Beam me up, Scotty!

New York Congressman Weiner is a veritable fool but not responsible, like some others, for the deaths of innocents, or maintaining to this day a known torture site in Bagram, Afghanistan, in violation of international law, or disregarding a U. S. law enacted as a check on the power-hungry, bombing-mad executive branch.

Truly a strange country and time we now live in, where apparent peccadillos are excoriated more than manifest heinous crimes. Yes, we’re living in an Orwellian age… War is peace… Breaking the law is defending freedom… Ignorance is something to be proud of…  Lying is the defense of truth…  Hope is the sound-byte for despair…  Murder is justice…  Science is the handiwork of the Devil…  Unemployment is voluntary and the work of shirkers…  The rich need tax breaks to save the rest of us from ourselves…  The poor are a bunch of whiners…  And the greatest infamy of all: Economics is a science, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary…

Oh, for the good old days of the Cold War….when we had a really powerful enemy to keep our Government and the rich in line at least half of the time…but you can’t go back again, so Beam me up, Scotty!

~ Greg Driscoll

Of public officials, the media, and parables

ALERT! ALERT! New York Congressman Weiner just had a news conference and admitted the pictures were of him, and that he sent them; he apologized but didn’t resign.

The corporate media in this country – and the nation by extension – have become a laughing-stock — here is a man in the public eye who made a stupid decision and the media are like sharks, covering this story here in NYC almost interminably day after day. Meanwhile, we have a president who violated the War Powers Act in regard to Libya and the same corporate media really don’t seem interested in that, or the previous president’s unnecessary war in Iraq, which, besides being illegal, has contributed to the trashing of America’s reputation, undermined our laws and Constitution, resulted in over 4,000 American deaths and tens of thousands of wounded, and hundreds of thousands if not a million Iraqi deaths in addition to who knows how many civilians wounded, and contributed immensely to our deficit and the further destruction of one of the Middle East’s most advanced nations — all not as newsworthy as a congressman’s stupid personal foible that had no effect except on his own family and the few other persons involved in his sending the pictures.

I guess it falls under a variation of the Christian New Testament parable’s story about the mote in someone’s eye and the “beam” in one’s own; the corporate media should read the holy book, not for divine guidance, but for some practical wisdom…

~ Greg Driscoll