Saturday, November 26, 2011

Yes, This Ad About Equality Says It All

Skeptical at first, when I saw so many people who lauded this as a wonderful, sightful ad on marriage equality, but it really DOES say it all, because it brings in all of life's emotions and doesn't sugar-coat same-sex relationships. The young man is stunning, but not in a drop-dead gorgeous way. He's funny and sensitive and, most of all ... 


LOVING.



Life Begins After Thanksgiving



Yes, it does. 


Life does not, as many think, come to a grinding halt after eating too much turkey. In fact, whether you eat turkey at all has nothing to do with your life's continuance: it's a fact that life continues. Especially after you eat something.


It continues...and continues. 


And so has mine. 


That's why I'm continuing to write.


Continuing to have faith in humanity.
Continuing to help people out of the morass of a Christian Right-dominated country.
Continuing to look for a job. Writing.  Because I want one. Because I need one. 


Really.


Actually, life begins each time we think it might likely end. It surprises us by continuing and in continuing from a moribund state, it begins anew. It's rather insidious that way, life is. 


But I'm not complaining: I love life as long as it gives me purpose, which is, right now, kicking the Christian Right's ass every second it breathes and makes precious life so miserable for everyone with its righteous arrogance. 


Ah, there's an apt phrase: righteous arrogance. It connotes total sin, or rather the cause of so much sin. It has been the cause of wars, genocide and suicide. It founded the Ku Klux Klan. It furrowed the Trail of Tears. It decimated Meso America. It caused a young man to leap from a bridge after his sexual encounter with another man was posted on YouTube.


It started Hell Houses. 


So I've begun, after Thanksgiving, to restore my crusade (ok, wrong word) against righteous arrogance and its perpetual perpetrator the Christian Right. Oh, I may get strident enough to call it the Christofascist Right, such is my abhorrence of the group, but I vow not to become so strident that I lose sight of my second goal: humor. For we are at war, the Christian Right and I, and I have chosen one of the best weapons of modern man: laughter. For as Mark Twain put it:


"Against the assault of laughter, 
nothing can stand."

Dumb and Dumber...and Dumbest: FOX News Creates America's Only Journalistic Black Hole

WE ALWAYS KNEW...




"Rather, the results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these questions than those who don’t watch any news at all."

A scathing report by Fairleigh Dickinson University - a PublicMind Poll - discloses the fact that not only have FOX viewers been LESS informed about national and international events than other news viewers, but  they have also have been MADE less informed than others who do not even follow the news via broadcast "journalism." It seems that in its driving force to keep people misinformed - "fairly unbalanced" - FOX has actually made its viewers dumber.


A BENEFICIAL BLACK HOLE
Of course, for most of the politicians who frequent FOX, this may not be a bad thing: "analysts" like Mike Huckabee feel safer in their niches than they would be at, say MSNBC: at FOX, they're never really questioned nor are their "analyses" really scrutinized. 

FOX's jumble of misinformation and no information has actually been beneficial to some people: while the general public suffers from current affairs blindness, pundits, politicians and religious leaders of the Right have benefited. Overly supportive attitudes and softball interviews have been the boon to the likes of Tony Perkins (Family Research Council), Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, and Ann Coulter. 

To be fair, it would be unwise for these same people to court, say, Anderson Cooper or Lawrence O'Donnell. Honest analysis with hardball questions are too tough for them unless, like Ann Coulter, one has an overabundance of self-esteem and thinks that there is no such thing as bad publicity. FOX always avoids the most detrimental subjects or frames them in the manner of an attack from the other side ("why do you think you were so viciously attacked about ____by____?"). 


Jon Stewart Was Right

So, let me tell you what's going on. So, two Sundays ago, I do an interview on Chris Wallace’s show, and along with some really salient, dynamic points that I made, I mentioned Fox News viewers were the most consistently misinformed viewers in every poll. PolitiFact took issue with that, and said I really shouldn't have said every poll. Just most. So, I accepted it, I then I brought up a 21 lie salute of PolitiFact Fox fact-checking. So I assume that Chris Wallace now begins the work of apologizing for Fox's many false and misleading statements. They’ll probably do a few per show and carry us into the 2014 midterms with a clear conscience.





UPDATE:

As is usual with FOX, there has been no response as to the FD report.