Everyday the news is filled with statements that just don't make any sense to me. The ideas they espouse are so jarringly disconnected that I just can't seem to make them resemble anything even close to logical thought. So I write them down. Then I study them later. The ones which are left still puzzle me. Maybe you can help.
- Many of those who say that government should stay out of private enterprise because no business is too big to fail are the same people who say health care reform shouldn't be enacted because it might cause large insurance companies to fail.
- Many of the politicians who say they don't want government involved in our health care are the same people who called a special session of Congress so they could pass a law to keep Terri Schiavo alive.
- Apparently those in the media who say they don't receive Republican talking points just happen to choose to use the same exact stilted language on the exact same day. Or did the word "dithering" suddenly become the most popular word in the English language?
- Isn't Fox "News" quoting Matt Drudge like Al Capone calling John Dillinger as a character witness?
- People identify certain "pundits" with whom they disagree as idiots. Fine. But when those same idiots come out and say something that their detractors agree with, they're held up as experts to be listened to. And people on both sides of the aisle do this. Case in point -- just because Rick "man on dog" Santorum is now saying the previous administration made some errors in the way they waged the war in Afghanistan, that doesn't make him smart. It makes him late.
- The Wall Street Journal states that more lobbyist dollars are currently going to Democrats in Congress than to Republicans. You'd think that story might have mentioned the fact that there are more Democrats serving in Congress than there are Republicans.
- Joe Lieberman says that now is not the right time for health care reform. Then why doesn't he give up his government run health care until it is time?
- And while I'm on the subject of Joe Lieberman, I find it amazing that this "independent" senator has stated that he already knows he'll be supporting many GOP candidates in the next election even though he doesn't know who exactly will be running.
- Poll after poll state that the majority of Americans want health care reform, yet Sean Hannity still goes on his program day after day and says that the polls are clear -- "Americans don't want health care reform."
- John Boehner says that the over nineteen-hundred-page health care bill the Democrats put forward is too long. That might be true. But I can't help but think that the zero-page version that his party has offered might be a little too short.
- Senator Chuck Grassley said that he's not opposed to end-of-life counseling, but thinks that those types of decisions should be made twenty years in advance. So does that mean that Senator Grassley knows when we're all going to die?
- It still bothers me that Sarah Palin can go to China and criticize our president on foreign soil, but when Natalie Maines of The Dixie Chicks did the same thing in England a few years ago she was vilified.
- Dick Cheney says that when President Obama is doing his job as Commander in Chief, he should always listen to his generals -- except for the generals who disagree with Cheney.
- According to Tucker Carlson, kids singing about President Obama is wrong. He called it "radical Khmer Rouge stuff." But Tucker didn't have any problem with kids singing about President Bush.
- It's not a news story, I realize, but it bothers me that when I type the word "Hannity" my spell check program doesn't recognize it and suggests I use the word "sanity" instead.
- When Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland, a few different actors and directors were very upset. Their rationale for why he shouldn't have been detained? "He's a brilliant director." Guess he didn't drug their thirteen-year-old daughters and then have sex with them.
- Bernie Goldberg told Bill O'Reilly that there were some people on Fox who have "outright lied" on their programs. He asked Bill if he wanted him to name names. Bill's face looked momentarily horrified at the thought of biting the hand that feeds him, but he quickly recovered. Bill -- who's always looking out for the folks -- said, "No, because then I'd have to go back and research it."
- The party that recently endorsed fifty million dollars worth of "abstinence only" birth-control education is the same party that brought you Ensign, Sanford and Vitter. And, yes, there are plenty of "non-abstainers" in the Democratic party, too. But at least they don't preach to us from a self-constructed moral high ground while spending our tax dollars on a form of birth control that's proven to be neither popular nor efficient.
- Rush Limbaugh spreads an outright lie about President Obama, tells his audience that he knows it's an outright lie, then says it doesn't matter whether it's true or not because he agrees with it.
- Fox keeps confusing excellent ratings with excellent news coverage. The Gong Show got good ratings, too. The difference is that they never claimed to be anything other than what they were -- a place to go to watch entertainers make fools of themselves.
So, please, help me out here, because I can't think of any more appropriate response than, "Huh?"