Lies. Temper tantrums. Willful ignorance of complexity.

McCain’s not 72 going on 73. He’s 7.

I must remind myself whenever I feel a pang of remorse over denigrating the man I supported in 2000, “He was so much older then, he’s younger than that now.”

Numbers like Mark Nickolas discovered are why whenever I hear the term “liberal biased media” these days, I get another white hair. They prove the media’s not liberal, or ideological, or even sensible.

They are merely deliberately stupid, arrogantly untruthful, gluttonous, sycophantic greedheads who have the interests of a fight promoter and the morals of a gulag commandant.

For the numbers show that even compared to Karl Rove and parties with an ideological bias, the media is harsher in its estimate of Obama’s appeal and abilities: That the polls of Zogby and the like compile to show Obama 127 electoral votes ahead, Rove at 77 ahead, the Cook Political Report at 66 ahead - and all of these are far larger than the most preferenntial media outlet, CNN, which has Obama at only 32 ahead.

Most channels and print media figures hover around 28 by Nickolas’ discovery; the Washington Post even goes so far with poll gymnatics to put McCain ahead by 6 EV.

The media is, for the time, wrong. The professionals, after all, are getting far different numbers than the ones that illustrate the campaigns as a tooth-and-nail death match that could swing either way (so stay tuned!).

But the media tells people what’s true and what they should feel about it. People react accordingly. And so the question becomes how long before the self-fulfilling prophecy of a tight race is born out, and the media - as they did with Iraq - coaxes the public to embrace the disaster they’ve dreamt up.

In the latest in my increasingly repetitive complaints about media bias, I present you a sigh of relief on my part and the statistical study that inspired it.

This study, released today from The Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, one of the leading statistical analysts of media, has been reviewing the the recent content of the three major networks. Its findings were no surprise to me:

…when network news people ventured opinions in recent weeks, 28% of the statements were positive for Obama and 72% negative.

Network reporting also tilted against McCain, but far less dramatically, with 43% of the statements positive and 57% negative, according to the Washington-based media center.

This, when combined with the recent Tyndall report that many McCain supporters have been using as foundation for their gripe of media bias, is what troubles me. Tyndall’s numbers suggested Obama was getting vastly more air time than McCain. Confidants of mine consoled me that the greater air time meant that McCain’s lack of exposure would fatally atrophy his campaign over time.

I was unconvinced, and this study makes me further unconvinced, for if you’re hearing for 72% of a vast amount of time how much a snobby, out-of-touch, vulnerable, presumptuous, you-name-it bum someone is, how does that help their image? It would seem given that kind of content, more air time would hurt, not help, a candidate.

In my ongoing - potentially life-long - diatribe against the media’s unforgiveable mishandling of news, I present the latest installment of stories that should have been sources of shock and dismay at the McCain candidacy, were it not for the almost total lack of coverage.

If you have been tuning in to the news this week, you would know that squeamishness over Obama abounds. From criticism over his allowing his children to be interviewed, to criticism over his regreting interview given the media’s take on it, to the incessant handwringing about the fragility of his public support, to at last the prattling about Jesse Jackson’s off-color, on-mic comments, it’s all bad Obama, all the time.

Meanwhile, McCain is talking about things that actually matter - insofar as they should put anybody with any sense in a position of anxious dread over the possibility of his election.

Credit to the compilation of this list of alarming statements from McCain goes to Max Bergmann, whose excellent piece covers ten of them in detail.

In Bergmann’s order, the incidents are:

* McCain calls social security an “absolute disgrace.” Not the threat to social security; social security:

“Americans have got to understand that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in America today. And that’s a disgrace. It’s an absolute disgrace and it’s got to be fixed.”

That should take care of the senior vote … if anyone was listening.

* Top McCain campaign economic advisor Phil Gramm said the effects of the recession were all “mental,” and that Americans are complaining because we’ve become a nation of “whiners.”

“We have sort of become a nation of whiners,” he said. “You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline” despite a major export boom that is the primary reason that growth continues in the economy.

So gas prices, food prices, foreclosure problems; they’re all just mental. Good to hear Gramm’s got solutions for them: Namely, “cheer up.”

This should be a big wake-up call to the illusion that typifies recent GOP economic policies: Economic growth does not necessarily mean everybody profits, only that the rich profit.

* McCain on Iraq: First, permanent bases are the way to go. Next, he claims Maliki didn’t really say what he said. Then, he admits to it, but says dismissively, “Prime Minister Maliki is a politician.”

