TV News LIES

The saying “There's a sucker born every minute.” has been kicking around since the late nineteenth century. The indomitable American “can do” attitude has made that adage an extremely lowball estimate. I watched a video clip on Crooks & Liars the other day excerpted from Cashin' In, a Fox News program hosted by Eric Bolling. It weirded me out so much I had to click on over to the Fox News website and watch the entire segment. I’ve never done that before. I don’t have the stomach lining for Fox. But this was so compelling I had to.

But first …

We’ve all received the scam email about helping a wealthy Nigerian move his millions out of the country into American banks. If you agree to help the guy out you get to keep a huge percentage of the money. The cost to victims of these advance-fee frauds like the Nigerian bank scam went from $100 million in the U.S. in 1997 to an estimated $6.3 billion in 2008 and $9.3 billion in 2009 worldwide.

The cost of paying attention keeps going up:  Increasing cases of thyroid growths near Fukushima.  Tar sands.  Poisoned water supplies.  Drones.  North Korea.  Corporate welfare.  Tainted and questionable food supplies.  Chemical weapons.  Gun violence.  Man-made gases eating the ozone shield.

There's even a recent report of a dormant virus coming back to life after a nap of 30,000 years.  After a run through the headlines, I'm feeling very much like I could use a nap of a few thousand years myself.

Y'know why I often refer to the Universal Studios monsters from the thirties and forties? Because those were the monsters I grew up with. In the fifties, the studio packed up its classic horror films and sold them to television. Every Saturday night I would be in front of our black and white Zenith from 10:30 pm until signoff watching channel 11s Nightmare. That's where I discovered Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, The Mummy, and The Wolf Man. Thats when I learned The Monster Rules. Everybody had to learn The Monster Rules because if you didn't there was no way in hell you could ever get to sleep after watching Nightmare.

The most important rule was Monsters Could Be Killed. It might take the whole movie to do it, but in the last few minutes of the final reel Dracula was staked, Frankenstein's monster was burned alive in a flaming windmill, the Egyptian goddess Isis reduced the mummy Imhotep to dust, and Larry Talbot, The Wolf Man, was beaten to death with a silver walking stick wielded by his own father. When all the monsters had been dispatched I could climb the darkened stairway up to my room without being too scared. Until I saw Dracula.

Unless Barack Obama is even a weaker president than he appears to be, the effusion of editorial emoting unleashed by the Ukraine crisis is unlikely to have any effect on U.S. policy. Pray, let that be the case.

Should Obama’s advisers look for guidance to the opinion pages of the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal, much less the Weekly Standard or Fox News, we’re in deep trouble. One might as well leaf through the latest Victoria’s Secret catalog for guidance on empowering women.

Since World War II – and extending well into the Twenty-first Century – the United States has invaded or otherwise intervened in so many countries that it would be challenging to compile a complete list. Just last decade, there were full-scale U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, plus American bombing operations from Pakistan to Yemen to Libya.

So, what is one to make of Secretary of State John Kerry’s pronouncement that Russia’s military intervention in the Crimea section of Ukraine – at the behest of the country’s deposed president – is a violation of international law that the United States would never countenance?

Kerry decried the Russian intervention as “a Nineteenth Century act in the Twenty-first Century.” However, if memory serves, Sen. Kerry in 2002 voted along with most other members of the U.S. Congress to authorize President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, which was also part of the Twenty-first Century. And, Kerry is a member of the Obama administration, which like its Bush predecessor, has been sending drones into the national territory of other nations to blow up various “enemy combatants.”

Every once in a while, I want to write a note,  roll it up, and jam it into a old milk bottle.  The scribbling part is easy.  The tough part comes when trying to decide where to deliver it.  There are not many outlets around willing to accept delivery on such a thing, and even fewer staff people able or interested enough to pay much attention to such a note, especially for one beginning this way:

"I see by the clock on the clubhouse wall, and by the full-faced frown on the burly, white-uniformed orderly I can't seem to shake, that it's time for a nice, hot cup of Thorazine and some phosphene therapy, staring off into space, my eyes shut tight..."