A spectacle of media bias

What a spectacle. Leftist voices from Maureen Dowd of the New York Times to Jimmy Carter are accusing Rep. Joe Wilson of being a racist after he's already apologized to President Obama for his outburst during the President's address to Congress... meanwhile the news media disparages and discounts the massive demonstration in Washington, DC over the weekend, and when certain media personalities call the big acronyms on the carpet on that, we get treated to the spectacle of Politifact.com dragging out some old photo harvested from an overenthusiastic blogger and asserting that this is proof that the demonstration was 50,000 to 75,000 people and not 1 to 2 million people like members of the Capitol Police and others calling in to radio stations have been saying. Jack Harris of 970 AM in Tampa said around 5 am this morning (Tuesday 09/15/09) that he had lived in Washington, seen several pictures and video of the event, people had called him describing it, and the way the media treated it "was an insult" to the people who flooded the city to protest against the way universal health care is being rammed down our throats.

In my entire life -- 44 years -- I have not seen such an egregious display of dishonesty and distortion from the major news outlets... you would expect this from a Communist or a Nazi government, not from a so-called free press. The real stinger is that a supposedly "independent, unbiased" group that rates political quotes on a "Truth-o-Meter" has now shown itself to me -- TWICE -- once on the Joe Wilson issue, and now with the crowd numbers in Washington -- that it is no more to be trusted on FACTS than Pravda or TASS under Leonid Brezhnev. The truth about Politifact is this: It is run by the St. Petersburg Times, whose editorial board is pro-Democrat, endorsed Obama for President, and parrots the same biased stories from the AP and Reuters, among others -- sometimes excising crucial facts that would put leftism in a bad light! I know because that's the paper I read every day, and the disconnect between its "journalism," if you can still call it that -- the quality of the writing having declined to near stupidity lately -- and verifiable information that I get from other sources, has widened to nearly a gulf on any story that has political controversy in it. I don't have to rehash my last blog criticizing the press to say that the St. Petersburg Times also has a code of ethics that it has lately defenestrated whenever it was inconvenient to the Democratic administration.

One more thing I'd like to say about Joe Wilson's shout "You lie!" Before you read racism into it, let me tell you that normally Southerners are a laconic bunch, especially when they're ticked off. I was born in Maryland, which is a Southern state and let no one tell you any different, and the only reason either I or anyone else would say "You lie!" is it was the shortest, most direct way of stating "You're a dishonest lying piece of crap, and anyone who trusts what you say is a damn fool!" Notice that nowhere in there is some race statement -- it was not reserved for use against only blacks or any other group. That's simply what Southerners will say to you if they think you're being deliberately and scummily deceptive. It's in the present tense, but perhaps it would be more accurate, from the tone that it's usually delivered in (this is for you grammarians), to call it an infinitive present tense. That means it's a permanent condition, there is no time attached to it, "You lie!" means "You can never be trusted again" and "You should never have been trusted at all!"