Meaning, I suppose, that Maliki was just telling the Iraqi people what they want to hear. Well, if the Iraqi people want to hear we’re going to leave, and Iraq is a democracy, and we will respect Iraq’s wishes, what’s McCain’s support for permanent bases and dismissal of a timetable about?

This should bankrupt McCain’s claim to moral foreign policy, but hey, what’s so important about that? Let’s talk about Obama flip-flopping on interviewing his kids.

* McCain claims he’s going to eliminate the defecit within his Presidency. The media transmits this obediently. They do not call this into question by pointing out that other parts of his economic proposals include:

“…a) cut individual and corporate taxes even further, b) extend the Bush tax cuts and c) massively increase defense spending on manpower (200,000 more troops) and d) maintain a long-term sizable military presence in Iraq.”

Nobody asks how he intends to pull off this magic trick. Why worry? More importantly, Obama is losing a little support among Progressives, so he is expected to not kick McCain’s ass as badly in fundraising this month - now there’s a story.

* McCain made a hallmark of his defecit reduction plan “achieving victory in Iraq” - he’s going to use the money we are borrowing for the war to pay down the money we are borrowing.

This should have raised questions about either his honesty or his sanity. Oh well. Got to be objective!

* Speaking of utter mendacity, McCain announced 300 economists had signed a letter supporting his economic agenda, save that they really didn’t.

“…good many of those economists don’t actually support the whole of McCain’s economic agenda. And at least one doesn’t even support McCain for president.”

This goes virtually unmentioned in the mainstream. McCain may lie, but Obama has apologized - what’s more important?

* McCain then implies he wants to kill Iranians by making a joke about how we should export more cigarettes to them. The press reports this as a moment of humor.

* McCain denies he said he was no expert on economics, when in fact it’s well-documented.

* McCain then distorts his record on Vet benefits, and gets upbraided for it by a Vietnam vet. This takes place, like the previous clip, on the only network approaching responsibility in reporting - MSNBC.

* McCain says there’s a glimmer of hope in improving relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan lately. Blogger Pat Barry points out how incorrect this is:

Just what “glimmer” is McCain talking about?? Maybe he’s referring to President Karzai’s remarks last month, which threatened military action in Pakistan if cross-border attacks persisted? Or maybe McCain is talking about Afghanistan’s allegations that Pakistan’s ISI was involved in a recent assassination attempt on Karzai? Maybe in McCain’s world you could call that a silver-lining, but in reality-land I’d call it something else.

This is so out of touch, so false-confident, it’s downright insulting. And considering the parties involved, it is dangerous - dangerous to believe it and let that situation continue to spiral, and dangerous to act like it and use it as an excuse to underfund and ignore the troops we send in there.

* The coup de grace comes today from a blog on ABC, mentioning that McCain lied to people in Pittsburgh about having resisted NVA interrogation by telling them the names of the Steelers offensive line rather than his squadron’s names. It was actually the Packers, as he’s written about before.

Maybe this story will stick. It has all the elements of a Hillary-in-Bosnia story: It’s basically lying about human interest fluff; it is contradicted by public record; it sounds dumb enough to be interesting.

I doubt it, though.

And that’s the tragedy of our times: Not that we want for political leadership, or that we’re divided as a nation, or that it’s so hard to figure out the truth.

There are good political leaders. We can come together over common ground. The truth is available with a few key strokes.

The tragedy is that the people who control the information we exchange - who literally decide what most people hear and what they do not - feed on the contrary.

They tear down, they foment division, they obscure the notion of truth, they prop up weak liars like McCain has made himself out to be and ignore actual issues for the sake of tabloid, fast-food news service.

They do this, and if our politicians pander to it, it is because the media not only lets them, but demands it of them.

After reading all of the above, I am certain McCain would be a disaster if elected. Yet I am even more worried, more despondent, given that no matter which candidate is elected, we will never truly be able to change the channel.

New York Times Foreign Affairs columnist and global resident genius, Thomas Friedman, wrote a recent column detailing what the intercepted National Intelligence Estimate of Iran might look like. While tongue in cheek, the piece has some truly brilliant insights.

“Yes, our last I.N.I.E. in 1990 concluded that after the collapse of communism, America was on track to become the world’s sole superpower and most compelling role model for Muslim youth — including our own. We were wrong. We now have “high confidence” that America is on a path of self-destruction.”

