This is not an easy task, I assure you.  This is a group that, when not whining about the size of the debt, is either clamoring for war, tax cuts, or both simultaneously.  Finding prominent ones that say things one could construe as “sane” and “rational” is rare.  When it happens twice in a day, well…there’s a post for ya.*

I also really wanted to talk about Egypt and the Revolution there.  I mentioned it here, back on Jan 25.  This meta-news analysis story, talking about the ratings cable news war and the ideological struggle going on between Fox and CNN (i.e. between news coverage and batshit insane conspiracy theories) didn’t even start tracking coverage until a week later.  The only real coverage from the get go was on Al Jazeera, as mentioned here (with hilarious screen grabs of the schlock Fox was peddling that with a hottie that afternoon).   This is one event where I was most sad I had no cable, but later I learned that the market censorship in the U.S. already made that a non-starter…

Among the markets where [Al Jazeera English] was available was were Toledo and Sandusky, Ohio; Burlington, Vermont; Houston, Texas; and Washington, DC. Industry giant Comcast originally planned to carry Al Jazeera English in 2007, but reversed its decision shortly before the channel’s launch, citing “the already-saturated television market”*. The two major American satellite providers, DirecTV and Dish Network, had similar plans but also changed their minds, with speculation that the decision may have been influenced by allegations by the Bush administration of “anti-American bias” in the channel.^**

^{* read as “Comcast threatened by News Corp and probably CNN” to drop them
** par for the course, 2001-2009}

So I’ve been following a freakin’ Revolution online.  I’m watching my generation use my internets and their outrage to just say…..no more.

That’s what I’m seeing.  I’m being inspired as I see crowds shout perhaps my favorite political slogan of the 21st century, “IF THE GOVERNMENT TAKES DOWN YOUR INTERNET, TAKE DOWN YOUR GOVERNMENT.”   That’s one I whole-heartedly agree with.  Whole-souledly.  There are people marching and standing, and running and dying for their own freedom.

I heard when the ultimatums were set and passed, when the hounds were unleashed and the blood began to flow.    I watch and read…and then…I see…

…I see that half of my country seems to want the Revolution to fail.  They are more scared about something they know nothing about (the Muslim Brotherhood..oooohh, scary!), than something they do (freedom).  Or something they claim to know better than anyone else.

So instead of celebration and solidarity, instead of a nation standing as one with Freedom, I see some god-damned blithering idiot warning our President about supporting Operation Egyptian Freedom during the Superbowl (’cause that might lead to the Bad People!!FEAR THEM!!)!!   Again, trying to bring someone down, a revolution down, a people down, rather than everyone together under the banner of freedom.   That damn liberal media, at it again.

Speaking of that damn liberal media…I’m goin to awkwardly seque into the NYTimes trying to make a strange point with their bold-faced-lie of a headline, “CNN Rises to the Top in Egypt Coverage“, by Alessandra Stanley.  Unless perhaps they meant “quality”, not “viewers” (which is still a bold-faced-lie)….

In the first week of extensive live coverage of the uprising in Egypt, CNN got a ratings bump, knocking MSNBC into third place overall in the critical demographic of viewers 25-54–but Fox News quietly cleaned up, attracting more viewers than CNN and MSNBC combined on a hard news story.According to Nielsen ratings data from Monday through Thursday of last week (Friday numbers will be released today), Fox News averaged 628,000 viewers 25-54 in primetime, compared to CNN’s 341,000 and MSNBC’s 254,000.

…

Fox News also led in terms of total viewers, with 2,452,000 in primetime, compared to CNN’s 959,000 and MSNBC’s 961,000.

[ed note: the first week of “extensive live coverage” was the second week of the revolution]

So what are the *most* viewers seeing instead of actual coverage of the Revolution on Al Jazeera?   *le sigh*

A word and a concept that until this week was relatively obscure and then FOX TV‘s Glenn Beck decided to explain the word and it’s meaning to his sizable audience.

And so Beck’s chalkboards were used to explain the meaning of Caliphate.  But as he always does, Mr. Beck challenged his audience to do their own homework and investigate all of the information he delivers on his nightly program.  Google recorded so many searches for “caliphate” and “caliphate definition” that both cracked the top five in Google trends.

[BTW, and for those that don’t know…the Christian equivalent myth about a “Caliphate” is Jesus coming back and setting up his 1,000 year reign.  Yes, that’s what Beck thinks in happening right now in Egypt, except for it’s teh Muslims.]

Oy, to the vey says this Spinoza convert.

 Yes, you read that right; the biggest idiot, on the biggest networked lie, is pushing a large portion of the most powerful country, to all being as insanely fucking paranoid, as Glenn Beck.

Instead of supporting Freedom and popular revolution rising directly from the streets against a corrupt and oppressive regime, Beck, O’Reilly and the whole Tard Brigade have half the country CHEERING FOR THE DICTATOR.

As such, I’m distressed once again.  It is in such moments of darkness that the strangest of things happen, and I find myself agreeing with Bill Kristol.

Now, people are more than entitled to their own opinions of how best to accomplish that democratic end. And it’s a sign of health that a political and intellectual movement does not respond to a complicated set of developments with one voice.

But hysteria is not a sign of health. When Glenn Beck rants about the caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left, he brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society. He’s marginalizing himself, just as his predecessors did back in the early 1960s.

Nor is it a sign of health when other American conservatives are so fearful of a popular awakening that they side with the dictator against the democrats. Rather, it’s a sign of fearfulness unworthy of Americans, of short-sightedness uncharacteristic of conservatives, of excuse-making for thuggery unworthy of the American conservative tradition.

[link to full post, for which I feel kinda dirty]

Bolded for, ya know, emphasis.  ^–This x9001.

I can’t say it better myself, since no one would believe me making the same dang point.

Kristol ends with words of wisdom every soul should learn upon attaining sentience…[bolded, so you can tell it from his filler]

Let’s hope that as talk radio hosts find time for reflection, and commentators step back to take a deep breath, they will recall that one of the most hopeful aspects of the current conservative revival is its reclamation of the American constitutionalist tradition. That tradition is anchored even beyond the Constitution, of course, in the Declaration of Independence. And that document, let’s not forget, proclaims that, “Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends [life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness], it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.”

I will remind Bill, in closing and in reference to his final, partisan paragraphs, *we* won the Revolution and built *our* country.  That is how it has to work, that’s the best way for it to work.   Bill, that’s the only way it does work.  That’s the legend we have to tell ourselves to hold it all together, and it needs to be true.  Forcing revolution from the outside, well, we learned what pitfalls and IEDs lie that direction, yes?  Okay, then.

Now perhaps, is when we actually do need a man of George W. Bush’s enormous but limited talents, a man to sit on the sidelines and cheer.

LOUDLY.

For Freedom. 

—

* I like this guy too.  Supporting START was a no-brainer, hence the typical nature of the opposition.