Here's One For John McCain

  Before I get into the story, let me tell you that I am still having problems with this darn computer. I'm thinking that maybe it has an evil gremlin in it and that it has gone stupid on me! If you only knew. That being said, I'm looking at a post over at DailyKos from  174winchell concerning some of McCain's comments about small town America and those comments from Senator Obama which the media, Clinton, and her side-kick McCain seem to be so concerned about.

  Here's the story.

So, John McCain is now the people's man. He tells his audience at the Associated Press annual meeting in Washington, DC that he thought Senator Obama's statement about small town America is "elitist", and went on to give a little history lesson on small town America. But I've got a history lesson for John McCain, yes, and an economics lesson as well, just so he knows...

It's silly season again in American politics.

As Senator Obama recently described it, it is season again for "fake controversies". It's that season of holier-than-thou, I-am-in-touch-and-you-are-not chicanery again, and our two veterans of Beltway politics-as-usual are busy doing their thing the best they know how: the pot calling the silver spoon names.

Hillary Clinton, who has been a first lady for over 30 years, never had to step into a grocery store to buy her own quart of milk or head of cabbage for over 30 years, never had to pull up at the gas station and pump her own gas, is now speaking for small town America. Ambassador Clinton from small town, PA is telling the rest of us who is and who's not in touch.

But that's not what this diary is about. This diary is about John McCain. Straight-backed, irritable, aloof and distant, suspicious and superstitious, quirky wacky son of an admiral and grandson of an admiral who nonetheless wants us to believe that he's more in touch with small town America than small town America itself.

When called on his campaign's running claim that Obama is elitist, McCain gave his AP annual meeting audience this little lesson on small town America:

Referring to Americans who survived the Great Depression and defeated Nazi Germany during World War II, McCain said: "They were not born with the advantages others in our country enjoyed. They suffered the worst during the Depression." But, he said, they did not "turn to their religious faith and cultural traditions out of resentment." On the contrary, he said, "their faith had given generations of their families purpose and meaning. . . . And their appreciation of traditions like hunting was based on nothing other than their contribution to the enjoyment of life."

http://www.latimes.com/...

Already his campaign manager Rick Davis has handed out a threat to the Democrats:

McCain's campaign meanwhile started using the Obama remarks in a fund-raising appeal. "If Barack Obama is the Democrat nominee in the general election, the American people will have a clear choice between two different visions: Sen. Obama's liberal, elitist philosophy and John McCain's faith in the small-town values that continue to make America great," campaign manager Rick Davis wrote in an e-mail to supporters.

But there's a couple of crucial things that John McCain and his campaign are forgetting about small town America, the Great Depression, and surviving World War II. Beside the many things that they're forgetting about John McCain's policy promises and record on the plight of small town America, and I'm going to remind him.

One:
Small town America did not survive the Great Depression because of religion and faith or so-called cultural values. It survived the Great Depression because a liberal, Democratic President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt stepped in and provided the most generous Fed bailout of the economy and the work force since Reconstruction through the New Deal and most importantly, through the Works Progress Administration. Under the WPA, the Federal Government directly provided employment for millions of Americans who'd fallen on hard times by embarking on huge construction, education, and revitalization programs across the country, thus helping Americans to earn and pull themselves out of the bogpit that a rabid and unregulated market had thrown them into.

John McCain, on the other hand, wouldn't even commit to helping millions of hard working Americans who're losing their dearest and most important possession, their homes. Instead he called them "irresponsible". Until Johnny Come Lately made his late-late turn around, he thought that any Federal help for small town America is liberal, big government and wrong. And now he wants us to believe he has "faith" in their values.

Two:
Small town America pulled itself through World War II not through God and Guns, but because, again, the same liberal, Democratic President, FDR, ran a war economy that provided jobs at home in the armament industry for millions of Americans. Obama always speaks of how his grandmother worked on a military plant to sustain her family. That war economy provided jobs at home.

Contrast John McCain Bush's war in Iraq. I want John McCain to name me one person in small town America who has benefitted from the war that he and his friend George Bush have spent $450 billion dollars waging in Iraq for five years! 

And I'm not advocating war for jobs, but the World War, which was a just war if any war is just, also created jobs at home for millions of families whose main bread earners were on the battlefront in Europe or Japan. McCain's war, on the other hand, has simply drained the economy, dragged us into debt, and destroyed our confidence.

Three
But even more importantly, while liberal Democrat FDR provided jobs for small town America making American armaments on American soil, what did John McCain do recently? He opened the door for the $35 bilion tanker deal that was handed to European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company, costing us thousands of jobs that could have gone to small town America.

