Wednesday, September 8, 2010

But wait, there's more!

This morning I turned on the radio and heard that a preacher in Florida plans to have a book-burning on September 11. The problem is that the book he plans to burn is the Koran! General Petraeus has asked that he not do so. My first thought was that this is straight out of a Christopher Buckley novel!

Then there was the story about the woman who for years has been involved with a lawsuit pending against the USDA for millions of dollars on behalf of black farmers in Georgia. The Obama administration hired her to have a high level position where? The USDA! But wait, there is more! Someone sent to Andrew Breitbart excerpts of a video in which the woman, Shirley Sherrod, is seen addressing a predominantly black audience, telling them that she had received a request from a poor white farmer for some assistance. The audience appeared to happily receive her initial words that she did not want to help the white farmer. Breitbart published the video. Sherrod was fired from her USDA position

But wait, there's more! It turns out that in fact she did help the white farmer, as a viewing of the entire video, not an excerpt, would have revealed. The "mainstream media," whose biases Breitbart is dedicated to exposing, skewered Breitbart. Breitbart blogs at Andrew Breitbart.com, but he also is the proprietor of three other excellent blogs, Big Hollywood, Big Journalism, and Big Governemnt.

But wait, there's more! An incident had allegedly occurred in which members of Tea Party groups had spat upon two black members of Congress as they were walking into the Capitol building. The Tea Party members also allegedly used the vile "n" word. Breitbart had obtained videos of the members of the black caucus as they walked into the capitol, and in the videos there is absolutely no evidence to support the allegations. Breitbart took the videos to NBC, CBS, and ABC, but none were interested in exposing the fact that no one confronted the Black politicians on their walk to the Capitol. No one from the black caucus has produced videos or eye-witnesses to substantiate their allegations. Do you suppose it is possible a scenario of alleged racism was cooked up by politicians to discredit the Tea Party movement? Nah, that sounds like something straight out of a Christopher Buckley novel!

My point is that a wonderful satirical novelist like Buckley can help us realize that politicians really can have sinister motives behind the actions they take. Laughing at the novel helps us not to take seriously the allegations made by politicans in real life to manipulate us one way or another on issues.

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