- CNN's Cartoon Version of America

The laughable vision of CNN liberals staring into the Republican petri dish and asking what they thought to be “relevant” questions turned the CNN – Youtube debate into a farce. It seemed like CNN did it’s level best to get their version of “typical conservatives” to ask questions. There was a bunch of T-Shirt wearing, wild eyed, slightly crazy looking folks, and a gay brigadier general who not only offered a piece of video, but then “magically” appeared in the audience as well. All of them were taken straight from the CNN book on “how to identify a conservative”. I guess they couldn’t find enough gap toothed banjo players wearing only blaze orange flannel or Ku Klux Klan robes, but I’m sure they did their best.

OK .. the guy with the shotgun looked pretty cool.

But wait a minute… you say that not all brigadier’s are gay? But the NYTimes told me that it was a pentagon requirement for getting a star on your collar. Are you saying that isn’t so? Oops…Quelle dommage, how will CNN ever recover it’s reputation for objectivity now? (I’ll pause here a minute hear to let you wipe the coffee off your monitor)

As any rational person would expect, it turned out that he wasn’t’ just a typical “undecided voter” after all but actually a gay rights activist who had appeared before on CNN and has worked for both the Kerry and Clinton campaigns. Personally I’m shocked … SHOCKED… How could something like this have happened? How could a detail like THAT slip past that highly efficient CNN objectivity team? I don’t know about you, but I can almost hear Anderson Cooper’s producers giggling and high five-ing each other at stage left.

The fact is, the only thing that’s really coming out of any of these debates, is that it’s being made abundantly clear how completely disconnected from the real world our major media has become. Dan Rather’s self immolation seemed to me to be the real turning point. As you may recall, time and time again old Dan asserted that he was “right down the political center” on every issue, every time. But that illusion went up in flames when he used forged documents to try to influence the outcome of a national election, and unseat a sitting US president whose policies he didn’t personally agree with.

And as it turns out, Dan is hardly an outlier. In the last Democratic debate we were all amazed how CNN managed to find a way to shamelessly softball the Democratic candidates so effectively. Later it turned out that a number of the questioners were simply plants from various liberal advocacy groups, and the whole left leaning major media establishment was simply in on the gag. It was just the American people who being fooled after all, and everyone in media knows what a bunch of mindless boobs they all are.

Somehow I think we need to find a way to explain the TV news folks that they have made it obvious enough even for us. They’ve made it clear that we can’t believe them anymore, and that we would appreciate it if they could change their tune. They think we are all imbeciles; we get that. But they are no longer even being discreet, and even an alleged imbecile can figure out when he’s being had eventually. And I don’t know about you, but I’ve long ago reached that point.

This is all very reminiscent of the immigration amnesty bill where collusion between the politicians and major media was being used to shove a policy down the throats of Americans who wanted nothing to do with it. Thankfully, we Americans stepped up and pushed back at the grassroots level, even though the major media was telling us that we were just a bunch of racists for doing so. The American people took momentary control of their political process back from the people who believe it to be their process not ours. Somehow we need to find a way to do the same when it comes to the major media and their self proclaimed “objectivity”. It’s a joke, they’ve always known it, but now we know it too. And we need to find a way to make them understand that we’d rather not have them pretend anymore.

In 1972 liberal New York columnist Pauline Kael famously spoke about her amazement that Nixon could have won in a landslide by saying “I don’t know anyone who voted for him”. Apparently the staff at CNN is hanging out with the same crowd because all the conservatives they know are cartoon characters from the Deep South. They can’t imagine an educated, intelligent, literate, well-spoken, informed and interested conservative. In their minds, anyone who meets those criteria must be a liberal.

But in truth it’s really them, the folks at the major news providers who seem to be from another country. They are the tiny isolated and insulated community that’s really out of touch, not the rest of us. And we need to let them know that we’d appreciate it if they would at least stop by America every now and then, before they try to tell us all how to think.