The Final Four Or More?
By Danny Schechter,Director, Plunder The Crime Of Our Time
March seems to be leaving us
like a lamb, although "March Madness" is still in effect, as college basketball
marched into "The Final Four"
It is safe to predict that more Americans are paying attention to the action on the courts than the tired rhetoric and electoral mash-up where another final four bid for our attention, over-hyped in confrontational terms by political commentators who, like their sports counterparts, are just there to keep score:
They are in the endless update business focused on who is up, who's down, and who is out-- in the cold.
The sports analysts tend to
be better dressed and more adept at "color" coverage while the pundits become
more and more knee jerk and predictable which is why networks like CNN seem to
invent new gadgets and graphic displays by the day. Have you seen their "cube?"
Let's see: in the elephant camp, we have Mitt on first, Rick on second and Newt a distant third. Ron Paul has already been sent to the showers by the media who long ago downrezed his campaign, probably, because, from time to time, he was making sense in his criticisms of the Fed and the wars,
Over in Donkey land, the
final member of the foursome/boresome, Barack Obama, is racing around the country and
the world to position himself as the only adult in the room.
Last week, he was in South Ohio taking energy; this week, he's in South Korea talking nukes, adding his fingerprinting to the global chorus of condemnation of the nasty North, insisting that "we" can't "reward their bad behavior."
I am not sure how many votes our Soul Brother #1 expects from the people of Seoul.
I would hope he would rather
be dunking baskets in the Final Four than signing new laws and executive orders
dunking the Constitution. He has clearly calculated that his hopes for
re-election depend in the public perceiving him as a hard-line commander in
chief steering us smoothly through a dangerous world.
While his opponents babble,
he seeks to be, ready for battle.
That's why the President has been playing footsie with Netanyahu, pledging that Israel has his "back" while, at the same time, trying to stop the lunatics of Likud from doing anything stupid and unilateral that he and his national security apparatchiks can't control.
As they say, timing is everything. And it takes time to "prepare a battlefield."
The Pentagon's Panetta, a pol to his core, is making his own contingency plans for a military conflict that will likely do more good for the POTUS politically in October than in the Spring or Summer.
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