The brilliance of Friedman - for those who haven’t read any of his work to have it summarized for them - is that the man thinks not in political terms, but in the ready, clean machinery of economic terms. There is no notion of the idealistic to his argument; power matters, the market matters, even values only have worth so far as they are a commodity. In fact, his observations on what role “values” - as defined by the political dialogue here in America - have are apt as well:

“…at a time when America’s bridges, roads, airports and Internet bandwidth have fallen behind other industrial powers, including China, we believe that the U.S. opposition to higher taxes — and the fact that the primary campaigns have focused largely on gay marriage, flag-burning and whether the Christian Bible is the literal truth — means it is “highly unlikely” that America will arrest its decline…

Our intel analysts are baffled that the leading Democrat, Mrs. Clinton, no longer believes in globalization and the leading Republican, Mr. Huckabee, never believed in evolution.”

Satire is often regarded as the most offensive form of criticism. This is, perhaps, because it is the most unvarnished truth - even the veneer of respect is not afforded to its target. That Mrs. Clinton might run a better “horse race” by dint of her debating tempo or consistency of empty message is not something to be admired, or even considered tolerable; Mr. Huckabee’s mythology is not regarded as quaint. The harm of those attitudes is starkly evident.

As an overall assessment of what the real threats and challenges are, the article is a more clarid assessment than any sober soundbite regurgitated by a network telecast talking head. Here, seen through our enemy’s eyes, the stakes are made clear, the rules defined, and, though a good laugh is the only sure result of reading this article, the call to action is raised loud enough to drown out the sea of useless blathering.

Across the world, crucial political scenes are being smeared by sensationalist pot-stirrings and opportunistic spin. Fun as this sounds, these factious foamings do no one any good except for the media and small, petty parties doing the stirring. They endanger the fate of the entire world just so that someone can sell advertising space or keep their campaign chest stuffed.

In Gaza and the West Bank, the proverbial slings and arrows were recently real bullets. But as damaging as the takeover of Gaza by the militant HAMAS party’s militias was in real terms, it’s the subsequent dialogue that does the worst long-term harm. President Mahmoud Abbas of HAMAS’ rival, the entrenched and corrupt Fatah organization made by Yasser Arafat’s grasping hands, was quick to trumpet all allegations of HAMAS brutality in the takeover. They’ve as much as promised a state of siege against Gaza, doling out enough cash to win what little favor it can from the common Palestinians while standing tough against any real cooperation or talk of reforming a unity government with HAMAS.

Outside observers might wonder why Abbas is stalling, when his nascent country is literally divided. The reason is that no sooner than HAMAS cut the lands run by the Palestinian Authority government - though occupied at leisure by the Israeli military - in half, foreign aid from all the western nations that had been cut off since HAMAS was elected began rolling in. Now Abbas doesn’t have any real control over his own militias; he has shown no capacity for actual improvement of Palestinians’ lives or substantial moves towards statehood through negotiation with Israel; he doesn’t, as the conflict two weeks ago showed, even have the capacity to run or defend his government. But he will be a favorite of the cameras now that he’s free to call his former colleagues in the Palestinian government “murderous terrorists”. He will be championed as the lone rational voice in the wilderness of occupied Palestine. And, most importantly for him, he will be able to indefinitely bilk the West of aid money to keep he and his Fatah pals rolling in dough and clinging to power.

This doesn’t give HAMAS a pass either. They’ve been as hardline as ever, but only if you buy into the spin of Abbas and the West do they sound as unreasonable as HAMAS - who has as a party platform the destruction of Israel - customarily sounds. Take note of some of the above points. First, they were denied foreign aid entirely. For those of you unaware, the Palestinian territories essentially subsist solely on aid and slave wages from Israel. Second, HAMAS was elected. Like it or not, the democratic elections chose HAMAS to lead the country - to staff ministries, lead the parliament, and fill all functions except for the highest executive powers that Abbas is now all too happy to exploit, like dissolving the government, enforcing martial law “state of emergency”, and sopping up aid money.

Which brings us to why HAMAS fought to seize Gaza in the first place. The reason is because Abbas and Fatah, such as they are, refused to let any of HAMAS’ people into the Palestinian law-enforcement and military forces which they had exclusive control over. Take a hard look at that, reader. Both sides of our esteemed aisle got their blood up when allegations of vandalism by the outgoing Clinton Administration officials against the White House hit the air waves. Imagine now if the Democrats had controlled not just the White House, but all of the armed forces and police, and refused to let any Republicans serve.

HAMAS first responded by entreaties. Then by negotiations. Finally, after Fatah militias began trading fire with them in the streets of Gaza, they took over. Again, this is not to say that HAMAS is the very soul of logic, but it entirely dispels the notion that Abbas, as he would like to claim, is playing fair. In fact, the last major incursion against the Israelis in Gaza, detailed in an earlier post on this weblog, was not by HAMAS but by one of Abbas’ own Fatah militias!

