I really need to spout off about this. My first and greatest pet peeve is the misuse of the word 'incredible' and its relatives. Second is SUV's and the people who drive them. Third and last, for today, is respectable journalism.
Incredible means 'not credible.' If a statement is incredible, it means one does not believe it. Incredible is not a synonym for 'good,' and incredibly is not a synonym for 'very much.' Example: 'The Bush Regime is incredible.' CORRECT; 'My car is incredible.' INCORRECT, unless your car is a figment of your imagination.
SUV's were developed as a way to exploit a loophole in the rules about auto safety and efficiency. By driving one, a person endangers everyone on the road, but that's the whole point, isn't it? It's the perfect American combination of tasteless display of wealth, conspicuous waste of resources, and placing oneself above and before others. It's like the vehicle equivalent of the bombing of Baghdad. Every time I see one, I want to grab the driver (if it's a man. Physical violence against women is wrong) and smash his face against the autoglass until the glass breaks, then run the thing into their front door. It's a $50k penis extender for those who find that viagra and assault weapons aren't enough. These people should be scraped from the face of the earth, along with all their seed.
Finally, there are responsible and respectable journalists. What makes a journalist respectable? A journalist is respectable if there is some corporate entity that can be sued for what he or she says, or, who write as if it were so. Respectable journalists have to pretend there might be some truth in what any authority figure says. For example, everybody knew there were no WMD's in Iraq. Even Collin Powell said so. But as soon as Butch started lying, respectable journalists all had to treat it as if there might be some truth there. Some of them actually believed it. (Some people are too dumb to live.) Look. Or as Jesus would say, Behold. Everyone in the government or the military or corporations lies. If by some miracle the truth happened to coincide with what they wanted to say, they would find some way to 'improve' it. Everything they say is 'incredible,' and we all know it. The only real information content in what they say is in knowing that the lies they tell are the lies they really hope will be believed. When they say 'These guys did the 911 attacks,' what they are really saying is that there will not be a real investigation of the 911 attacks, and the government wants to kill brown people. When they say 'without $750b in borrowed money to pass out to our cronies behind closed doors, the sky is going to fall,' they are really saying 'we've already stolen just about everything in the US that isn't nailed down, and wrecked the future for everyone now living, but then there's that credit card. Let's see how much more we can steal before the currency collapses from the sheer incredibility of our fiscal policy.'
When respectable journalists repeat those lies, and 'analyze' them and yammer on about them at length, it creates the impression that there is some truth in them. In this, the ones that get paid are doing their jobs creating confusion and stupidity, the greatest of our national resources. When unpaid journalists do it, they are chumps, pure and simple.