And what is worse, the EAD deal that sent a $35 billion American contract abroad was brokered by lobbyists working as advisers for Senator McCain's campaign.

WASHINGTON — A co-chairman of Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign and other top campaign advisers and supporters were lobbyists for the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company, part of a group that beat out Boeing for a $35 billion contract to build aerial refueling tankers for the Air Force.

Boeing, which has filed an appeal with the Government Accountability Office, is expected to focus at least in part on Mr. McCain’s role in the deal, including letters that he sent urging the Defense Department, in evaluating the tanker bids, not to consider the potential effects of a separate United States-Airbus trade dispute.

Obviously John McCain doesn't recall his history, and that it was a liberal that helped small town America pull through the Great Depression and World War II. And obviously he doesn't understand economics like he's admitted, yet he wants to be President so he can run the world's largest economy further into the ground.

And clearly John McCain doesn't care that it is deals and policies that he has supported that have destroyed hope in small town America, handing contracts to foreign companies, taking jobs away from American workers, bleeding little towns of young men and women who ought to be in college learning a trade so that they can help their families rather than be stuck in a rut in Iraq.

John McCain talks about "enjoyment of life" in small town America. Guess who's out touch!

Technorati Tags: John McCain,Hillary Clinton,Democrats,Republicans,Barack Obama,2008

The Cult of the Professional

  The Original

The Cult of the Professional

by Devilstower Sun Apr 13, 2008

It's been more than a year now since Andrew Keen's indictment of the Internet in The Cult of the Amateur. According to Keen, the sad result of recent trends in how information is circulated has been the deterioration of authoritative sources and uncertainty over the relative importance of stories. I completely agree.

Where I disagree is the source of this rising cloud of confusion.  It's not the blogs that have caused faith in the media to decline.  It's not Wikipedia which has led to a diminished respect for facts and research.  The fault doesn't lie with the amateurs.  It's squarely in the court of the professionals.

By this I don't mean to engage in a "Judy Miller Attack," placing the blame on those who gather and report the news.  Keen is quite correct to point out that many -- most -- reporters are both knowledgeable about their subject areas and courageous in their efforts to gather information.  As someone who never held a reporting position higher than $5-a-story stringer to a small town weekly, I feel both awe and gratitude for the people who place their careers and bodies in harm's way to see that I get news from halfway around the world. There are a few bad apples (and sour Picklers) in the barrel, but most reporters are in fact both capable and objective.

That's not enough.  Keen's attempts to defend the traditional media by stating that reporters are good is like trying to sell a Yugo by boasting of its high-quality tires. 

The media -- newspapers, radio, and television -- is not made up of reporters running on a sparkling field of journalistic integrity.  Those reporters are instead embedded in a machine intended to do the one thing that Mr. Keen sets as the mark of professionalism -- make money.  And the way the media has chosen to make money over the last few decades is, perversely, by devaluing their own product.  The clearest illustration of this can be found in three massive changes that have affected news over the last two decades: the increase in radio pundits, the establishment of the Fox News Network, and the reaction of the remainder of the media to the first two events.

The idea of folks who jabber about politics on the radio certainly isn't new, neither is the ad-mix of news, gossip, advertising, and opinion.  Paul Harvey carried on this way for over seven decades, and acted as a bridge to even earlier practitioners.  Harvey, like his predecessors, mingled ugly disdain for liberals and selectively distorted newscasts amongst his folksy product pitches, helping to lay the groundwork for the Limbaughs and Savages to come.  The critical difference between the newcomers and what's always been there is little more than a switch in balance between the amount of vinegar added to the honey.

But the right wing talk brigade doesn't exist just to build up their own or tear down Democrats. They have, from the moment they first rolled onto the air, existed to tell you that traditional news organizations are no good.  The Washington Post?  Inside the beltway losers out of touch with real America.  CNN?  The Clinton News Network.  The New York Times?  Please.  Do you really have to ask?

Punditry has always aimed as much artillery at the people who deliver the news as it does at those who make it.  There's a very good reason for this.  Before you can convince someone of a lie, you need to make it more difficult for them to check your information.  If you establish from the start that NPR is communist, MSNBC and CNN are slanted, and every newspaper this side of Journal's editorial page should be printed on pink paper, then any exaggeration you deliver becomes the de facto standard.  Impugning the validity of other news sources is the first job of a successful pundit.  They don't seek to be your sources of information by passing along reliable news.  They do so by constantly assailing the legitimacy of other sources until you're left shaking your head at the absolute ignorance of everyone but Rush/Bill/Sean/Ann.