The chain’s links are easy to follow - HAMAS wins the popularity contest and the government because of Fatah recklessness, corruption and mismanagement. Fatah and the west shut HAMAS out. HAMAS seethes for the better part of a year and then, responding to provocation, takes over. Now they, and not the equally murderous and far more uncontrollable Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade of Fatah, are the “murderous terrorists”. And now Abbas, safe in his West Bank isolation, can play the satrap of the West with the whole of the Palestinian Authority living on his till and the whole of the West casting him as the great white hope.

Meanwhile, a similar slugfest is spiraling around the American airwaves. Yesterday Elizabeth Edwards called into Hardball with Chris Matthews to rake Ann Coulter over the coals for saying:

“If I’m going to say anything about John Edwards in the future, I’ll just wish he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot,”

A stiff glance at that quote will detect the inference that it requires a larger context. In fact, Coulter was talking about how her earlier comment about Edwards - the notorious “faggot” remark - was itself taken out of context. When she voiced the nasty jab at Edwards, it was in discussing how certain terms were unallowable under the social standards of political correctness. Well, she certainly proved her own point. It is unallowable. Except if, like Ann Coulter, your livelihood thrives on that kind of scandal and divisiveness. “Commentators” - and I use the term very lightly - like Coulter depend on attacks on her to get the media buzzing, get the blog posts up - yes, like this one - and get the TV appearances rolling in.

Her point about Edwards being killed was, in fact, a criticism of the media finding Bill Maher’s comment allowable whereas her remark employing ‘faggot’ was not. In that criticism, she cited Maher as wishing Cheney had been killed in a terrorist attack. Thus, she reasoned to Good Morning America’s viewership, she would in the future refrain from using the term ‘faggot’ against an adversary, and simply wish they were killed in a terrorist attack.

But Maher did not say that at all. His discussion was, like Coulter’s, about what kind of political speech was allowable. Though pressed into a certain sympathy for the opinion that Cheney’s demise would bring about an end to the military adventurism for which the Vice-President is credited, he was ultimately asking whether or not people posting on the internet - not commentators, nor politicians, nor even bloggers, but respondents to blogs - had the right to say they wished Cheney dead.

All of this is lost in the discourse. And Elizabeth Edwards’ remarks of censure against Coulter, urging her to tone down the rhetoric, were not the end of the pot-stirring either. As is always the case, it cast more attention on Coulter’s inflammatory comments, thus giving her more incentive to voice them. And as for the Edwards side, they immediately posted the comments on their campaign website, got to talking to the press about it, and are profitting vastly as well.

Here we see another chain of spin’s links strangling us: Radical opinions on a website are discussed by Bill Maher. Maher is pressed into stating a position, which is then radicalized by his opponents. Coulter plays off of Maher’s comment, making it sound radical and using it as an excuse to make herself seem more radical. And finally, Elizabeth Edwards and the ailing Edwards campaign raises a loud cry against radicalism that they have exploited to leap to the fore of the election coverage.

Compare us with the Palestinians. Are the stakes as high? Is it, because we have a functioning system of government and they do not, just entertainment? Is it life and death for them, but just good prime time and watercooler talk for us?

It is life and death for everyone.

This kind of twisting of fact, exploitation of distortion and relentless divisiveness is not just throttling the desperate Occupied Territories. Our own government suffers. Budget battles loom, our Iraq legislation is as much a quagmire as that of the Iraqi parliament itself, and domestic initiatives bog down. And this is not only important because it is our country that suffers - it is important because when the world’s superpower languishes, order in the world languishes. Global credibility of America’s leadership is at an all time low. Aid is dysfunctional. Strategic power is diluted and fettered.

Not all this is the problem of George Bush. Remember who voted to give him his war powers and what powers were voted for. In the case of so many of the Executive’s blunders, we now hear his deriders claiming, “We supported him because we did not know”. That is nonsense. The information was out there. The reason we did not hear it then is the same reason as we do not hear now:

The clamor is deafening.

At the core of America’s global woes, we have its ventures in the Middle East. At the core of the Middle East conflict, inspiring and uniting generations of Islamist radicals and anti-American nationalists, we have the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. And at the core of that crisis, the complexities we need to unravel to solve it are being drown by a power elite exploiting the spin. To defeat the disease known as The War On Terror, the cancer of the Palestine crisis must be conquered.

And where is America’s political will - its voting public - in this?

Too busy debating what their favorite soapbox crier - Coulter or Maher - did or did not say.

