As I watch and listen to McCain/Palin "Swift Boat" or "Willie Horton" Barack Obama I am ashamed of the medias participation in the electoral process that accepts, condones, and even encourages this duplicitous behavior.
Our country is sliding into an economic abyss and is involved in not less then two wars; is this the best we can expect from a war hero Senator and a short term Governor and former Mayor of an Alaskan metropolis with a population of fewer than 9,000?
I hold both the Republican and Democratic operatives and their candidates responsible for this irresponsible Barack "Hussein" Obama type of "racial" comment. It will not surprise many if I throw a few stones at the mass media for just "retailing" the accusations without telling the truth about this "scurrilous" behavior. Truth can serve both sides of a debate, and of course truth can serve America as well. In my opinion, reporting an accusation against a candidate without attempting to report the facts surrounding the accusation is not fulfilling contemporary journalistic responsibilities.
Are Time Warner (CNN, TBS, TNT etc), General Electric (NBC, CNBC, MSNBC etc.), and others afraid of the Government, or what exactly, in that if they reported the truth concerning Obama's "terrorist" activities, the lies would probably stop. The Fox outlets are a bad joke to me and their behavior does not upset me at all as they only say and report what I would expect a branch of the RNC to say and report.
More than 200 years ago the French King convened a full meeting of the "Estates General." The First Estate consisted of three hundred clergy. The Second Estate was made up of three hundred nobles. The Third Estate consisted of six hundred commoners. Years later, after the French Revolution, Edmund Burke, looking up at the Press Gallery of the House of Commons said, "Yonder sits the Fourth Estate, and they are more important than them all."
How quickly we forget!
I received the original of this today and only wished I had been creative enough to have thought it up myself. While the original version of this implied that racism might be the cause of the "injustice" of not noting the differences of the candidates, such as the outstanding education of Obama's, compared to McCain's, I will once again blame the inadequacies of the mass media for allowing this to happen.
How would it have been reported if:
Obama had "paraded" five children across the stage, including a three month old infant and an unwed, pregnant teenage daughter?
John McCain was the former president of the Harvard Law Review?
Barack Obama finished fifth from the bottom of his graduating class?
McCain had only married once and Obama was a divorcee?
Obama was the candidate who left his first wife after a severe, disfiguring car accident?
Obama had met his second wife in a bar and had a long affair while he was still married?
Michelle Obama was the wife who not only became addicted to pain killers but also acquired them illegally through her charitable organization?
Cindy McCain graduated from Harvard?
Obama had been a member of the Keating Five?
Obama couldn't read from a teleprompter?
Obama was the one who had military experience that included discipline problems and a record of crashing seven planes?
Obama was the one who was known to display publicly, on many occasions, an anger management problem?
The Obama's had adopted a white child?
Has all of this information been reported to the same extent as the unconscionable lies circulated by "the Mavericks" McCain/Palin? I expect that the journalists consider it "juicier" to report the "Obama is a terrorist" nonsense than to review Obama's record at Harvard Law.
Barack Obama:
Columbia University - B.A. Political Science with a Specialization in International Relations.
Harvard - Juris Doctor (J.D.) Magna Cum Laude
Joseph Biden:
University of Delaware - B.A. in History and B.A. in Political Science.
Syracuse University College of Law - Juris Doctor (J.D.)
John McCain:
United States Naval Academy - Class rank: 894 of 899
Sarah Palin:
Hawaii Pacific University - 1 semester
North Idaho College - 2 semesters - general study
University of Idaho - 2 semesters - journalism
Matanuska-Susitna College - 1 semester
University of Idaho - 3 semesters - B.A. in Journalism
I heard Cindy McCain tell a crowd that Barack Obama voted against "funding the troops" as though he would have chosen to leave them (as well as her son) in Iraq defenseless. How dare the wife of a candidate make this irresponsible charge, and how dare the media not jump all over this horrid stuff?
Blame the "messengers" who do not deliver the real messages.
I would expect no more from Governor Palin than what we get!
I once expected more from the maverick conductor of "the straight talk express," but alas he has turned into a "bitter, angry, disrespectful old man" who is four years younger then I am.
Winning apparently is not only everything, it is the only thing.
Norman Horowitz
I can now confess that as a i4 year old I played in many pick up schoolyard basketball games with someone who went on to "fix" countless College basketball games.