Progressive World Review

        Thanks to the tireless efforts of our nation’s news media we now know just exactly what type of bowler the leading Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, is.  In fact, the scandal has been probed to its depths and new information has been revealed-they had it wrong!  Obama’s pathetic score of 37 wasn’t the whole story; he had only bowled half a game! 

And yet! All is not as it seems, apparently. That devilish Mainstream Media is leaving out one very important fact as it has its fun: Obama didn’t bowl a whole game! He says he only bowled five or six frames (a normal game is 10 frames, for those of you not from Milwaukee), which, let’s be honest, doesn’t make him much better of a bowler. He still threw several very dainty gutter balls. So, no, we’re not going to take back the 9-year-old girl crack.

Thank goodness we got the bottom of that story, enquiring minds want to know.  We can all sleep better now that we know the real truth behind Obama’s bowling prowess.

This, of course, is but one example of the completely useless stories reported and repeated endlessly by a news media that unceasingly focuses on shallow, personality based investigations of our nation’s leaders and would be leaders.  Maureen Dowd, one of the country’s most widely known and read columnists, writes an entire article about John McCain’s drinking preferences-vodka apparently, for those who care-and a few of his childhood nicknames,

McCain’s pals know him as a man who enjoys libations of vodka with little green cocktail olives. Over the years, at dinners with reporters, I noted he had the habit of ordering one double vodka and sipping it slowly. And there was that famous Hillary-McCain Estonian drink-off in 2004, when Hillary instigated a vodka shot contest and McCain agreed with alacrity (even though he later offered a sketchy denial).

Maybe now that he’s the presumptive Republican nominee, his campaign wants to put his vices in a vise and sanitize the wild side of the man whose nicknames in high school were “Punk,” “Nasty” and “McNasty.”

        This is what passes for investigative journalism and serious political discourse in this country today.  Glenn Greenwald, in his post yesterday, drives this point home with some very disturbing statistics,

Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:

“Yoo and torture” - 102

“Mukasey and 9/11″ — 73

“Yoo and Fourth Amendment” — 16

“Obama and bowling” — 1,043

“Obama and Wright” — More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)

“Obama and patriotism” - 1,607

“Clinton and Lewinsky” — 1,079

This is as embarrassing as it is disturbing.  We like to think of ourselves as beacons of freedom to the rest of the world, as somehow superior to everyone else.  We invade sovereign nations on the pretense that we know what’s best for them when in reality we are, as a nation, clueless ourselves.

–Paul Wilden

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