The same principles apply to an even greater degree for Fox News.  Yes, the network exists to promulgate a rigidly conservative agenda, but it can't do that without first informing you that every other source of news is invalid.  Fox doesn't compete with the other networks, it sneers at them. From its motto to its non-existent boundaries between opinion and reporting, Fox exists by being an instrument of destruction to other news providers.  Why do those who watch Fox News continue to believe that Iraq was involved in 9/11 despite that idea having been disproved over, and over, and over?  Because Fox tells them to.  Because Fox's pundits repeat the lie.  Because Fox has convinced them that no other source of fact exists.

Fox News Network alone has done more to devalue the whole idea of news than every supermarket tabloid, every radio ranter, and every blogger combined.

If both the institutions at blame are heavily weighted to the right, that's no coincidence.  Conservative dogma has long held the idea that it must discredit the press by claiming that the Fourth Estate is in fact a Fifth Column.  They have depended on their ability to defame factual sources as a means of easing the way for misinformation since well before the time of Joe McCarthy.  The right has successfully extended this campaign into the realm of science, convincing people that both evolution and global warming are somehow "political issues," deserving of no more attention than alternatives despite reams of evidence. 

The myth of the "liberal media" came long before the blogs. Discrediting the "nattering nabobs" of the press is not a game that originated with bloggers.  Every blogger I know is fully aware that we could not survive without the legwork done by hardworking, professional reporters.  Bloggers are not competition to the traditional media -- though they do, hopefully, act as an occasional check on its excesses.  However, even if the Internet were entirely dedicated to the downfall of existing media, it would be only one popgun in a chorus of cannons.  A large part of the traditional media is dedicated to nothing less than making war on the rest.

Suffering the wounds from that war, the media might have chosen to hold to strict standards and fought back by dissecting the falsehoods being directed against good reporting.  Instead, that job has been left, almost without exception, to the very bloggers Keen blames as the cause.  The reaction of the traditional media was quite different. 

In response to the assault from less factual sources, media both accelerated the already existing trend toward mingling news and entertainment and -- in the most twisted move imaginable -- sought to imitate the mudslingers.  They joined the war not by upholding their standards, but by dismissing them.  And again, they did so for the reason that Keen indicates as the break between amateur and professional: the perception that there was more money to be made on the less truthful side of the aisle.

Rather than fight back against patently nonsensical claims of bias by professional vomiters like Hannity and O'Reilly, the other networks responded by filling their ranks with Becks and Buchanans.  Dazzled by Fox's growing ratings, the other broadcasters became quislings to their own cause, confirming the idea that they were less than reliable by becoming less reliable.

At the same time, both networks and newspapers devoted increasingly fewer resources to "hard news," and turned more dollars toward entertainment features.  The drive to do so affects everyone from the no-longer-so-Gray Lady and the freshly perk-ified Tiffany Network to the 24 hour cable shouting festivals.  As time goes on, they've increasingly broken the barriers between the news and entertainment, a fact reflected in the ever-thickening fashion sections of papers, the mainstreaming of trash like the New York Post and Washington Times, and the unweighted transition from war news to visiting pop-stars in the midst of news broadcasts.

In interviews, Keen has often attempted to dismiss the value of Wikipedia by pointing out that the entry for "truthiness" is nearly as long as the entry for "truth" itself.  Why not apply the same standard to every network that expended more hours on Natalie Holloway than it did on topics with far more impact on American lives and futures?  Which gets more attention in professional media, birth defects or Brittany?  What gets promoted about the candidates, their energy plans, or their preference in beverages?

Keen's contention that the fault of the failing media lies with the amateurs is attractive to those claiming a paycheck to distribute information.  It's a theory that's certainly given him plenty of air time and lots of approving nods.  But the truth is, the "Web 2.0 movement" that he wants to blame is a bystander in this fight.

The media is working very, very hard to make sure that you don't trust the media.  Professionalism defined only by dollars dictates that they chase declining ad revenues through alleys of filth.  News outlets have become devoted not to providing stories that are timely and accurate, but to providing proof that their competitors are slanted and unreliable. It's devolved into a battle in which all sides lose.  And the biggest loser is the consumer looking for a reliable, authoritative source of information.

But it's certainly nice that Keen has given them somewhere to place the blame while they pick each other apart.

Technorati Tags: Fox News Network,Blogging,Media