Reason #3924 why hannity is a tool

I have a bad habit of turning on am radio from time to time and listening to whichever Goebbels wannabe happens to be yelling at that moment. And there was a doosy yesterday, sean hannity the Irish ape/college dropout, was getting all holy about Michael Jackson's funeral ceremony. It was an interesting tack, the "liberal" media was being horrible by covering it and not the deaths of American servicemen in Afghanistan that day. I agree, only I was also concerned about that years ago right through yesterday. All during that time hannity would baselessly attack the same media outlets for trying to read the names of fallen soldiers on the air, you see, because it was a propaganda stunt then to try and turn the squishy Americans against the war.

You know, we are at war with East Asia, and allied with Eurasia, we have always been at war with East Asia and always been allied with Eurasia.

It is a political show, but how is it that every event somehow can be molded to fit hannity's strange worldview that the media (of which he is regrettably a part of, and prominent at that) wants to destroy "his" America. Apparently this is such a minor smear that Media Matters for America doesn't have a entry for it. But I feel that a man who savaged John Kerry for "flip-flops" really should be called on this, shameless and contradictory attempt to grandstand on a funeral. I mean, at this point the half-dozen or so fans he still has will believe he can fly if he proclaims it on our airwaves. But it is more likely this is simply cynical propaganda to keep up the lie of hannity's "watchdog" status, at least in his own mind. Thank God we have this honest and intellectually forthright champion of the truth to do our thinking for us.

I suppose hannity would play the victim at this point and whine with self-righteous fury about the big, bad gloomy historian bullying him. LOL. It must be asked though, how do the die-hard conservatives who eat up his every word deal with a case of doublethink this blatent?

The truth of course is that at some point in the recent past, stories about the war dropped procipitously. I think most people are just exhausted, especially people who opposed invading Iraq and/or Afghanistan from the beginning (like me) and tuned out. The fighting continues, blood and treasure are still being wasted upon the sand but it seems so far away and unconnected from our daily lives. I wish we could get the same kind of large-scale, coordinated protests against the war today as there were when bush dismissed them as "focus groups", that might get the Obama Administration moving on actually withdrawing.

MJ's demise

I wanted to post about the different realms of media coverage yesterday when the networks picked up the story the Michael Jackson was sick but now the focus shifted because of his death. This blogging thing is gonna be hard, I can only imagine how many holier than thou types started ragging about how irrelevant he was and then boom, he's dead. I will start off by saying that MJ's music was a big part of my life as a kid and while I agree he got weirder and weirder as time went on, I am not convinced he really was the serial molester the media made him out to be. Suddenly, the butt of all kinds of jokes is remembered as a ground-breaking musician and activist for social justice at a time (the '80's) when nearly 100% of the zeitgeist was about greed and screwing everybody for a percentage.

Guys my age will probably need to ask our dads what all the hubbub was about Farrah Fawcett, I heard Mark Belling talk a little about her yesterday and he gave some insight about it. And in surprisingly tasteful terms too, the way I understood it she was this enormous sex symbol in the '70's epitomized by that poster but Belling glossed over the cruder aspects of that. It was the first time I actually cared what that guy had to say.

What I really wanted to talk about though was the overload of media coverage in general. News seems to be broken down into well, three categories: important things that actually affect our lives, complete distractions and something that can be best described as "oh, that's interesting". These are quite arbitrary and what ends up in one column for one person goes into a different one for someone else. I don't religiously watch the news but I try to keep up so here are my categories for the week.

Important: President Obama's weak and watered down health-care reforms and the frantic attempts by insurance companies and their conservative commentator flunkies to suck as much substance out of it as possible.

Distraction: This Sanford clown who traipsed off to Argentina to get laid or something while pretending to be hiking. This isn't worth our time for two reasons, one: most of us don't live in South Carolina and two: no matter how many instances of Republican officials in sex scandals rise up like swamp gas out of the bog it will never break the frame of how "moral" and "family-values orientated" they are.

"That's interesting" or trivia goes to the celebrity deaths, and I'd have to posit the Iranian protests because even the most hard-core neocon has to come to grips with the fact that we're not going to invade that country. And there may be just the slightest admission by the elite that we do not have the right to interfere with other countries' business. These things will be an "oh yeah, I remember that" but little else. Like a sports event, it happens, we notice and then move on. Does it really matter who won a game last year? But it does matter that we're shedding half a million jobs a month and so forth.

Now if you'll excuse me I'm gonna watch some more MJ video clips.