Having another drink at the wake for objective reality

I've seen this short video on several websites, so it may not be new to you. Sharron Angle, Republican candidate for U.S. senator in Nevada described as a Tea Party favorite, says this to Fox News' Carl Cameron.

Angle: We needed to have the press be our friend.

Cameron: Wait a minute. Hold on a second. To be your friend? That sounds naive.

Angle: Well, no. We wanted them to ask the questions we want to answer so that they report the news the way we want it to be reported... and when I get on a show, and I say, 'Send money to SharronAngle.com,' so that your listeners will know that if they want to support me they need to go to SharronAngle.com.

The video is a half minute. The context and facial expressions augment the story quite a bit.




Over at Talking Points Memo, several commenters hit it right on the head. Sharron has been truly clueless with the media so far, and obviously someone from the Republican Party came in and told her what the strategy was. She is just dim enough that she thought she was supposed to repeat what she was told, not unlike Sarah Palin's quote during the vice-presidential debate, "And I may not answer the questions the way that either the moderator or you (Biden) want to hear, but I'm going to talk straight to the American people and let them know my track record also."

I left the "And" at the beginning and the "also" at the end to give it that dull clang of Palin authenticity.

Sharron Angle is not a good candidate, and the numbers are starting to show this. In June, all but one poll showed her with a lead over Harry Reid. In July, the situation reversed, and all but one poll shows Reid with a small lead.

The operative word in that last sentence is "small". A candidate this bad should be getting poleaxed, but we have such a polarized political landscape, I expect she will get at least 40% of the vote based nearly entirely on an anti-Harry Reid vote.


(Photo by Gary Reyes/ San Jose Mercury News)
A wave of fairness and balance sweeping over me for unknown reasons, I'd like to point out the race for governor here in California. The Democrats have put up Jerry Brown to run against Meg Whitman, and he has been ahead in the polls for most of the past three months except for a short time in early July.

I bring this up because Jerry Brown is an awful candidate. I don't know anyone excited about him being at the top of the ticket. He's only 72, but I thought he was as old as my dad, pushing 80 or so. This may have something to do with the old mean joke that politics is show business for ugly people.

Let's be clear. Jerry Brown is no Sharron Angle. He's a tired old war horse and she's a clueless n00b, but both of their numbers can be credited to how much the public hates their opponent, not to how much the public loves the prospect of either of them being in office.

And so it continues, a political system that does not even pretend to put forward the best candidates, hoping they can get more people to hate the opponent than the crowd that hates their candidate. No one reaches out or listens to the other side because in truth, the other side isn't listening.

Objective reality is dead. We are just guests at the wake.

The Portland Police Department have closed the investigation of charges against Al Gore for sexual assault against a massage therapist for an incident that happened in 2006. The public would be completely unaware of this except for the National Enquirer. Over at my other blog, It's News 2 Them™, I have followed the headlines they have had about Al and the therapist. I point you toward this link from the middle of the story, which has a further link to an investigation by Talking Points Memo, a center-left political news blog.

The Enquirer got a Pulitzer nomination for their work on the John Edwards story. This isn't the worst major award mistake in my lifetime. Henry Kissinger has a Nobel Peace Prize, for pity's sake. In my lifetime, Around the World in 80 Days, The Sound of Music, Rocky, Ordinary People, Dances With Wolves, Braveheart, Crash and Slumdog Millionaire were Best Picture winners. The Pulitzer's mistake was just a nomination and not a win, but it ranks right up there with these other mistakes.

I've only been reading the tabloids closely for about seven months now and only the covers, but I'm a quick study. Some of the supermarket rags have reporters who do a good job, but many of the headline writers are grotesque hacks. They are happy to put people in jail who haven't even been charged yet, and in the case of Al Gore, it looks like he'll never be charged in this case. The Portland Police decided the woman's story wasn't credible, and though the Enquirer denies it, the Portland Police say the woman was paid by the Enquirer. In such a case, I believe the Portland Police.

None of this matters a whit. There are people who hate Al Gore and will believe with all their hearts that this was a whitewash and a miscarriage of justice. More than that, they will believe that Al Gore's alleged inability to control his penis is proof that Anthropogenic Climate Change is just a figment of evil people's imaginations.


Before you think this is an indictment of right wing stupidity, let's recall the story that brought the National Enquirer out of the wilderness, their exposé of the drug habits of Rush Limbaugh. By bribing Limbaugh's maid, they got a lot of the details correct about his Oxycontin use. On tape, he told the people who were his middlemen to keep silent or he would be in jail.

They didn't keep silent. He admitted his addiction and went into rehab. Charges were filed against him by the police of doctor shopping to get more pills than a single prescription would fill. He did get thousands of pills in the space of a few months, so the facts looked to be incontrovertible. He hired a big scary lawyer, Roy Black. The district attorneys in Palm Beach allowed him to plead not guilty in exchange for court ordered supervision for 18 months after a three year investigation.

In the eyes of the law, Mr. Limbaugh is a free man. This does not stop some people from thinking he is just a rich person who gamed our now decrepit and corrupt legal system.

In much the same way, but with the split being racial instead of political, the legal system letting both Kobe Bryant and Michael Jackson free are seen as either wise use of the court's power or the end of civilization as we know it.

If you have a particular prejudice, then you are a niche and someone will scratch you. On the Internet, on TV, in the newspapers, there is someone who will tell you what you want to hear, no matter what happens. Obama crushes McCain in a landslide? This is a major victory for a Republican splinter group that will call itself the Tea Party. Even more evidence is present about global warming? The polls can show that the public is turning against the idea.

Science is just "theory", much weaker than its modern rival "conjecture". After all, science said bumblebees can't fly. Stupid, stupid scientists.

In brief, objective reality is dead. We are just guests at the wake.