era polling data was collected monthly, not on what appears to be the current practice of minute-by-minute, so the MSM wasn't able to obsess about trivia quite as much.  Maybe the '80s weren't so horrible after all.

Major news flash

It's snowing in Buffalo, New York, and it's cold in Nebraska.  And, wow, it's only December.  Who would have thought that the country would actually experience cold weather at this time of year?  So much for global warming. . .

Maybe I should have begun with a sarcasm warning, but one of my pet annoyances with the news media is when they decide to waste air time on stating the obvious and treating something that isn't exactly news as if it's something truly earth shattering, a unique event we're never going to see again.  And they do it every year.  I was quite willing to view the snow falling in Houston, Texas, a few days ago as a news event, because you don't expect it to snow there.  But snow in Buffalo?  But that turned out to be the lead story on the evening news.  Unreal. 

I can't believe this is an issue

Or, alternative title, why the main stream media bites the big one. I got home from work yesterday afternoon and it was nonstop on CNN, Headline News, even frelling PBS: is Obama a patriot?! OMG. Shut up already. If I could have reached through the screen to strangle the airheads masquerading as journalists on the "Situation Room" I would have. When they weren't sucking oxygen from the rest of us by babbling on and on about how if you get distracted and forget to put your hand over your heart while someone is butchering "The Star Spangled Banner" you must not be a true American, they went off on an equally bizarre tangent attacking Wes Clark for pointing out that getting shot out of an airplane doesn't automatically mean you've got leadership potential.

It's a perfectly valid point, but the MSM leaped all over it as though (a) this was breaking news [big flash for you guys at CNN: Wes Clark has been saying this over and over in multiple settings since he came out for Obama earlier this spring. Way to go on the superstar investigative journalism front]; and (b) Clark was unpatriotic for suggesting military service, especially fairly low level military service, in and of itself should not be a litmus test for anything. (I was, by the way, extremely disappointed that Obama was frigging stupid enough to repudiate Clark's comments instead of stating the obvious: it's a legitimate critique, especially when it's coming from someone with Clark's extensive command experience. Note to Obama: If you shove enough people under the bus, sooner or later you're going to run out of people willing to ride it.)

You know, maybe if people spent less time worrying about whether or not someone conforms to their personal ideal of patriotism and more time doing stuff that could actually help this country, I wouldn't have to resort to watching 2-hour History Channels specials devoted to "Dung" just to preserve my sanity. But after observing political news coverage for awhile, discussions of 100-foot tall piles of bat guano covered with cockroaches just seem so clean in comparison.

(I am, by the way, trying to figure out how much longer Jack Cafferty is going to survive on CNN. He's the only on-air personality left there who seems relatively immune to group think.)