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Are we getting the leaders we deserve?
Matt Bai 8 hours ago

If you’re tired of hearing Donald Trump go on about his ratings and polls, if you’re mystified by the Twitter War of the Candidates’ Wives, if you can’t understand why Wolf Blitzer interviews a former contestant on “The Apprentice” as if she were a political authority, then I’ve got a video you really need to watch.

The video I’m showing you here, courtesy of C-Span’s archive, is of a presidential candidate speaking in 1987, at a moment of tectonic upheaval in our politics and media. Chances are pretty good you’ve never seen it, or even heard about it, and there’s a reason for that.

Before I tell the remarkable story of that eight-minute speech, though, let’s put it in the context of our moment.

Recently, a bunch of commentators — among them the president of the United States — seem to have latched on to the idea that the media is culpable in enabling Trump’s antic march to the Republican nomination. In the New York Times, my former colleagues Nicholas Kristof and Jim Rutenberg have both written columns in the past week asking whether we, as an industry, need to be more accountable.

Regular readers of this column know that I wrote early and often on this theme, including a column last December about the destructive “symbiosis” between Trump and the media — a term very much in fashion now.

In fact, not long ago I wrote an entire book on the collision of entertainment and political journalism, called “All the Truth Is Out,” which seems to have accidentally anticipated the Trump phenomenon. I borrowed from the brilliant work of the social critic Neil Postman, whose 1985 book “Amusing Ourselves to Death” feels more relevant today than it probably did then.

But the guy who really predicted all of this was Gary Hart, the protagonist of “All the Truth Is Out.” And man, did he try to sound the alarm.

At this time in 1987, Hart was rather like the Hillary Clinton of his day, only more talented and more visionary; he had been the presumed nominee of the Democratic Party since narrowly losing in 1984, and the Gallup Poll had him beating George H.W. Bush — then the sitting vice president — by double digits. A man of staggering intellect, he was talking even then about the rise of stateless terrorism and the arrival of a high-tech economy.

But his campaign unraveled in the space of five surreal days, during which reporters from the Miami Herald hid outside Hart’s home in order to catch him spending time with a younger woman. Hart found himself undone by the first modern political sex scandal — the inevitable result of myriad forces that were just then reshaping the media, from the echoes of Watergate to the birth of the mobile satellite.

What happened next is interesting and almost entirely forgotten.

Driven from the campaign trail in New Hampshire, Hart repaired to his cabin in the Denver foothills, where he and his family were literally penned in by a fleet of satellite trucks and news choppers. His aides wrote him the kind of withdrawal statement we’ve come to expect from scandalized politicians — contrite, gracious, bland.

Hart couldn’t sleep after reading that speech. It made him want to vomit. He called his close friend Warren Beatty (who would later make the film “Bulworth,” not incidentally) and talked through what he wished he could say instead.

Then, the next morning, Hart drove the canyon road down to Denver, stepped before the national media and calmly delivered one of the most stinging and prescient indictments of an American institution you will ever see.

“In public life, some things may be interesting, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re important,” Hart said, decrying a process that he said reduced reporters to hunters and candidates to the hunted.

“And then after all that, ponderous pundits wonder in mock seriousness why some of the best people in this country choose not to run for high office,” Hart went on. “Now I want those talented people who supported me to insist that this system be changed. Too much of it is just a mockery. And if it continues to destroy people’s integrity and honor, then that system will eventually destroy itself.

“Politics in this country, take it from me, is on the verge of becoming another form of athletic competition or sporting match.”

He closed by paraphrasing his idol, Thomas Jefferson: “I tremble for my country when I think we may in fact get the kind of leaders we deserve.”

Whenever I talk about my book to audiences around the country, I close with those lines. Invariably, I look up to find shocked and silent voters nodding their heads, amazed at how eerily that captures our present reality.

So why haven’t you heard anything about this seminal speech? I’ll tell you why. Because within 24 hours of its delivery, despite the polls showing that the public mostly sided with Hart over the reporters, America’s elite media, led by its columnists and editorial boards, rose up in unison to mock and discredit it.

“Instead of saying goodbye with a measure of dignity, respect and introspection,” A.M. Rosenthal, the Times’ former editor, wrote on the paper’s op-ed page, “Gary Hart told us he had decided that Gary Hart was a wonderful man after all and that everybody was responsible for Gary Hart’s political demise except Gary Hart.” (Watch Hart’s speech and decide for yourself if that was the point.)

