Monkeywrenching the political process

[unixronin]

With the popular vote in the just-past election so close, one could be forgiven for wondering how much the election may have been influenced by what amounts to an elaborate practical joke.

Of course, the article points out that the perpetrators observed that the news media could easily have exposed their hoax had they put the least effort into checking their facts.  But in this last election, by all appearances the media didn't WANT to check their facts, as long as the report involved something damaging to the McCain-Palin campaign.  Can you imagine the witch-hunt had Eitan Gorlin and Dan Mirvish chosen Barack Obama as their target?  Ah, but wait, we don't have to imagine — we have the persecution of Joe the Plumber as an example.

When I consider how one-sided the reporting of this past election campaign was, and yet how close the popular vote was, I find it hard to avoid speculating that in this Presidential election, the people of the United States did not elect Barack Obama; the news media did.

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

We must kill people, to stop people from killing people. It's a moral imperative!

[msa.livejournal.com]

I don't think they killed anyone besides themselves per se -- they warned the target ahead of time, but that said, my brain is still trying to wrap itself around that rationalization.

Somehow, I can't quite understand how bombing the Haymarket statue (twice), the Capitol, the Pentagon, the State Department, various courthouses, and committing arson directed at a state supreme court justice whose only offense was trying the Black Panthers for crimes they'd committed or were planning to commit, in order to achieve a political aim, is not terrorism.

And I just can't do it...as much as the word is overused now, those actions, for political gain, are clearly terrorism. In their own country. And we let these people -teach-?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I can't argue with any of that. But yeah, I'm reminded of this quote (http://www.babcom.com/alaric/quotations.html#bell).