No news is Fox News
It is rare that any politician strikes me as decent, honest and worthy of absolute trust. Why that’d be just silly. Some of them though, seem so transparently opportunistic and fake that you would wonder how even some of the people could be fooled some of the time. Hillary Clinton is one such politican.
As with David Cameron, I mentally picture a little pie chart floating above her head with every sentence she utters, showing the demographic it’s supposed to appeal to and the sentiment it is designed to reinforce.
This story from The Ecomomist blog, linking the Clinton campaign to an organised effort to mislead poor, black voters into not voting, doesn’t come as a great suprise to me. Clinton is a woman on a mission - as shown by her camp’s ongoing smear campaign against Obama which has gone largely unreciprocated.
Even with their utterly broken media and somewhat broken electoral system, I struggle to believe that our friends across the pond could elect a warmongering redneck moron like John McCain. However, I remember thinking the same about the warmongering redneck moron they returned for a second term in 2004. As we’ve just discovered here in London, people can do crazy, inexplicable things at election time.
I used to believe that Americans who vote Republican are making an informed decision similar to that made by Britons who vote Conservative. The basis for this informed decision would be something along the lines of “We’ve got lots of money and we’d like to hang onto as much of it as possible” [*]
I realise now that those in America who are poor enough to be reliant on the “mainstream media” for their news - and there are quite a few of them - are so utterly brainwashed that they really can’t be held responsible for their actions at the polling booth. By appealing to their sense of patriotism (or fears surrounding immigration or national security), the turkeys can be very effectively persuaded to vote for Christmas.
The consensus from the online discussion surrounding the story linked to above is that it stands no chance of an airing in the “MSM” and that is a great tragedy for the American people.
This is a good opportunity to mention one of my favourite cartoons, This Modern World. It goes overy my head on occasion (though not as often as Doonesbury) but the fundamental theme is the same every week: how American politicians and the media conspire to divert political debate away from actual issues in favour of liberal-vs-conservative bickering.
Here are the two most recent cartoons at the time of writing. NB Depending on your screen resolution you may need to click on these to open them in a new window in order to see the whole thing.
Finally regarding the post title, here is a thorough analysis of the political bias displayed by Fox News which makes for rather depressing reading.
[*] Good luck to David Cameron in his attempt to rebrand the core message to “I vote Conservative because I care about little fluffy bunny rabbits and the lush green fields they scamper around in”. I’m not buying it, Dave, but I’m sure you’ll find plenty of wealthy tofu-weavers in my part of town who will.
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