I’m talking about the media. The job of the press is to report events, not blanket the facts with conjecture and interpretations that end up becoming part of the narrative and serving to fuse fact with fancy. I refer to the way town hall attendees against Obama Care are being discounted as stooges for “corporate interests.”

It was wicked when the neocons presented antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan as something other than what she was. And it is execrable now that MSNBC is tarring impassioned Americans on the Right as something other than what they are. It doesn’t matter with which small or large groups these protesters, left and right, seek solidarity and solace. What matters is the case they present against socializing medicine. The rest is just ad hominem, which is where discourse in the US is at.
I don’t care if George Soros, as alleged by this neocon outfit , came to back Sheehan. Her cause was just. She spoke extremely well against the ongoing travesty in Iraq.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow intoned like a solemn commissar about corporate agents and their little foot soldiers conspiring against state health care. The forces of darkness against the forces of light. She arrived at her scoop by following a few links on the internet and ominously reading out some posts, which she framed as secret memos. Unlike comrade Keith, at least Maddow obeyed the journalistic imperative to interview one of those evil corporatists. And how delightful he turned out to be. “Do the oil companies fund us? No, but I’d love them to. I urge them to support us.” And so he went.

She looked confused. (Rachel’s inner voice: “When will all this free exchange of funds be outlawed? Oh pretty please, Obamby.”) But at least she was a good sport, which is more than one can say about Chris Trickle-Down-The-Leg-For-Obama Matthews and other Obamaheads.

I must say, Maddow is so smarmy and self-satisfied. I can’t bear to watch her coiling and uncoiling as she expounds ominously on conspiracies that are really unremarkable events and associations.

Update I (August 10): The woman of the frozen face and equally unsupple mind—Nancy Pelosi—has teamed up with the Ring Leader, Steny Hoyer (House majority leader), to label and libel 50 percent of Americans as “un-American.” As if the number of podiums the parasitical class monopolizes were not enough, the parrot press has given another sizable platform to this excuse of a team: “‘Un-American’ attacks can’t derail health care debate.”

Pay attention to how the dastardly duo:

• Conflates the political will with the will of the people. (“Health coverage for all was on the national agenda as early as 1912… Americans have been waiting for nearly a century for quality, affordable health care.”)
• Dishonestly fails to acknowledge that the protests mirror the polls:

The latest USA Today/Gallup poll finds that more Americans disapprove (50%) than approve (44%) of the way U.S. President Barack Obama is handling healthcare policy. There is a tremendous partisan gap in these views, with 74% of Democrats but only 11% of Republicans approving. Independents are more likely to disapprove than to approve of Obama’s work on healthcare.

• Contends that health care drives our economy. In truth, production should drive a healthy economy, not consumption of services. The former enables the latter.
• Sell yet another government program as salvation for the nation’s ills. If you believe them, you deserve what they dish. The problem is, you intend to force your choice on me and mine; sell me into serfdom, using the power of the state to get your way.

Update II (August 11): SVENGALI SHIFTS INTO CAMPAIGN MODE. Obama showed his hand by emphasizing during his Town Hall that it was not to the converted that he was preaching, but to a randomly selected group of people.

Naturally, MSNBC took him at his word, reporting enthusiastically on how little resistance BO met. Outside the Obama town hall the country was roiling—still is. Inside the Barack Bubble the debate was flatlining like Nancy Pelosi’s brain waves.

Tucker Carlson, who works for MSNBC and has certainly worked the political system, was unable to back-up the line the Obama organ—also his employers—was peddling. Most presidential town halls are screened and packed with supported, said Carlson. BO has just joined the rest in lying about the practice.

As BO’s charmed political life continues—suspended as he is in a third dimension—one of the few honest Republicans, Democratic Sen. Arlen Specter, confronted a more realistic setting. I say honest, because all Republicans bar a handful fit in the camp to which Specter defected.

In any event, Specter provided some much-needed comic relief. When asked by a patriot what he was going to do “to restore this country back to what our founders created, according to the Constitution,” Specter replied: “When you ask me to defend the Constitution, that’s what I’ve been doing.”

That’s rich.

Note how Specter, like a true pol, “vowed he would never support any bill that increased the federal deficit or took away a person’s right to choose their health care coverage.”

And indeed, once the lumbering juggernaut of government-run health care becomes a fait accompli, Specter and his ilk will be perfectly correct to say that when they signed off on this violation of rights and usurpation of authority, he was promised the “reform” would not become a public plan.

This is just how the Hildebeest and her Democratic warmongers excused their vote to give George authority to go to war in Iraq: “We were betrayed; we had been told the power would not be abused.”

These people are beyond contempt.

Update III (August 12): TAMRON TITS-HALL is an MSNBC host. Tits-Hall’s beauty is inversely related to her brain power. (The combination of beauty and brains is as rare as it is lethal, I paraphrase Peter Brimelow.) But in the Age of the Idiot she fits right in. (Whereas some MSNBC babes are lovely, Foxette News anchors, I would argue, sport the porn look. They are molded in the Hugh Hefner mold: vulgar but fit for You Know What. This Fox News aesthetic is one of the few issues of disagreement with my good friend, Prof. Paul Gottfried. I think the pea brain Kirsten Powers is a dreadfully plain girl. Alex Witt, on the other hand, has going for her that Lara loveliness from “Dr. Zhivago.”)
But I digress. Here is Tamron; a beauty. Here are her fans; brainless..

I arrive, after that bit of titillation, at Tamron’s portion of the week (that’s what we Jews call a weekly segment read from the Hebrew Bible in synagogue). First she and David Shyster peddled the propaganda that healthcare protesters had been bussed in by political operatives. Now they concede that these angry “un-American” Americans are simply stupid. Tits-Hall, who could never be called simple (read what her fans say about her clever cleavage), believes “these people,” clearly alien to a member of the “multicultural noise machine,” don’t know that Medicare and Medicaid are run by government; and they don’t get that INsurance (why do Americans place the emphasis incorrectly on the first syllable of this word?) is a third-party entity.

And this is reportage in the age of the idiot.

Your retort to Tits-Hall:

• From the fact that VA hospitals, Medicare and Medicaid are government-run, it doesn’t follow that incorporating more of the industry into the state gulag is insignificant, negligible, or that protest is rendered meaningless. Tits-Hall is one big non sequitur, which should be your most used word in the Age of the Idiot.
• The fact that there is already one mediating entity between doctor and patient does not mean that another, subject to all the wrong incentives, ought to be introduced.

Don’t count on Tits-Hall or Shyster to comprehend a reasoned argument.