What? Me worry?
(Illustration found here).
Since the last time I’d posted, there’s been a shitload of weird, dangerous and dumb stuff happen, but most of it apparently hasn’t had enough stupidity involved to really get me spiking the old keyboard again — this past week’s adventure via the Internet, though, has caused a return, made me want to comment somewhat on the complete low-level, gutter-trash rigmarole posing as politics nowadays.
USA peoples are in deep dodo.
By now, just about anybody that ain’t stupid has heard of the Shirley Sherrod escapade, and how everybody but a few “fringe” news people were punked by a video posted on a nutcase, right-wing freak’s website.
A dumb-shit feeding frenzy ensued: “In a matter of hours, Shirley Sherrod was attacked by politicians, denounced by pundits, criticized by that same NAACP, and told to resign her post, immediately – to literally pull over to the side of the road and submit her resignation on her Blackberry.
I guess she should be grateful they didn’t send a patrol car to arrest her for texting while driving.”
What a freakin’ mess.
And what damn-dumb-ass stupid.
An episode which fully illustrates the horror of modern communications — truth or not, just get a nifty, one-sided spin through the news cycle, and faster than you can say Fox News, people are near-instantly scared stupid.
Real horror of the incident, and the crux of that horror, is that these people who were so-quickly scared stupid, shouldn’t be, as they run the freakin’ country, and one of these people, the most-hoped-for-elected president in generations, maybe ever.
Impact of the right-wing media apparently carries a great deal of weight — if you’re stupid.
The story in a nutshell: Andrew Breitbart, a right-winger hardcase and Tea Party pusher-man, posted a short video on his jaundiced, nasty, weird-assed website, biggovernment, of Sherrod giving a speech last March to the NAACP in which she seemingly displayed some racist bullshit, and before one could mutter how-do-you-do, the shit quickly the fan — Fox News online ran with the story, the NAACP got all freaked, and Sherrod was asked to resign.
The tape, however, turned out to be nearly opposite the truth, edited for bad effect.
According to Jane Hall, an associate professor at American University and a former Fox News contributor, the Sherrod case was formed and spun “like a virtual world McCarthyism”, where just throwing something out there is considered true, despite it being a total lie, forcing a response/denial where none is required.
Journalism in the mainstream sucks.
And the entire shame is a nasty-type of long-time politics.
Salon’s Joan Walsh nails it:
The most important point is this: Fox News has, sadly, become the purveyor of a 50-state “Southern strategy,” the plan perfected by Richard Nixon to use race to scare Southern Democrats into becoming Republicans by insisting the other party wasn’t merely trying to fight racism, but give blacks advantages over whites (Fox News boss Roger Ailes, of course, famously worked for Nixon).
Now Fox is using the election of our first black president to scare (mainly older) white people in all 50 states that, again, the Democratic party is run by corrupt black people trying to give blacks advantages over whites (MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow laid out the history last week).
Where is the US nowadays?
Dumb-ass stupid is as dumb-ass-stupid does.