Ok, so I'm driving home today listening to the local Air America station, and it's the top of the hour, so the brief news summary from CBS comes on. And what do I hear? Mind you, I'm not choosing to subject myself to right wing radio (which I do every now and then just to see what they are saying). I'm listening to Air America to get away from Republican drivel for a while.
So I hear some Republican congressman (don't remember which one) going on about all the terrible spending in the stimulus bill, saying, "It's not like this is Monopoly money, you know." Then I hear Dick Cheney's creepy voice as if from the dead warning about how worried he is that Obama is reading Al-qaeda their rights instead of protecting the American people.
My question is, why is this news?
Why, even as I'm listening to Air America--never mind all the rest of the supposedly mainstream media--why do I still have to listen to Republicans repeat their failed ideas, as if there were anything remarkable or important about what they have to say? Yes, I realize the news spot is from CBS, which is part of that corporate media, which partly answers my question. But that same corporate media told us they had more Republican talking heads on in the past because that was the party in power. Now the Democrats are in power, but they still give us Republicans by about a 2-1 ratio.
I'm hardly the first person to notice or comment on this, but it's really getting under my skin. Cheney's ominous words are pure Republican spin. You know he's drooling over the hope that there will be some kind of terrorist attack that he can blame on Obama. Of course, nothing made us less safe than our adventurism in Iraq, Cheney's beloved torture policies, and everything else that administration did to increase hatred toward America around the world.
Also, no one has ever wasted money like the last administration, on Iraq, no-bid corporate contracts, bank deregulation, tax cuts for the rich, and everything else that ballooned the national debt while tanking the economy and strangling the poor and middle class. After years of off-budget special allocations for Iraq and goodies of all kinds for the wealthiest of the wealthy, NOW they're worried about treating national resources as Monopoly money? What lard. It's such blatant, stupid spin. They had their day, and their policies utterly failed. Why should anyone listen to them now?
Again, none of this is new to most of us here. But their voices are still the ones being force-fed to most of America. I don't know where the pressure points are to begin to change the dominant right-wing corporate media bias in this nation, but it starts with naming it and speaking out, hence this rant. It may be obvious to us, but there are plenty of people who don't see it, so we need to keep on pointing it out.