A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

By now, we should be used to stories like this one, in which mainstream media journalists warn us with ever so much tut-tutting that Republicans win Presidential elections by planning "onslaughts" against Democrats and "scaring" voters--thus fostering and furthering a narrative that states that Democratic victories are triumphs of Light and Truth while Republican victories are illegitimate and only come about because the sheeple are too terrified to vote the other way. Added to this narrative is an epic poem to the wonderfulness of Senator Obama. I am sure that Senator Obama is a very nice and charming guy, but good grief, no one is perfect and there are plenty of things that could be pointed about about Senator Obama's personality and character that would conflict with the hagiography that has been drawn up concerning him.

All of this is fatuous nonsense and I would call it various other things as well if this was not a family blog. Don't tell me that Democrats don't run fear campaigns; on a regular basis, the desperate need to reform entitlements like Social Security and Medicare is sidetracked because of Democratic fear-mongering that Republicans are out to take away the pensions of seniors or the health care of old people. Free trade in general and pacts like NAFTA in particular have been dazzlingly successful in bringing about greater prosperity, but you wouldn't know if from listening to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and others in the Democratic Party link the implementation of free trade policies to widespread job losses and economic downturns (with no evidence or substantiation whatsoever, mind you). The economy has thus far avoided contracting, unemployment is at a very low 5% with the employment picture actually picking up and 95% of homeowners are still able to pay their mortgages, but the facts are ignored you would think that we are in the throes of yet another Great Depression. The surge and the implementation of the counterinsurgency strategy have stabilized the situation in Iraq but we are regularly told that we are "losing" or have "lost" there. And on and on and on.

So you can understand the frustration of people like me who watch demagoguery get raised to an art form on the other side of the partisan divide while at the same time, the mainstream media piously tries to convince us that Democrats are fighting by Marquis of Queensbury rules while Republicans are punching below the belt. The facts don't support this at all and while I have come to recognize that this lack of evidence is never an obstacle for the "reality-based community" and its natural allies in the mainstream media, I nevertheless don't have to like being lied to. And neither do the rest of you.