Hart’s monologue was instantly buried in an avalanche of defensiveness and moral posturing. “It wasn’t just that I was blaming the media,” Hart recalled when we talked this week. “It was that I was a bad guy, and it was good riddance to a bad politician.”

For 29 years after that moment, until I directed him to it this week, even Hart hadn’t watched that video clip. Nor did he bother to continue pressing his case, despite a stream of offers to give speeches or appear on talk shows.

“I was not put on earth to pick a fight with the media and carry it out,” he told me. “I couldn’t repeat the theme of that talk without the headline inevitably saying, ‘Hart attacks the press,’ and I just didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life.

“There was no capacity for thoughtful reflection,” Hart said. “It was all me versus them.”

By the time I got into the business of political journalism in the late 1990s, 24-hour cable news — mindless, sensational, personality-obsessed — was driving the conversation. Then came the Internet, with its frenzied competition for clicks. By 2007, Politico (which does some excellent work, to be fair) was calling itself the ESPN of news, which is pretty much exactly what Hart had prophesied.

And so we systematically created a process perfectly suited to a manipulative, reality-TV performer like Trump (or Sarah Palin before him) — and just as hostile to a guy like John Kasich, who talks about governing as complicated work. We spend half of any given debate talking about poll numbers and strategies, mean tweets and sordid allegations, because the game of politics is so much more alluring than the practice of statecraft.

I asked Hart if, on a week like this one, when battery charges against Trump’s campaign manager were vying for airtime against his war with Ted Cruz over their spouses, he felt vindicated at last.

“No,” he said quickly. “No. No.” After all, he explained, no one (other than me) ever saw the need to revisit what he said all those years ago.

I raise the Hart video this week because if you read this latest flood of self-criticism, some of it from commentators who have worked in our business for decades, you might come away thinking that something transformative has just taken us by surprise. You might get the impression that a tsunami of triviality has suddenly overwhelmed our media, and we barely had time to suck in air and duck our heads.

But don’t let anyone tell you that this is all just about Trump’s suckering us, or about some convergence of recent trends we couldn’t have foreseen. It is, in fact, a generational reckoning — the failure of executives and anchors and reporters-turned-cable-personalities, many of them in our most serious news outlets, who for decades refused to confront the creeping realities of their industry, as surely as a generation of political leaders refused to confront the realities of fiscal and global instability.

Leslie Moonves, the chairman of CBS, did a pretty nice job of encapsulating that failure when he talked about Trump’s campaign this way last month: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

We can say, as Moonves surely would, that we were just responding to market forces beyond our control. We can say that voters, and not us, get to decide what matters and what doesn’t. We can point out that we’ve gone to great lengths to expose the depth of Trump’s ignorance and inconsistency.

What we can’t say is that we weren’t told it would happen.

Link to the article

Link to the video of the speech


I remember this event, I was about 21 years old. Obviously it was just a blip on my radar back then but I think this article makes a very good case.

It's very easy to say, if you don't want the media exposing you with another woman, don't do it. And there is some validity to that argument.

But he predicted what we have now. An arena where it's not about finding the best politicians to lead our country, it's about the sport of it. It's exposing everything, even if you have to make stuff up to do it. It's about the media not only wanting to report on the race but to be an active participant in who wins. It's about the citizens being fed a constant diet of celebrity type crap instead of any substance at all..

Almost everybody on this board complains about the politicians we get.. while at the same time every thread of substance turns into a fight about something different very quickly...

So do we get the politicians we deserve?

I believe we get the politicians that are fed to us.

Either by the powers of each party or by the media, we are spoon fed a steady diet of crap. The 24 hour news cycle by several sources, create a need by them to come up the fastest, most sensational stories they can find to grab ratings.

One thing has changed in a very vast way since I was a child. The news used to be more of a service to inform our citizens. I would almost say the news services of that time felt it a duty and obligation to be honest and forthright to the people.

Now it has become so competitive and ratings related, that actual news has been put on the back burner to promote sensationalism. That is why I say news is what we're being spoon fed.

As a people, many have bought into this as actually being news. And to that end, those who buy into that, do actually get what they deserve.

Great read DC.



