Obama: is America ready for this dangerous leftwinger?

[darko.]

Don't worry, Dennis. Obama won't be pulling troops out

[Captain Beefheart]

If the press really were rabidly liberal, it's hard to imagine they would have taken the Lewinsky issue so seriously, and almost as hard to imagine that they would not have debunked the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in a thorough yet dissmissive fashion. I suspect all the hot air about a "liberal media establishment" has contributed to a rightward march if only because privately liberal journalists are deathly afraid of being tagged with the liberal epithet through the content of their coverage.

People in the US who get all their news from the big national media end up believing right-biased falsehoods, and holding extreme unfounded rightist political opinions, much more often than those who get at least some of their news elsewhere. (We see this even in the slight tendency "left" (not left of center, left of right) of personal opinions of reporters. Reporters see more news before the filtered presentation than most people, and sometimes read outside and independent sources, both factors that bias one to "left" opinions in the US.)

It may seem crazy to argue that people can be substantially misinformed about the state of the society they inhabit, but then again many Americans actually believed that the economic recovery a couple of years ago was a direct result of Bush tax cuts or that the associated debt increase wouldn't have long term negative consequence for the economy.

I still have reservations about the idea that people born and raised in a police state, with weapons free foreign soldiers camped out in their proverbial backyard, would be mostly honest when asked about their attitude regarding continued military occupation of Iraq. Even if U.S. forces had been greeted in the streets of Baghdad with flowers and candy instead of snipers and IEDs, I would still be skeptical of the wisdom of long term military occupation.

At the end the lives of Iraqis will not be improved by this at all. The Shia death squads will still roam around with thier vendettas, the Sunni death squads will roam around seeking to destabalise the country and hope for a return to power, the central government will remain hopelessly weak and ineffectual and its army consisting of battalions split along ethnic lines straining at the leash to become embroiled in defending thier respective peoples from the death squads. The criminal killing will continue.

[Moshe..]

My favourite hero at school was palmerston. I think his family were some kind of irish viscountcy. Ok I have a palmerston fetish! He was school legend anyway, he totally decimated china. Ran for re-election at 80 years. People didn't think he had it in him. THen decided to get an 18 year old pregnant, or so it was rumoured. Won the election by a landslide! Very sadly this was in the days before proper foam heat insulation had been installed at downing street. It was very draughty in his study. After a few weeks poor thing died from chills. It's how bertrand russell's grandfather got into office. And oh my god the russell family were some genuine hippies. Bertrand's dad used to share his wife with the butlers. Strictly in adherence to the egalitarian principle.