Sunday, August 10, 2014

Shame

People get killed in almost any kind of racing and everyone knows it. It's a rough sport, like the sports Americans love the most.  People get hurt playing football.  People get killed on ski slopes and while surfing and  skateboarding.  People go out during hurricanes to kite surf and board surf and when they get killed in the process the responsibility is usually clear. People run out into highways, people walk around on railroad bridges and they get hurt and nobody blames anyone but the fools who do it, but that's in the real world, not the strange world of journalism where it becomes necessary to ask whether there will be criminal charges against Tony Stewart who ran over and killed a teen age driver who deliberately ran out on a race track fired up with childish egotism and deliberately stepped in front of his race car, finger held high. "Will he face criminal charges?" asks CNN?  Do you ever feel shame?  I have to ask.

And speaking of shame, can we write it off to early stages of dementia that John McCain can get away with blaming the raging barbarians now running loose in Iraq on President Obama's having pulled troops out on a schedule agreed to by George Bush and at the demand of the incompetent, ill-prepared Iraqi Government set up by George Bush that alienated a large portion of  the population? It's time for the public to ask, but it's time for the Media to start asking out loud since unlike the rest of  us, they remember all the details about a war sold on a false pretext with the full cooperation of  armchair heroes and war profiteers and in which so many people died.

 It's time to ask how much the American public would have supported keeping thousands of stoops there for another decade or longer since it's unlikely that the schisms going on in Muslim countries are going end or stop taking advantage of the kind of power vacuums provided by people like George Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, inter alia for no other reason than the love of  conquest. I'm sorry, Mr. McCain, but you backed the destruction if Iraq and you asked for the destruction of Iran from the comfort of your own safety.

You've blamed Obama for the results of the laws of supply and demand in a free world market.  You've been offering predictions of all kinds of disasters, military and economic and have been proven wrong -- and indeed nothing you've been warning against has happened. The "everything is Obama's fault" has disgraced you and any sympathy you may have earned for having been a prisoner of war and if I do not call you unscrupulous, dishonest and dangerous to America, it's because I think you're demented and to be pitied.  It's time for him to retire from public life, but it's time to ask why the media gives such credit and support to a man who has stepped in front of truth in a fit of childish egotism and does it without a hint of shame.

And speaking of shame, can we direct further disgust toward the media for the shamelessness of asking why a tiny supply of a highly risky and experimental serum was given to two Americans instead of selecting two Africans somewhere?  How disgusting to talk about racism when we know full well they'd have been asking whether there should be criminal charges had the serum, never tested on humans or monkeys, proved fatal.







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