My expectations are low, and I even understand why Jeremiah Wright's gotten more coverage than John Yoo's love of torture, but the apparent fact that "Yoo and torture" shows up only one tenth as often as "Obama and bowling" in Nexis over the past thirty days really does make you think we're plumbing new depths of terribleness in our press' sense of what matters.
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A Sense of Proportion
07 Apr 2008 11:12 am
Comments (13)
People who expect nothing from their country's political process usually want at least to be entertained by it.
Gives the line "Nobody f@%#s with the Je-sus" a whole new meaning, doesn't it?
This story is so disturbing on many levels, yet the mainstream media has yet to give a comprehensive report. We must write our congress representatives and Senators demanding hearings.
For excellent coverage on the issue, visit http://balkin.blogspot.com/
Perhaps because it is old news?
We know that from 2002 John Yoo testified that he would consider saving many American lives worth the price of a little Islamoid terrorist discomfort. Especially since the Islamoids made no effort to honor Geneva reciprocity - by engaging in REAL torture, and unlawfully killing, terrorizing non-combatants and uniformed soldiers serving in full compliance of Geneva requirements before AQ chopped their heads off....
Hard interrogations to save "our side's" lives seems reasonable when the enemy has forgone Geneva reciprocity. Nor will we ever be bound by it if WMDs are used to kill masses of our civilians - as the response strategy is Geneva immediately goes away when cities roast by nukes or are poisoned by germ, nerve gas warfare - and deterrence is restored by demonstrating we can make their country suffer far greater casualties...
Old discussion however. Not resolved because we have split into two camps - one favoring our lives and security and to err on the side of preserving them - the other side convinced of the enemy being a law enforcement problem, a "slippery slope" existing, and obsession about "poor terrorist's civil liberties".
Compared to that, Obama's 37 score in bowling and Rev "Down with Whitey" Wright are fresh stories.
The output of the media is a cross between chaff and a game show buzzer. Most of the time, flood the landscape with loud, titillating bullshit to keep people distracted and not even try to figure out what's going on. And if someone should stray too far from the "accepted" level of discourse, then BZZZZT! They get slammed.
The perfect example for me was the 1992 election. What was one of the big, important issues the media was dwelling on at that time? How fat Clinton was! All during the campaign trail we kept hearing about how he loved those cheeseburgers! Then Perot, for one brief shining moment, actually got important issues into the discourse, by buying his way on TV to talk about the economy. And it worked - news reports actually started taking serious looks at the economic differences between Bush I and Clinton, and discussions of the economic policies regularly made the airwaves.
Perot, of course, is "crazy", says the media. No need to pay attention to the crazy man and any of the ideas or concerns he raised. Hey look, check out how rich Hillary is!
American news corps are owned by descendents of the marketing geniuses who changed King Lear and Macbeth because they thought happy endings would sell more tickets.
By the way, Obama didn't actually bowl 37. On Jon Stewart, I caught a glimpse of the electronic scoring and he had 37 in the 6th frame. In the seventh frame he had a spare so no score showed up for that one, because he never bowled in the 8th (see 2:43 in the clip linked here: (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/04/02/jon-stewart-mocks-media-s_n_94746.html). His true 7 frame score would thus have been 47-57, depending on his first ball in the 8th frame. I'm annoyed that the story is not only trivial but not even really true.
Old discussion however. Not resolved because we have split into two camps - one favoring our lives and security and to err on the side of preserving them - the other side convinced of the enemy being a law enforcement problem, a "slippery slope" existing, and obsession about "poor terrorist's civil liberties".
Bullshit. First of all, you need to separate the CIA's use of torture, versus Gitmo, versus military personnel in Iraq. Many of the torture victims at Abu Gharib were not so-called "terrorists". It was determined that many of the victimes were, in fact, innocent Iraqi civilians. This is just one reason why the military using torture techniques is bad policy. Another? Low-level military are not trained to interrogate terror suspects, torture or not.
Secondly, the Yoo memo was said to have been kept secret because of national security issues, and this turns out to be false. If the Justice Department is invoking NEW LAWS, then it's important those laws be vetted...in fact, it's ILLEGAL to avert the process this way.
But nevermind. Let's just throw out the Constitution and all international treaties. Let's throw out the rule of law while were at it, and if anybody complains, we'll just tell them they only care about the "terrorist's" civil liberties.
America faces a crisis. The onslaught of terrrrrrrrists is never ceasing. They are crawling under the beds of American children at 3:00 AM every single night. The profits of unregulated Wall St banks and companies that have offshored labor to third-world countries are falling fast. The bonuses of the captains of finance are expected to be many millions less than they were just last year. And librul fascists prowl the halls of Congress conspiring to strip the executive of his God-given right to freely examine our emails, listen to our phone calls, and hold us in prison without any contact with legal representation or access to courts for years and years.
The media knows just how important this election is, just how big the crisis is. The fact that Obama bowled a 37 in 6 frames of bowling is telling. Obama isn't one of us (and we all know what I mean by "us"). We can quibble about "who justified torture" and "who justified unfettered search and seizure of Americans with no judicial oversight" all day. But really, the true test of a president comes when they fail to break 50 after six frames of bowling.
America deserves better than Obama and his weakling bowling skills. How can we expect to fight the terrrrrrrrists if he can even get two consecutive strikes on the bowling lane?
I found only 3.5 to 1.
I hate to ask Matt, but are you sure you spelled everything right?
OK, I admit it. I enjoyed asking.
It may be because our media (shamefully) avoids the word "torture." I'm guessing if you search for "Yoo and interrogation" you'd get a lot more hits. Not anything close to "Obama and Bowling" of course, but possibly not quite as bad as it looks. Anyone with access to Nexis want to give it a shot?
I don't have Nexis access. I do have Google News access, however.
According to Google News, there are about 3 times as many stories with "john yoo" as those with "obama" + "bowling", over the last week. Combining the two searches reveals that one might count on the fingers of one hand the number of opinion pieces that use this same comparison to illustrate priorities being out of whack. (And for all I know, some of them are about John Yoo's excellent bowling skills, and his opinion of Obama.)
Comments closed April 21, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
or maybe just new depths in what the press' audience is interested in.
Posted by passing thru | April 7, 2008 11:35 AM