WHO CARES ABOUT CABLE WIZARDS?

Does anybody really take any interest at all in the inane blatherings of the likes of Joe Scarborough, Bill O'Reilly, Lou Dobbs, Hannity or Colmes? These guys get all worked up about all sorts of things that don't mean a hell of a lot and then harangue the rest of us that we don't share their mean-spiritedness. Please! These guys make fortunes for not knowing all that much but pretend to be experts on just about any topic that crosses their narrow minds. What exactly are their credentials outside of their wooden and affected acting skills?

Any PhDs in philosophy, politics, business, or sociology hanging on their office walls? Any extensive experience at anything other than wearing makeup, sitting behind a desk and screaming at us? Any scholastic or politically serious books to their credit other than their endless variations on the theme "My America, And Why You Should Hate Anybody Who Disagrees With Me," where they basically write down their prejudices and godawful mis-readings of America and what it means. These guys are such lightweight intellectuals that they make even that flunked out college freshman radio host gas bag Rush Limbaugh look smart by comparison, no easy task.

They all pretend to have the answers for America, yet outside of Scarborough, a mediocre Congressman at best, none of them have felt it was their duty to implement those goals by running for public office. I guess a brief glance at the pay scale of politicians in the position to make a difference in comparison to the princely sums they receive from cable TV for making no difference at all has dissuaded them from acting on their beliefs, being instead content to be back seat drivers and Monday morning quarterbacks. And they all seem to know what's best for our military even though none of them ever saw fit to join up. As if any and all foreign policy difficulties ought to be met by lethal force or the threat of lethal force like we were some modern Roman Empire.

These clowns view our soldiers as implements to project their will, forgetting that soldiers are human beings who bleed and die in service to their nation, even when their mission is patently ridiculous. That one soldier who is worth a hundred of these morons should die in a misadventure publicly supported by them is a travesty, but the Cable Wizards revel in the blood of our sons and daughters, claiming their valor, their honor, their grievous wounds and even their spent lives as their own. From their studios where they are in no danger from anything worse that a paper cut they advocate killing and maiming in the name of America, confident in the knowledge that they will never have to actually participate in these activities, nor will their children. Like any other rich man, they have "people" to do that for them, and like a lot of wealthy patricians, the "people-to-do-that-for-me" designation implies a less than human being, more of a tool or a utensil than an actual person, a man or woman who may suffer horribly or die as the result of "doing things" for them.

They wax nostalgic about Ronald Reagan's call to tear down the Berlin Wall and then advocate rebuilding it in the American Southwest. They forget that Ronald Reagan was a senile old coot who tripled the size of the Federal Government he vowed to shrink, who sowed the seeds of unrest in the Middle East by selling arms to Iran and arming Osama bin Laden and his band of not-so-merry-men in Afghanistan, thus starting him on the path to 9/11/01. These guys also support Bush The Younger in almost every criminal act he perpetrates and every rollback of the Bill of Rights he forces down America's throat with skillful fear mongering. Bill Clinton is to them a devil for getting a blow job but Bush The Younger and Shotgun Dick Cheney can screw us all in the ass time and again and they give them standing ovations and curtain calls. Real clear thinking here, guys. Can you bend over backwards any further to excuse the felonious behavior of the malicious fools you support?

So who cares what these assholes think? They shriek and howl and run in packs because their kind is dying. They scream "America first" and advocate the exact opposite. If they had America as their top priority they would use their very public pulpits to call for better education, universal health care, a call for increased gas mileage and research of alternative energy sources, an end to the phony war on drugs that drives a multi-billion dollar industry of government and private sector jobs involved in maintaining the status quo of mass incarceration, prosecutions, interdictions, bribery and corruption. "America first" does not mean protecting international corporations all over the world with our soldiers. Let Exxon hire Blackwater Guards mercenaries when they're feeling adventurous in somebody else's country. Why should we pick up the tab for a company who rips off the American public and cheats our government out of taxes?

Our soldiers are to fight our enemies, not make new ones. And not to fight people the giant corporations wish to subdue for their oil. The one true and proven enemy the United States has, Osama bin Laden, has been given a reprieve since he had the good sense to hide out in a region where our corporations could make no large profits, pretty much proving his point that the current American government is a money-driven enterprise with no scruples or moral compass. Greed and the lust for power is now the calling card of a nation that used to be a beacon of hope for the world. That was not always the case and it will not always be the case, but that's where we stand now and none of these guys, or their vicious pit bull sister Anne Coulter, has the courage to call a spade a spade and work towards reclaiming America, the one with a government of the people, by the people and for the people.

