In the swirl of bullshit that has been written by reporters and pundits who seem to want to push each other out of the way and stand in front of the crowd and scream "I'm the one who's wrong and doesn't know anything!" at the top of their lungs, this post stands out:
From TIME's "Swampland" blog
January 5, 2008 10:25
The GOP's High School Debate: The cool kid vs. the valedictorian
Posted by Michael Scherer
Here's one thing you need to know about John McCain. He's always been the coolest kid in school. He was the brat who racked up demerits at the Naval Academy. He was the hot dog pilot who went back to the skies weeks after almost dying in a fire on the U.S.S. Forrestal. His first wife was a model. His second wife was a rich girl, 17 years his junior. He kept himself together during years of North Vietnamese torture and solitary confinement. When he sits in the back of his campaign bus, we reporters gather like kids in the cafeteria huddling around the star quarterback. We ask him tough questions, and we try to make him slip up, but almost inevitably we come around to admiring him. He wants the challenge. He likes the give and take. He is, to put it simply, cooler than us.
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And you have the audacity to call yourself a reporter after writing that paragraph? You have the gall to call yourself "a journalist?"
After writing that paragraph--and after an editor allowed it to be published--EVERYONE associated with bringing that little pearl to the forefront of the American dialogue about politics and the 2008 election should have been fired. Fired and sent home. Fired and then forced to carry their belongings out through the front door with a uniformed security guard at each elbow. Fired and asked not to write anymore.
It's all well and good to write in a parody style, in a cutesy style, and to use different techniques to make a point about something.
But that one paragraph explains it all--the media is not to be trusted anymore. They are not serving the interests of their readers by coming up with such mind-blowing insanity. They are not doing their jobs. They are not representing their trade or their craft anymore. They are not well versed in the ethics of their profession anymore. They don't care if they lie, they don't care what they write, they just want to get what their opinion is out into the open so that it can fit whatever theme they're trying to push. They are shameless and incompetent.
Here's what you REALLY need to know about John McCain--he is a caricature of a leader. He lacks the temperament and the judgement to be President. Everyone who knows anything about him knows it. He is a pariah in the Senate because of this. His public life is full of incidents where he denigrates, insults and berates people just because he can--just like an insecure bully. He left his first wife to take up with his second wife--just like a family values Republican always does. He is not respected in foreign policy circles. He doesn't have the first clue what is really going on in Iraq. His statement that we can keep US troops in Iraq for a "million years" is the single biggest gaffe of his campaign so far. He is not qualified to be President of the United States by virtue of his record, NOT his resume--in fact, one would have to conclude that his record, NOT his resume, is the very thing that highlights why we have to question the adoration the media has for him. They don't have a clue as to how to separate the two.
Un-fucking-believable.
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