In short, yes ... I feel like a good part of the reason we have so many mass shootings in this country, is because the media shows absolutely no restraint in making these shooters mild celebrities. Ratings over responsibility in their minds. Give the guy 15 minutes of fame, and anyone can turn a suicide into a last ditch glory hunt.

Back to the point though, I remember someone talking about how the media used to strive to protect the sports stars and celebrities. Baby Ruth had a drinking problem, but you'd never hear about it. Mickey Mantle had all kinds of issues, but it was never really major news. These day, those guys would be crucified before they even got close to Hall of Fame numbers. Now, it's all about building up people and then rushing to destroy them.

The media just falls over themselves trying to find dirt on whoever they can. The only people that come out on top are the pigs that already like to roll in the mud.

This election cycle could show that we ( the individual ) voter are , or really have been shut out of the process .. I am not sure if Joe average is paying as close attention as some or maybe he has already given up .. Very sad and dangerous times are a foot ! Read the article this morning ; I'm and old dude , remember well ..

Or government has become a direct reflection of the American population as a whole.

We deserve every bit of this.

We had reasonable candidates in the beginning, Gilmore and Webb to name just a couple.. but nobody seemed to care. All we, the people, had to do was show support and elevate them in the early polls and they would have been able to stick around. Instead they were among the first 2 out on both sides.


Is that because they are fed to us or... as Gary Hart implied, that good people don't want to get into politics at a high level because they don't want to be subjected to this kind of crap?


I agree, there have been a few watershed moments for journalism in my lifetime.. Watergate being one and Gary Hart being another one.. and I think what changed is exactly what I said in the beginning, journalists realized that they didn't have to just sit back and report the news, they could actually go make the news and influence the deicisions.

Perhaps, but the conduit between the government and the population is the media. They control the valves on what gets through. They can choose to make it something of substance or something of flash.

I'm not totally disagreeing with you bro. One word, Kardashian... the market for gobbling up celebrity crap, rumors, gossip, and scandal has definitely grown. But I look at it like this, it's like feeding your kids. If you feed your kids healthy food, they will quickly learn to like it, then give them a treat once in a while.. feed them crap all the time and it's very hard to go back to feeding them healthy because they will always be craving crap. We used to get "healthy" news from the media and we had some sports and entertainment stuff as crap... now it's 90% crap so nobody wants to go back to healthy... everybody just craves more crap.

they might control the valve, but we the people ultimately control the what sort of fluid is going through the pipes.

As much as people like to cry about the media, at the end of the day, the media doesn't play anything the people weren't already craving. All they're doing is discussing the questions we all secretly wanted answers to.

I fully admit that as a liberal, we don't deserve Sanders. We absolutely deserve Clinton.

I wish conservatives would admit that they don't deserve a Bush, they deserve a Trump.

I don't really remember Gilmore, but you may remember that I've been a big Webb supporter for some time. I'm not sure DC. While I'm not a true Kasich supporter, he does seem to be the only sane one in the room on the GOP side at this point. Yet he too seems to be suffering the same fate. I believe you're probably on to something. It does seem the more outrageous the candidate the more people flock to them.



Oh, I do believe that's something we've discussed during previous election cycles and to a large part I agree. Who would truly wish to undergo the scrutiny? No matter how qualified I was, I don't know that I would.

Yup. I think we need to set up a 'jury duty' system. John Q. Public become congressmen for two years. Repeal the 17th so the Senate is appointed by state election winners. The House was meant to represent the people, and the Senate was meant to represent the states. Besides, it's my belief that common sense people will pass common sense legislation. Not the 'country for sale' game we have going on now.

I keep waiting for Vince McMahon to announce that he owns all the News Outlets and we have all been watching News Entertainment.

Yep...NFL examples.... Tom Brady and Payton Manning

well... it is April Fool's Day, after all...

You're probably not far off. It's known that 6 corporations own the vast majority of media out there.

I'm good with keeping my right to elect my senators. I don't care what a bunch of slave owning men wanted to do 200 years ago.

It seems odd to me how little people discuss the difference between a republic and a democracy. People constantly refer to America as a democracy when it wasn't founded to be that and largely isn't.

There have been massive changes towards that. I don't think a lot of people realize the only people who used to be allowed to vote were white land owning males.

