Idiots.

I realize time and money were short, but a far, far more effective video would have been to include clips of Petraeus uttering the ’success’ statements.

This video made me long to read a transcript rather than have to be subjected to the Greenwald-vs-baseline contest for another minute.

It is unfortunate that most people, left, right, center or fringe simply do not think that deeply or that carefully before they act.

The ameriican poltical system is predicated on the idea that the mass of people will generally steer toward ‘the correct’ direction. This is an obvious absurdity if you imagine that it is universally correct. We are living through an example of how it goes wrong.

The basic idea of being a wise ruler is to be able to look outside of your own narrow self interest and act in the common good. The basic idea of democracy is that the people are the rulers, therefore… if the people have no ability to look outside of their own narrow self interest… the country will be badly ruled.

Translation: The political parties are not driving what is going on, therefore an excessive faith in their ability to fix things is misplaced. ‘The media’ is not driving what is going on, therefore an excessive blame in that direction is erroneous, leading to further fuck ups.

We live in an approximately free market system, so anyone who tries to sell the public something they don’t want to buy (the truth for example) ends up losing their shirts. If fox news is the most popular, and more importantly money making, news show, then other news shows will copy them. This is econ 101 folks, stop blaming the media.

The big, big problem is that absolutely every voice in the ‘discussion’ is required to never say what is really true, because the population is dominated by weak individuals who cannot stand the truth — that this debacle is their fault. We are to blame for what has become of our country, we are to blame for the poor quality of information in our media (because we continue to buy it up at prodigious rates), we are too blame for the pathetic political parties because… we continue to support them.

You really want to make a difference? Stop listening to TV News, stop reading Fiedman, Hewitt, and … stop responding to their absurdity — they thrive on attention, that is all they need or want more eyeballs, and the consequent money. The ‘DC establishment’ is successful because… people keep watching and reading and talking about what they say and do. They are fools, we all know it, get over it.

Finally… face facts: This situation is precisely the same as the cold war, held together by precisely the same web of inter-locking self interest that in no way is in the general interest. The situation we are in is a self sustaining con (like the War on Drugs) which satisfies the needs of all of the individual players, including the vocal opposition, while never in fact satisfying the needs of the group as whole. In fact, like the war on drugs and the cold war, it is a death spiral for the group as whole, even as it satisfies the needs of enough self interests (if you’ll forgive the expression) that it cannot be stopped…

Until people grow up, become wise leaders and choose the good of the group over their own narrow self interest.

Good Night and Good Luck

It is time to rally the people who desire

Peace.

No excuse for that. None.

The one good thing about Moveon’s ad is that it instantly made “Betrayus” a household name. I swear, I have heard people accidentally or on purpose, slip it in on the teevee.

When I hear the way some callers on Washington Journal mangle the names of politicians, there’s gonna be a lot of people across the country using the “B” word. ;-)

solai @ 43

IMHO, the MoveOn ad was a poor choice. I’d much rather have seen Larry Johnson’s questions printed. Or Juan Cole’s observations. Or Kevin Drum’s. The ad they chose to run did nothing but further the idea that they are too far left. By contrast, they might have been able to reach middle Americans by illustrating why the liberals are so angry. Instead, they caused controversy and their message is not being heard.

It’s important to remember that if they had not picked up on the MoveOn ad they would just have picked up on something else. MoveOn doing what it did was legitimate. The Republicans will always blame us and the Democrats regardless of what we say or do so I don’t understand why we should self-censor just to make their lives easier. The reason they went ballistic is because the ad hits a little too close to the truth.

I am proud to be a supporter of MoveOn and applaud their work and proudly intend to continue to help them fund their work.