The media is a bunch of pansy pussies with useless degrees that prove they are too scared to get on the front lines and do something. Or at least this is my assessment of the near total free card the press gave the GOP last week.

When the media got attacked by Palin and McCain they should have defended themselves (Joe Klein did, he is excused from this indictment). There is nothing biased about reporting on things. Instead they reported on whether or not they are biased. This, in addition to being a ridiculous exercise in self aggrandizement as the media now believes that they are the story, is also a waste of time.

Watching the Republican convention was like attending a lecture on logical yoga. I watched with astonishment as Mitt Romney (a governor from my hometown of Boston who while governor championed gay rights, universal healthcare, and the expansion of abortion rights, but now apparently is against all that) a man of unimaginable wealth from the upper reaches of a society none of us could ever imagine of obtaining explained that the problem with government is East Coast elites. I am from the fucking East Coast and I can tell you he is the damn East Coast elite. Mitt Romney is the sail boating, croquet playing, elite clubbing, namby pamby bullshit he spent last week attacking. Apparently my econ teacher is wrong and if A=B and B=C then C doesn’t equal A. Following in these footsteps Mike Huckabee explained that all the issues we have had in the past 8 years is due to “European Ideas.” I didn’t realize George Bush went to college in Europe!!! Yes folks, the RNC proved that at times indifference curves do intersect.

The problem is that for the past 8 years the GOP has controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress. Yes the past 2 years the congress has been democratic, so Palin’s little attack about them being the do nothing congress might have been valid except that they did many things which were either vetoed or filibustered by the Republicans. So the GOP has controlled government, A=B. Then the country went to shit and he all lost our jobs, our security, our rights, and our economy. This was largely due to actions by the government be it an expensive war following huge tax cuts or the PATRIOT Act (yes it is all capitals because it is an acronym for something it is pretending to be). So the government has created our problems, B=C. And there is of course the theme of the McCain campaign C does not equal A. The mind boggles.

Instead A apparently equals liberal government despite not actually being in charge, European ideas, the teachers union, community organizers, and of course the media. Oh the media!!! When will you learn how not to destroy our government despite a complete inability to make any governmental decisions. Forget this notion of liberal media bias. The only out and out biased media source is FOX NEWS. They are the media. They are conservative. But the media has a liberal bias. Again C does not equal A. The rest of the media gets caught up trying to prove themselves unbiased and never actually reports anything.

I heard numerous lies this past week that the media never touched on:

1)      Obama will raise taxes on the middle class. He won’t – he will only raise tax on the top 5% or those making well over $250,000 (basically Mitt Romney and Cindy McCain)

2)      Drilling for oil will reduce our dependence on foreign oil. It won’t — we only have 3% of the world’s oil supply.

3)      Drilling for oil will reduce the price of gas. It won’t — we won’t see any new oil hit our tanks for 7 years if we start drilling today.

4)      Drilling for oil will reduce the price of gas even though we won’t see it for 7 years because the fact that there will be new oil will scare prices down. It won’t because OPEC, which gives the world most of its oil, is a monopoly and monopolies set the price and they do not listen to Congress when deciding this price.

5)      John McCain is for developing alternative energy. Even if he is he has a funny way of showing it, The NYT reported last week the McCain has deliberately not voted the past 8 times for federal funding for the development of more solar and wind power.

6)      Obama is against nuclear power. He isn’t. He is for it although he probably shouldn’t be because one day we are going to destroy a part of out country with that stuff and I bet you it won’t affect Romney’s or any of McCain’s houses.

Basically folks, A does equal C. And if the media is too cowardly to point it out when attacked by the GOP then they are working in the wrong profession.

I don’t mind if the Republicans provide their own alternative vision for the future, especially if they truly want a Party that moves away from the policies of Bush. But I do mind their attempts to rewrite history and blame Bush’s errors on the very people who were trying to stop him.