As to the article. I find it amusing people think Trump is being supported by the media when he and Bernie are the only people not being funded by massive banking and media corporations. All while Trump is being endlessly attacked by the media he is somehow the media darling? Get real.

Trump is succeeding because he is a populist, anti-media, anti-PC, and very different from the usual bought and paid for smarmy pathetic lying career politicians that these parties trot out every year.

Ted Cruz sounds like a friggen weatherman with his bullcrap accent and manner of speech. Most politicians sound like newscasters, there is a very obvious lying inflection in their voices. Some people call it "sounding presidential". To me I just hear Patrick Bateman talking about Huey Lewis and the News every time these people talk.

Uh huh

What you're saying is the puppet master got tired of his puppets, and decided to take a more hands on approach.

It's amazing how people cry about politicians being bought, yet have no problem supporting the guy doing the buying.

It's amazing to me you support obvious sociopath and future felon Hillary Clinton over Bernie.

I like Trump and Bernie because they aren't sociopaths funded by the banking industry. I think Bernie's policies are catastrophic so I don't support him, but I do respect that he isn't a sociopathic puppet.

There is a world of difference between Donald Trump and the people who run banks.

edit: on reviewing the terms. These people are technically psychopaths not sociopaths. Psychopath has a bit more of a "charged" element to it so I prefer to say sociopath. But technically they are psychopaths.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wicked-deeds/201401/how-tell-sociopath-psychopath

Other than the profession, there isn't much of a difference.

I like Bernie, but his current tax plan is something I can't get behind. I've explained that a thousand times already.

And like the other thousand times, I refuse to support these extremes we do as a country. Which causes a ton of divide.

Bernie wants way too much government intervention. Trump wants way too much private sector controlling everything.

I'm good. Pit said something that I believed already, but it really sticks now:

People are wanting change just for the sake of change, without asking if that change will make anything worse.

DC, i thought this was a pretty interesting read:

2 political scientists have found a key reason Republicans and Democrats see politics so differently

http://www.vox.com/2016/4/1/11340882/republicans-democrats-media-fox

Here's a telling fact about modern American politics: Republicans only trust Fox News. Democrats trust every network but Fox News.

The numbers come from a new study from political scientists Matt Grossmann and Dave Hopkins collating five years of Public Policy Polling data on which major news networks people do and do not trust. PPP's data shows that Republicans are just as distrustful of mainstream outlets as of MSNBC, and Democrats are about as trusting:


Vox / Javier Zarracina
PPP isn't alone in this finding. Grossmann and Hopkins survey a bevy of other sources finding similar patterns. A Pew survey found that the only outlets trusted by conservatives are Fox, the Wall Street Journal, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Breitbart, the Drudge Report, and the Blaze, whereas liberals trusted both avowedly liberal outlets and mainstream ones that present themselves as neutral.

University of Texas professor Natalie Jomini Stroud's research has found that "conservatives allege and perceive media bias more often than liberals," while the University of Pennsylvania's Kathleen Jamieson and Joseph Capella found that "mistrust of the news media was especially high among talk radio listeners." Georgetown professor Jonathan Ladd conducted open-ended interviews with Republican voters on the media, and found that most cited concerns that the mainstream media is biased.

Grossmann and Hopkins are clear that these concerns have some basis. Academic research into media bias has found mixed results, but it's unquestionably true that most reporters are left of center, and big national outlets tend to be centered in urban areas, introducing some (largely unconscious) cultural biases that favor liberal cities and disfavor conservative rural areas.

Democrats "understate conservatives’ legitimate aversion to trusting mainstream media institutions often disproportionately staffed by non-conservatives to fairly adjudicate information on the public’s behalf," Grossmann and Hopkins write. And while Democrats don't prefer partisan media, the mainstream media they do consume "implicitly flatters the Democratic worldview."

But whatever the reason for conservatives' distrust of the media, Grossmann and Hopkins find it has huge implications for how Democrats and Republicans view politics.

Different media preferences lead to different kinds of political parties

Top-Polling GOP Candidates Participate In First Republican Presidential Debate
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Fox News anchors Chris Wallace, Megyn Kelly, and Bret Baier.
Grossmann and Hopkins's broader argument is that Republicans' distrust of the mainstream media creates an asymmetry in how the parties approach the media. Democrats rely on the mainstream media both to get out their message and to cover events. Republicans generally distrust mainstream outlets and so have set up a parallel ecosystem to get their message out.