——————–

Care to see what they did say? See here:

Coulter

Maher

Edwards

But for an even better read, check out how the HAMAS/Fatah feud is already deepening the battle lines of The War On Terror:

Helping Abbas Hurts Real Peace Negotiations

It Also Foments Further Division In The Arab World, Making Them Either Martyrs For Islam Or Traitors

A recent spate of headlines has my hackles up, and brings again to light that the media’s job nowadays it not to be informative but provocative.

Answers do not get people turning the page nearly as well as questions. Questions that make you scared or angry, doubly so. Check out the questions these raise:

Giuliani warns of ‘new 9/11′ if Dems win

Pelosi Won’t Attend Petraeus Briefing

It seems like, their noses wet with the blood from the VA tragedy, the media is more eager than ever to keep the frenzy going. For neither of these headlines tell the whole story - only enough to get the pulse racing.

First off, in Giuliani’s statements, he doesn’t mention a “new 9/11″. And his comments are more about Democrats wanting to go on the defensive, and the defensive being the wrong stance. But the writer makes sure that the readers think he’s going right for the other party’s jugular with great, gory jaws of generalization, using statements like this:

“If we are on defense [with a Democratic president], we will have more losses
and it will go on longer.”

Now in actuality, he hadn’t yet mentioned a Democratic president. Which means, in actuality, without writer Roger Simon’s slant, Rudi said:

“If we are on defense, we will have more losses and with will go on longer.”

Not nearly so stimulating as a full-frontal attack on another party, using threats of dooming America, now is it?

On the other side of the aisle, the Pelosi article makes one think she’s snubbing Petraeus totally, as if a Versailles artiso not deigning to receive him at her court.

But the article at least goes on to admit:

A Pelosi aide said the speaker on Tuesday requested a one-on-one meeting with
Petraeus but that could not be worked out. He said their phone conversation
lasted 30 minutes.

…before returning to stirring the political pot to a fever pitch with fiery statements about her actions.

Now, granted, Nancy better have a damn good excuse. For the sake of her own integrity, if not for her party’s. Unanimous approval of Gen. Petraeus - if the Democrats’ actions as a party are any indication - meant only that they all agreed on him to be their sacrificial animal. There’s been no support for his plan or him since.

I would posit that they unanimously approved him because they don’t care who captains a ship they’re going to sink. They’re opening the shuttlecocks on “Bush’s war” anyway.

But regardless of the conflict between the Democrats’ stance on the war and Petraeus’, Pelosi did not show utter disinterest in meeting with him. What kind of good news would that make, though?

This has been endemic for awhile, but recent years - particularly the Iraq conflict - has brought the media’s ravenous appetite for discord and decay to levels that threaten the course of human events.

The media shoved the case for the Iraq war down our throats, even though they knew full well of reports that contradicted the Bush administration’s evidence and of prominent strategians speaking out about the dangers of occupying the country. They did this because violence sells. And that means the only thing better than a war with a clean ending is a war that doesn’t end.

Let’s face it, World War II was a “good war” for this country, if such a thing as a good war is possible. But not for the media. Not like Vietnam. In Vietnam, the media became aware that they could not only exploit the endless cycle of violence to sell more papers with gore than with greatness, they could also direct the course of events.

Yes, we should challenge our leaders. But it is increasingly important to challenge the institution that would lead us to opinions about them.

This link on the Drudge Report just popped up to prod an already feisty public with more provocation:

PELOSI DIPLOMACY? Syrian officials claim key role…

Now everyone from the Beltway to Tehran will be tossing invective and political capital around, debating whether Pelosi freed the hostages with a wink and a nod. Why? Because whether the article has that implication or not, rabble-rouser Drudge just put it in your head and lit the fuse.

The article mentions her once. To put context to where one of Syria’s officials was speaking from. Once.

And it specifically says:

He said Syria had been asked “to help positively in the issue of British” crew members since their March 23 seizure by Iran in the Persian Gulf.

“Since”. Not “since Nancy came to town”. Since the 23rd. Which only makes sense, considering that Iran and Syria are like chatty soccer moms when it comes to diplomacy - talk to one and you’re talking to them both.

If Britain talked to Syria, considering Syria aches under EU sanctions, that might get something done. But Pelosi? What’s she going to offer - Syrian labor gets first pick of Schwarznegger’s new highway bond projects? Or further annoying Bush? She’s doing that anyway.

So don’t stir this pot, Drudge. Sure, it gets all the right names in the papers, but it makes a connection for people that’s not only unrealistic and provocative, but distracting and pretty damn far-fetched.