Two items in Yahoo News this morning highlighted the shallowness of American media critics and the threat this poses to the world’s survival. One item described the collapse of a huge ice shelf in Canada’s northern Arctic; the other reported the fawning praise heaped on Sarah Palin’s Republican Convention speech by television commentators.
Judging from the Palin story, Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper of CNN, Mort Kondrake and Chris Wallace of Fox News Channel, NBC’s Tom Brokaw and CBS’s Jeff Greenfield are guilty of dangerous shallowness at best, conspiracy to deceive at worst.
These trusted members of the press, which Thomas Jefferson regarded as essential to a functioning democracy, helped dazzle viewers with the glitz concocted by clever propagandists for delivery by a former beauty queen (photo at right) and overlooked the dangerous messages buried in “her” speech.
“A very auspicious debut,” said Brokaw. A “perfect populist pitch,” said Greenfield. “Terrific,” said Kondrake. “A star is born,” said Wallace. “A star is born,” said Blitzer. “A star is born,” said Cooper.
How original! How pathetic! If that “hockey mom” from Wasilla is a star, I am the exiled King of Siam. Do the pundits really believe she wrote that speech? Do they think she has any idea of the challenges facing the world? Do they know that she insists that mankind has nothing to do with the world’s climate crisis?
In case you missed it – with all the hullaballoo over America’s newest “star” – here’s an excerpt from the Reuters report on that breakaway ice shelf:
A huge 19 square mile (55 square km) ice shelf in Canada’s northern Arctic broke away last month and the remaining shelves have shrunk at a “massive and disturbing” rate, the latest sign of accelerating climate change in the remote region, scientists said on Tuesday.
They said the Markham Ice Shelf (photo at left), one of just five remaining ice shelves in the Canadian Arctic, split away from Ellesmere Island in early August. They also said two large chunks totaling 47 square miles had broken off the nearby Serson Ice Shelf, reducing it in size by 60 percent.
“The changes … were massive and disturbing,” said Warwick Vincent, director of the Centre for Northern Studies at Laval University in Quebec.
Temperatures in large parts of the Arctic have risen far faster than the global average in recent decades, a development that experts say is linked to global warming.
“These …. events underscore the rapidity of changes taking place in the Arctic,” said Derek Mueller, an Arctic ice shelf specialist at Trent University in Ontario.
The Republican candidate for the vice-presidency of America pooh-poohs the threat of global warming and sees no necessity for changes to combat it. She is dangerously anti-environment, supports building a pipeline that would endanger Alaska’s polar bears, funds propaganda campaigns in favor of the aerial hunting of wolves and bears, and favors drilling for oil in national parks as well as next to America’s beaches.
She is also dangerously anti-peace. She scoffed at Barack Obama for proposing the orderly withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. “When victory is in sight,” he wants “to forfeit it,” she said. Victory? Does this witless warmonger realize that there can be no such thing as “victory” in an occupation? That the Iraq government has requested a timeline for withdrawal of American forces? That the Bush administration has agreed?
She also scoffed at Obama for defending the rule of law in America, finding the idea that accused terrorists might have legal rights simply ludicrous. I wonder what her position is on torture?
To anyone who took the trouble to figure out the real message that Palin’s speech sent America – and the world – the Wasilla wunderkind did not prove herself to be a star. Behind her beauty-queen facade, she proved herself to be a messenger of death.