The result is Republicans rely on a media that is more likely to echo their partisan biases, and Democrats rely on media that does not pick a side and at least claims to be objective and empirical (whether or not it lives up to that promise). "Democrats therefore remain relatively unexposed to messages that encourage ideological self-identification or describe political conflict as reflecting the clash of two incompatible value systems," Grossmann and Hopkins write. "Instead, the information environment in which they reside claims to prize objectivity, empiricism, and policy expertise."

Of course, Democrats have their own left-of-center media. But it's not as tightly aligned with their party, and not as successful. The talk radio syndicate Air America was a colossal failure, and MSNBC lags behind Fox in viewership. "MSNBC is not nearly as important or as trusted a news source for liberals as FNC is among conservatives," Grossmann and Hopkins write. In a Pew survey, "Consistent conservatives overwhelmingly report trusting FNC (88 percent) and receiving at least some of their news from the network (84 percent), compared to 52 percent of consistent liberals who trust MSNBC and just 38 percent who watch it at least part of the time."

Al Franken Discusses Upcoming Protests
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Al Franken's political career is doing better than his radio career.
The result is a situation where Democrats gain most of their information, and build their worldviews, primarily on information from mainstream media sources not aligned with either party, whereas Republicans rely overwhelmingly on partisan media. This has real political consequences. Distrustful voters, Ladd writes, are "more resistant to new information and rely more on their predispositions when forming perceptions of the world around them. As a result, they heavily weigh their partisanship when voting."

Grossmann and Hopkins confirm this, citing a bevy of evidence demonstrating that increased access to only one side's media increases partisanship and ideological commitment in news consumers. The University of Pennsylvania's Matthew Levendusky experimentally exposed study participants to Fox and MSNBC, and concluded that "partisan media make citizens more convinced that their views are the ‘right’ one … make citizens less willing to trust the other party and less willing to support compromise with them, thereby contributing to persistent gridlock … [and] influence vote choice, as well as how citizens come to understand elections."

There's also good evidence that this kind of "selective exposure" is disproportionately powerful among Republicans. "One study found that adding the FNC logo to a news story increased the probability that Republicans would choose to read the story by 25 percentage points, whereas adding CNN’s logo or NPR’s logo reduced the chance by 10 points," Grossmann and Hopkins write. "No equally strong effects occurred among Democrats."

The core distinction: The GOP is an ideological party; the Democrats are a coalition

Grossmann and Hopkins's underlying explanation is that the Republican Party and the Democratic Party are fundamentally structurally distinct. Republicans are "chiefly defined by a common ideological commitment," while Democrats are a "coalition of social groups."

They marshal empirical evidence to back this up. They looked at Democratic and Republican guests' appearances on Meet the Press and found that "Democratic guests were more likely than Republicans to cite particular social or interest groups and referenced demographic groups more than twice as often. … Unlike Republicans, Democrats rarely use media appearances to articulate broader ideological principles."

They also look at data collected about op-ed columns by Georgetown political scientist (and Vox contributor) Hans Noel, and find that "conservative opinion columns are much more likely to mention (conservative) ideological principles whereas liberal columns are more likely to mention demographic groups."

So on the one side you have an ideologically rigorous party/movement that relies on its own newsgathering and information-producing services, leading to an increasingly distinct worldview from Democrats or independents.

"Today, the same patterns of information use and dissemination are repeated in every election and each policy dispute," Grossmann and Hopkins write, "producing a political conversation that is less a 'great debate' over principles and policies than an asymmetric dialogue between combatants who do not share each other’s rules or styles."

How this helps explain 2016

GOP Presidential Candidates Debate In Detroit
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Trump and Cruz on home terrain.
It's unclear how this analysis translates to 2016. On the one hand, the understanding of the Democratic Party as a set of interests perfectly explains why the candidate with broad demographic support and interest group loyalty (Hillary Clinton) beat the ideologically pure candidate who wanted to cleanse the party of its more rightward, pro–Wall Street elements (Bernie Sanders).

The Republican side is trickier. The theory helps explain why Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush were forced out; they were seen as ideologically untrustworthy, and in a predominantly ideological party that's not viable in a nominee. Ted Cruz's rise aligns well with the characterization of the party.