These people read the same newspapers we do, live in the same world as the rest of us and yet cannot admit that what we are seeing is real. They insist on attributing alternate motives to the obvious deeds of the current administration and their corporate sponsors. When a president lets an enemy that attacked our country and inflicted 3,000 deaths off the hook by invading an oil-rich country that never attacked America, why did anybody buy into the reasoning that this invasion was an extension of the war on terror? When 9 billion dollars in U.S. currency disappeared why did anybody accept that it was the Iraqis' fault, like they were illiterate shepherds who could not count instead of an educated and sophisticated society of long standing? When it was revealed that all the oil meters on Iraq's pipelines and waterfront oil shipping depots were broken and no one could say how much oil was being stolen daily, none of these Cable Wizards questioned the explanation the it must be the rag-tag militias who engineered this sophisticated heist. Or demanded the meters be immediately replaced and rigorously guarded.

Did any of these geniuses see anything wrong with handing out 30-year oil leases to administration cronies in somebody else's country? Or handing Halliburton, Shotgun Dick's company, multi-billion dollar no-bid contracts to rebuild the Iraqi infrastructure we blew up and then watch them fail to perform their contractual obligations and overcharge the United States above and beyond the agreed-upon billions? Then they get rewarded with huge contracts to rebuild New Orleans, which at last glance is still a little light in the the rebuilding department, and still these cable dopes adore Bush The Younger and his gang of thugs. Did any of these people use their shows to call for investigations of the administration? No, they were too busy praising the government for invading our privacy, doing away with the right to a writ of habeus corpus for those arrested, torturing prisoners like some modern-day Gestapo, gutting the Bill of Rights and transferring an incredible amount of the nation's wealth from the working classes to the super-rich. That was all hunky-dory with these America First blowhards.

And then they perpetrate the lie that the American media is too Liberal. Yeah, right. Like we're all blind and believe what these John Birch Society rejects say. You remember Liberals, right? The people these clowns would have us believe are traitorous cowards? The people who delivered the Bill of Rights, Social Security, the 8 hour workday, equal opportunity, unemployment insurance, safe working conditions, Civil Rights, the vote for women, the war on poverty, abolition, the New Deal, the defeat of the Axis Powers, the space program, the Peace Corps, women's rights, the Head Start Program, the rights of the individual in America and the whole idea of America itself. Yeah, those devils, those traitorous cowards. The ones who made it possible for gas bags like the Cable Wizards to lie and scream on television, many of whom laid down their lives in the process, putting their money and a whole lot more where their mouth is.

So I suppose Liberals are the opposite of these guys. They saw things as they are, not as they wish them to be, and they did something about it other than blathering about some wished-for reality that did not exist. Where they found injustice they sought justice. Where they saw need they provided help. Where they saw a legitimate threat to our nation and its cherished liberty threat they responded with force. When our nation was wrong they said so. They did not respond by calling for the imprisonment or disenfranchisement of those in opposition to their thinking, knowing that such an act would reduce them to the state of their enemies, and then nothing would separate them from the imprisoners, the dividers, the condemners and the would-be fascists. They knew freedom for one means freedom for all, regardless of what a horse's ass one might be.

So if these guys want to function as the Bush the Younger Administration Ministers of Propaganda, well, that's their right to do so. If they make a mockery of their claim of impartiality and are an embarrassment to the cause of open social discourse, well, they have the liberals to thank for that opportunity. Not that they'd ever acknowledge that debt, but they are allowed to be the biggest frauds around because of the sacrifices of their liberal forebears, who they hate because their brand of commentary is completely dependent upon having a bogey man to assign blame and with which to frighten people. In the absence of intelligence or simple logic they resort to bullying and fear-mongering to further their agenda. It's a political tactic as old as tyranny itself, and as transparent as the camera lens they love so dearly.

Smart people never pay much attention to fools like his, recognizing them for what they are, shills and hucksters of the worst sort, cranky, squeaky wheels begging for grease, always part of the problem and never the solution. This is a free country even if they wish it were less free for people other than themselves. They sort of do make for some amusing entertainment sometimes, as each of them over time becomes a comically disturbing self parody. But that doesn't mean any one of us has to take them even a little bit seriously or give a flying fandango what they think. They are, after all, merely entertainers, and not very talented or interesting ones at that.