THE MEDIA ISSUE: VOLUME 31, ISSUE 48
HOODWINKING
by Malik Isasis






















It’s not a problem that Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin is a woman; it’s not a problem that she has family drama (who doesn’t?); it’s not even a problem that Sarah Palin has been a governor for less than two years, and has no federal government or foreign policy experience. What is a problem though, is the corporate media and the Republican Party twisting themselves into a pretzel trying to justify Palin’s inexperience after 18 months of criticizing Barack Obama’s so-called inexperience and foreign policy credentials.

The discrepancy is not cognitive dissonance by the corporate media. As I stated in an earlier blog, Jackass Nation, this is what the media does, shit on people’s heads and then tell them that the smell is the truth, legitimate news. The media creates perceptions that becomes a parallel reality and it should be clear that the Republicans are using their media allies and the media apparatus to create a folklore around Sarah Palin’s inexperience as experience to try and bridge their delusions to a parallel reality where we forget that George W. Bush was the worst fucking president, ever.

The fact that Republicans and their political operatives in the corporate media have completely flipped their views on experience or inexperience goes to show that they are only interested in power and would do and say anything to obtain it.

John K. Wilson over at Huffingtonpost wrote an article challenging and breaking down a study of media coverage of the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates. Here is an excerpt:

By contrast, one of the biggest negatives about Obama was the accusation of inexperience. And media stories in the format of "on the one hand, on the other hand" didn't count as negative in this study, since they're equally balanced. According to the study's authors, "In order to fall into the positive or negative category, two-thirds or more of the assertions in a story had to fall clearly on one side of that line or the other." So many stories might point out a meaningless positive (Obama is popular) and balance it with a devastating negative attack (Obama is inexperienced).

Much like the earlier media tropes about Al Gore (lied about inventing the Internet) or John Kerry (coward and traitor), the idea of Obama as inexperienced was not merely unproven but the opposite of the truth. It scarcely mattered that the accusation of inexperience was untrue; the media made it true by force of repetition. You'll look in vain for any press who pointed out the fact that Obama has more years of experience as an elected public official than Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, or Mitt Romney. It's almost impossible to find any media reporting the fact that Obama has far more foreign policy experience than four out of the last five presidents when they were elected..

William Kristol, a neocon and political operative over at New York Times, Fox News and editor of the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, led his own brigade on Obama’s inexperience in all of his media outlets. Here’s one from his own magazine:

Putting Obama's Inexperience Into Perspective

Dan McLaughlin (who blogs as the Baseball Crank) has written what may well be the seminal essay to date on Barack Obama’s experience, or what little there is of it. By all means take a few minutes and read the whole thing, but here’s a sample:

He's never run anything at all, not even a small law practice like John Edwards. Besides his campaign, probably the biggest thing he's ever run was the Harvard Law Review.

He has nothing resembling national security experience or even particularly sustained advocacy on the issue before announcing his candidacy in 2007. The man has apparently hardly even traveled to Europe, to pick one example.

He is running in a contested election outside the insular world of Chicago politics for the first time and has never had any sort of responsibility for political leadership.

He's never served in the military and seems to have scarcely any experience even knowing people who served in the military.

His private-sector business background is negligible.

Are any of these things disqualifying from the Presidency? No. But electing a man who is so seriously lacking in all of them is indeed unprecedented. And that is and should be a central issue in this campaign.

Since Sarah Palin, Kristol has found himself like most of his flying monkey brethren, back-tracking on his most fierce argument against Obama saying this:

There are Republicans who are unhappy about John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin. Many are insiders who highly value -- who overly value -- "experience."

Here’s another example in Kristol’s magazine in a piece titled: The Tales of Two Résumés by Dean Barnett:

WHAT STORY DOES Barack Obama's résumé tell? Obama became the head of the Harvard Law Review in 1990 and graduated Harvard Law magna cum laude in 1991. These accomplishments suggest great intelligence and strong interpersonal skills. They also suggest limitless potential.

So what did Obama choose to do with his limitless potential after leaving Harvard? Not much. His first two years out of law school, he began writing a book, commenced lecturing at the University of Chicago Law School and returned to his old vocation of community organizing. Obama's résumé would probably advertise the fact that he eschewed big money options to better serve humanity in these various capacities. Many members of the legal community would view these claims of selflessness with skepticism. Some cynical readers of his résumé would infer that he spent the time "trying to find himself," and perhaps think of the old Bill Cosby crack that after two years of searching, he should have been able to find not just himself but a couple of other people as well…

As for Palin, she lacks Obama's glittering Ivy League credentials. While that fact scandalizes vast portions of the Bos-Wash corridor, the scandalized neglect the most common purpose for an education--to develop one's abilities to such a point that one can actually begin accomplishing things. And there again is where Palin shines--she has gotten a tremendous amount done everyplace she has been.

In truth, Sarah Palin is the kind of employee virtually every enterprise seeks--the kind who gets things done. And Barack Obama is the kind of employee a company hires only when it's in the mood for taking a risk and willing to wager that the candidate's past performance isn't predictive of his future efforts.

One would think that in a highly technological Youtube society where things are recorded and archived, people like Kristol and other shit throwers in his flock would care about what they’ve said three months, a day or a second ago, but they don’t because their arguments are distractions, meaningless, attached to nothing but pathology—ever notice that when Republicans’ arguments become unraveled, they develop sudden amnesia and argue the complete opposite with the same passion?




Liberal Bias Exposed

The Republicans have often criticized the media for the mythical liberal bias, but you can always tell what Republicans are thinking by taking their criticism about the media and inverting it—kinda like an inverse function (shout out to my math geeks). Everything that they say about the Democrats is the opposite, and can be reduced to what they, the Republicans believe.

Here’s an example of Fox News being indignant about the media scrutinizing and “attacking” Sarah Palin and her family.



Here’s the inverse or opposite: Remember Mary Matilin, a political operative, saying, “They've (Democrats) tried every which way. They've tried the kitchen sink, but all it's done is revealed their elitism, their sexism, their hypocrisy? Well, Matlin stated exactly what they do to their political enemies, and here’s an example of that:



The Real Smear Merchants

Fox News loves throwing around the phrase smear merchants to discredit Demcrats.



A Smear Merchant Being Broken Down to His Very Last Compound



The Hoodwink

Sarah Palin is being used as a distraction from the last eight years of the worst presidency of this country’s history with endless wars and occupations, collapse of banks, deficits the size of black holes, the devalued dollar, domestic spying, torturing, government sponsored kidnappings, systemic corporate corruption, and the lost of a major US city, New Orleans, and a gaping hole 7 years later in Lower Manhattan that seems to perfectly encapsulate Bush’s failures. This is what Sarah Palin’s story is about, changing the topic. If the corporate media has its way, and Bush has set the bar so low that all Palin has to do is not trip over her feet, and string together some coherent words during her speech and she’ll be successful in changing the subject because America’s politically dumb like that.

The Republicans are shining each other’s peckers with grandiosity at their convention and the corporate media will participate in this orgy to deceive the American people because they benefit from Republican Chaos Theory of governance.

I haven't forgotten about you George W. Bush. The economy hasn't forgotten. The families of dead soldiers, and dead Iraqis and Afghans haven't forgotten you either. This election is about you.

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