After skipping day 1 of the RNC to watch Hurricane Gustav, thankfully, miss New Orleans, the RNC’s first two days became one.

Notes about the RNC: The first thing that I noticed was the simplicity of the stage, especially when it is compared to the flash and glamour of the DNC’s stage. The stage of the RNC is really minimalist and frankly kind of ugly. This is of course either stupid or brilliant. It either feeds their armature at govt image or feeds the image they want to create of the Dems as elitist. My guess is the second.

The script is not really but kind of surprising. McCain hates the culture wars. That is why the Dems in the Senate like him. McCain has always been lukewarm about the issue of abortion and frankly doesn’t like talking about it. He isn’t a social conservative but he has no problem voting that to expand his base. Palin is a culture warrior. Since adding her to the ticket we are now back in the culture wars.

Abortion, the gays, religion, blah blah blah let’s fight…

With this comes the tactics of Bush and Rove that McCain back in 2000 despised. They will attack Obama’s patriotism and every Democrat’s patriotism…a la ‘country first’. Then they will attack the media for being biased. Now the media is biased in a sense. Fox News is biased, MSNBC is in part biased, and various people on CNN (Glen Beck and Lou Dobbs) are biased. But Wolf Blitzer, Tom Brokaw, Katie Couric? Give me a break.

John McCain says the coverage of Palin is sexist and biased. Yes the biased people have taken sides. But McCain claims the non-biased people are now biased. This is crap. They are vetting Palin because that is what reporters do. They did it to Obama…a la Rev Wright…and Palin gets no special treatment.

I leave you with Joe Klein of Time Magazine’s words or McCain’s attacks:

September 3, 2008 2:04

Angry Amateurs

Posted by Joe Klein

The story of the day out here in Minneapolis is the McCain campaign’s war against the press. This has been building for some time. Those of us who have criticized the candidate–and especially those of us who enjoyed good relations with McCain in the past–have been subject to off-the-record browbeating and attempted bullying all year. But things have gotten much worse in recent days: there was McCain’s rude, bizarre interview with Time Magazine last week. Yesterday, McCain refused to an interview with Larry King, for God’s sake, because Campbell Brown had been caught in the commission of journalism on CNN the night before, asking McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds what decisions Sarah Palin had made as commander-in-chief of the Alaska national guard. (There was an answer that the unprepared Bounds didn’t have: she had deployed them to fight fires.)

So what’s going on here? Two things. McCain is just plain angry at us. By the evidence presented in the utterly revealing Time interview, he’s ballistic. This is a politician who needs to see himself as the man on the white horse, boldly traversing a muddy field…any intimations that he’s gotten muddied in the process, or has decided to throw mud, are intolerable.

The second thing is more insidious: Steve Schmidt has decided, for tactical reasons, to slime the press. He wants the public to believe that there is an unfair–sexist (you gotta love it)–personal assault going on against Palin and her family. This is a smokescreen, intended to divert attention from the very real and responsible vetting that is taking place in the media–about the substance of Palin’s record as mayor and governor. Sure, there are a few outliers–and the tabloid press–who have fixed on baby stories. That was inevitable….the flip side of the personal stories that the McCain team thought would work to their advantage–Palin’s moose-hunting and wolf-shooting, and her admirable decision to have a Down Syndrome baby. And yes, when we all fix on the same story, whether it’s a hurricane or a little-known politician, a zoo ensues. But the media coverage of the Palin story has been well within the bounds of responsibility. Schmidt is trying to make it seem otherwise, a desperate tactic.

There is a tendency in the media to kick ourselves, cringe and withdraw, when we are criticized. But I hope my colleagues stand strong in this case: it is important for the public to know that Palin raised taxes as governor, supported the Bridge to Nowhere before she opposed it, pursued pork-barrel projects as mayor, tried to ban books at the local library and thinks the war in Iraq is “a task from God.” The attempts by the McCain campaign to bully us into not reporting such things are not only stupidly aggressive, but unprofessional in the extreme.