Donald Trump is trickier, given elite conservative media's (and Fox News's) disdain for his views on health care, foreign policy, and entitlements and his past views on abortion. He's also personally gone to war against Fox News, attacking Megyn Kelly for excessively tough debate questions and declining to appear at one January debate. Maybe his rise is a sign of the party getting less ideological and less tied to partisan media.

Then again, it could be saying something about what the ideology undergirding the party, from the point of view of its voters, really is. Whatever else can be said about him, Trump is more consistently anti-immigration and anti-Muslim refugee than any other candidate — positions that, while unpopular in much of the media, have often been embraced in conservative talk radio. It could be that rank-and-file conservatives view those positions, at this point in time, as more crucial than disagreements on health care or Social Security.

This would help explain why talk radio hosts like Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity are either pro-Trump or friendly toward him, even as Fox is skeptical. Maybe Republican primary voters aren't getting less rigorously conservative. Maybe they're telling us something about what they think conservatism really is.

Yes.

Because, if we deserved something better, we'd elect something better. If we deserved something better, something better would run for office. If we were more politically active, more socially aware, and more personally engaged in the process, we'd have never allowed the system to mutate into what we have now.

So we get what we deserve:
Crooks
Hucksters
Charlatans
Snake Oil Salesmen
Spoiled rich young politicians taking over the reigns handed to them by spoiled, corrupt old politicians.

And much of America spends 10-20X more internet clicks, TV time and disposable resources on Keeping up with Kanye Kardashian than they do monitoring the dirty, self-serving deals that go on in DC, their own states, and even thir own home towns.

So, yes... we get the government that we deserve, in the same way absentee/distracted/self-consumed parents get the miscreant children they [failed to] raise. And when those kids get busted by the cops (or their elected politicians get exposed, or when their federal government gets 'Snowdened,') they all cry: "How could this have happened to us?!!!"

______________

Our 'political landscape' is a garden of our own making. If said garden is now overrun with rocks, invasive insects and weeds, it's only because WE were too lazy and inattentive to drag out a hoe and a garbage bag on occasion, and do the bare minimum that's required to have a healthy, self-sustaining ecosystem in our own back yards.

We can blame the media all we want, but the undeniable truth is this: The News is just the latest incarnation of what we saw with the post-80's Music Industry... ratings drive content. And as long as their ratings are gained by pandering to the interests of the shallowest, least sophisticated, and most myopic of our populace, trash coverage is what you'll get.

Garbage in = garbage out.

And WE allowed the garbage to take over... through sloth, lack of vigilance, and a shortened attention span that lost patience for political programming like Frontline, Meet The Press and well-written, considered op-eds by folks like Wm F. Buckley and Gore Vidal. Regardless of politics, authors such as these two elevated the level of discourse, and set the tone for political discussions in bar rooms, barber shops, service clubs and country clubs across America.

___________

Nowadays, everything that's readily available feels (and smells) like TMZ... and I miss those days when true intellectual debate set the standard. I was a punk kid/teenager when I graduated from the funny pages to the editorials, but MAN... what an education I received. Those op-eds formed the basis of my burgeoning adult sensibilities, and they also re-set my relationship(s) with My Pops and the Grand Old Elders of My Family. My elders used my newfound interest in The World to foster and instill in me a love for critical thought and debate.... and challenged me to evaluate the data, form my own opinions, and staunchly defend them in open debate.

Imagine: being 14 years old, and defending Jimi Hendrix's version of The National Anthem to:

A Police Lieutenant (and hardazz WWII vet)
A die-hard Southern Baptist Minister, and regional/national social activist (who marched with ML King in Selma)
A seasoned Jazz Musician (who played with Duke Ellington and Count Basie)
A NASA Engineer (and published Jazz scholar, who had at least 2K LP's in his listening studio)

They had a BLAST that Thanksgiving dinner at Uncie's house... ganging up on me, presenting me with hypotheticals, what-if's... and they crushed me, under the weight of numbers.

(At the end of the night, when hugs were being exchanged all-'round, Uncle Rory [Jazzman] sidled up to me, and said: "Kid- you right... Hendrix is a MF'er! You got good instincts- work with them." Made my entire day.)

From that Thanksgiving on, the talks only intensified. We'd all rush from 'the turkey table' to Uncie's study, and GET IT ON. As I matured, I LIVED for Thanksgiving Weekend. It was the single most stimulating 2 days of my year. I went from a kid who dreaded that boring annual 'adultspeak' to someone who truly valued the familial resources that were made available to him. In short: those talks formed the foundation for the man I was to become.

DC: I owe them all a debt I can never, ever repay.


Needless to say, My familial upbringing was one of challenge, study, and scholastic rigor. My Family would accept nothing less from ANY of us kids.

_______________

A steady diet of lowbrow politics masquerading as entertainment is as debilitating to the mind and spirit as a steady diet of fast food is to the Human Body. Eventually, BOTH are incapable of self-sustaining or warding off infection.

Until we reach that day when a simple majority of 'consumers' says "Enough!"... and demands better from our media, our politicians, and ourselves, we get what we've given ourselves.

Eat your gruel, America.
It's the dinner you've prepared for yourself... in the microwave oven, with dirty tap water, and processed boxed food.


Yum.
Tasty.

Now, swallow what you've cooked for yourselves.
Or... starte demanding better for yourselves.
Starting right (f'ing) NOW.

Not sure if we can be friends with you knocking such wonderful acts as Toto, Duran Duran, Tears For Fears, or Aha!



I think what we lack are people like your family and friends at that Thanksgiving. Hard to find people that can rationally talk about topics like politics, and not have it devolve into "you're a greedy rich person, you're a communist!". I've lost friendships over these kinds of discussions, honestly.

People are "afraid" to talk about politics. A lot of us get into heated debates on here, but nowhere do I harbor ill will towards any of you. Heck, someone who stands in stark contrast to my political ideas sits in my sig as awesome.

I most likely infuriate many of you with my young left ideals, but I meet all of you halfway there. Many of you meet me halfway, too. We may not agree, but we can have a dialogue without name calling. Y'all taught me alot, and we're all better for it.

We get these politicians because not many are willing to sit and talk. I'd probably vote for most of you as president over many of the dolts in the GOP, and Hillary included! (Note: I didn't say Bernie...but that's besides the point)

Good piece DC, I wished I had time to write a meaningful post in response but it all boils down to the American public being manipulated. I read this piece the other day I would encourage all of you to take the time to read it. Like this piece DC posted it exposes why in many cases we do what I call step on our own dicks.

One thing for certain the advent of the internet has made a volume of info available to us to educate ourselves in the process of educating ourselves we learn how manipulated we are. That is a bitter pill to swallow for all of us, but once done we can move away from the ignorant peoples we truly are.

Here is the link please read it... Warning its long but our story as to how we got here is long so it can't be short....

http://www.stirjournal.com/2016/04/01/i-know-why-poor-whites-chant-trump-trump-trump/

I read this last week. It's a very interesting take.

I'll be interested to hear what Dawgs think of it.

[quote=PitDAWG]
One thing has changed in a very vast way since I was a child. The news used to be more of a service to inform our citizens. I would almost say the news services of that time felt it a duty and obligation to be honest and forthright to the people.

I don't want to hijack the thread but I disagree. Not sure how long ago you are referring to, but one of the things I like to do on YOUTUBE is look up new coverage on certain historical events.

The past few weeks I have been watching Network coverage of presidential elections from as far back as the Dewey Truman 1948 election until about 1992.

During CBS' broadcast of the 1980 election one of the correspondents went on about a 3 minute diatribe when it was quite obvious Jimmy Carter would be defeated.

He stated that tonight was a big loss for African Americans (he may have said black but not positive), Women, Hispanics etc & I think a few other minority groups, don't remember them all. Basically he sounded like he was reporting on a funeral. His "speech" was certainly not labeled as "editorial".

I thought maybe Walter Cronkite would at least get into discussion as to why he felt that way but he just seemed to accept it as fact.

In other 80 & 84 coverage there was numerous journalist at the desk (only 3 networks at the time) making what I would consider to be statements of opinion, similar to Ronald Reagan was basically an actor and could manipulate the medium of television, and Carter and Mondale just used poor tactics, but were more virtuous candidates.

Obviously I am a little slanted being a conservative, but the coverage did not seem "unbiased". Only when actual data was being presented did the information and conversation appear level.

I was actually speaking more about the Vietnam war era.