Saturday, September 20, 2008

The Media can't help itself, first it was Sexism and Ageism, now it's Alaskism

Whenever I overhear Keith Olbermann and his protege Rachel Maddow speak, I am reminded of Snidely Whiplash from the Dudley Do Right Cartoon and Natasha from the Rocky and Squirrel cartoon. Unfortunately, Snidely Whiplash and Natasha were the bad guys. The same can be said about K.O. and R.M. as they calmly tell us how misguided we are if we believe that Sarah Palin is Vice Presidential material.

I've begun to notice a "pattern" among the liberal media this year. First it was sexism and ageism against the Hillary Clinton campaign, then it was ageism against John McCain, now it is Alaskism against Sarah Palin, all emanating from the LIBERAL MEDIA.

Alaskism means the ridiculing of people from another part of the world where it's cold and dark, a lot. Alaskism's come in many forms. Examples include ridiculing people from Alaska for having tanning beds. Superimposing a bikini clad body under the face of the vice presidential candidate is another way to for the liberal media to Alaskism their way merrily along.

Cuddling up with a loved one in cold, cold, Alaska is a no no according to the puritanical liberal media. If cuddling leads to more intimacy which results in a pregnancy, the liberal media will ridicule that. If the cuddlers have had a "secret" abortion, the liberal media will find out and throw it in their faces.

If the cuddlers have the child, the liberal media will throw that in their face as well for having premarital sex. If the cuddlers have a kid and it has downs syndrome, they'll first blame Sarah Palin for improper pre natal care, then when there is an uproar over that insinuation, the liberal media will claim they dropped the story because of the lack of civility from conservatives responding to the story. (Just ask Alan Colmes). It's as if the liberal media thinks they own the topic of sex and can use it at will to ridicule conservatives.

I just don't understand how liberal media types that live in the continental United States feel entitled to judge our Alaskan neighbors with such arrogance and mockery. Imagine what it must be like that whenever you go outside, you are probably bundled up in several extra layers of clothing. Every single time you go outside, you are wearing twice the clothing, go back inside, unbundle. Bundle, unbundle, all day long. The Great Plains states and surrounding areas have very cold winters as well, I just find it odd for the liberal media to so freely and easily ridicule anybody that lives through months upon months of cold weather.

Hey, lets make fun of moose meat, tanning beds, roads to nowhere, or being mayor of a less densely populated region of the planet. We'd better never inhabit the moon or surely the liberal media would ridicule a place that would be even less populated than Alaska. I could see the liberal media about now, "You were mayor on the moon, HA, you governed less than a hundred people, big whoop." That's about how ignorant Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow sound to me these days.

Here's an idea for the liberal media, don't use your pampered lifestyle in posh, comfortable surroundings to judge people who live in cold, dark, places and have more struggles in a single day than you do in a year.

Being liberal this year means throwing everything against a wall and hyping anything that will momentarily stick. Ironically, many Alaskans make their living using that same approach. The difference is Alaskans don't go around judging the rest of us, too bad the liberal media can't do the same as they smugly judge people who live in less densely populated, harsher conditions than themselves.

I can't stand the 2008 liberal media and the only hope we have is to defeat Barack Obama and cleanse the D.N.C. and MSNBC so I can go back to the party that I used to be a staunch support of, the democratic party.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

A great article! I too wonder what happened to the Democratic party that I once belonged. I left 4 years ago and hardly recognize them anymore.

Alessandro Machi said...

I was very honored to read the following editorial in the New York Times. I think it kind of says the same thing I am saying.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/opinion/12navasky.html?ref=opinion

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Democracy, at 70 Degrees Below Zero
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By VICTOR S. NAVASKY
Published: October 11, 2008
SPEAKING as one who spent almost two years in Alaska, even though it was more than 50 years ago, even though I was only in the peacetime army, even though I merely rose to the rank of private first class (53rd Infantry Regiment, Fort Richardson, just outside Anchorage), even though as a member of headquarters company I was issued snowshoes, whereas most Arctic Frontiersman (as our regimental insignia identified us) were issued skis, and even though Alaska was not yet a state, I believe I speak with authority when I say that at least in those years, Gov. Sarah Palin’s much-mocked claim that Alaska’s proximity to Russia gives one a leg up on matters of national security was, in effect, official United States policy.

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Drew Breckmeyer
Consider Operation Moosehorn. It was the winter of 1956 when the whistle blew and we dutifully packed our rucksacks and moved from the heated comfort of our Fort Richardson barracks to the snows of Big Delta, a few hundred miles to the north, where we set up our tents in temperatures, believe it or not, as low as 70 degrees below zero.

The reason for our maneuvers? As our commander explained it: When the Russians invade the United States they will cross over from the Soviet island of Big Diomede to the Alaskan island of Little Diomede (“You can literally see Russia from Little Diomede,” he told us — I kid you not), and then they will invade the Lower 48 by way of Alaska through Canada. “You,” he assured us, “are our first line of defense.” As the editor of “The Moose Hornblower,” the mimeographed paper officially charged with covering these maneuvers, I can attest that these were his very words. (I can also attest that our headline on the final day was “Moosehorn Blows at Midnight.”)

Such an invasion never took place, but that, I like to think, may have been precisely because the specter of taking on us Arctic Frontiersmen was too frightening for the Soviets to contemplate. Be that as it may, Governor Palin can take solace in knowing that she is not the first to identify Alaska as foremost to our national security.

Governor Palin also may find a lesson in a civilian event I was lucky enough to witness during my Alaskan tour of duty. It began on Nov. 8, 1955, when 55 elected delegates from across Alaska (a number chosen to match the 55 in attendance at the Philadelphia Convention of 1787) descended on the University of Alaska in Fairbanks for their constitutional convention. It lasted for 76 days, long enough for me to take a furlough and hitch a ride to Fairbanks. The idea was to adopt a constitution, elect a Washington delegation (two senators, one representative) and then knock on the door of Congress, applying for admission, which happened on Jan. 3, 1959.

At the time, I thought the high point of the convention came after testimony from representatives of the National Municipal League and the American Political Science Association advising that constitutions should be short and general, and deal with fundamental principles; whereupon a fisherman-delegate from Ketchikan, which then billed itself as “The Salmon Capital of the World” (and had a sign on its docks that read “We Catch What We Can and Can What We Catch”), rose to make a motion that the constitution include a provision banning fish traps. When another delegate explained that while that might be a proper subject for legislation, a constitution should deal only with matters of principle, life-and-death matters as it were, the man from Ketchikan responded, “In Ketchikan, fish traps are a life-and-death matter.”

The result was a document half the size of most state constitutions — and that included a provision for a ballot measure outlawing the use of fish traps in commercial salmon fishing, to be voted upon along with the Constitution itself. (And as soon as the Constitution was ratified, the ordinance abolishing salmon fish traps was passed.)

I was later to discover that the issue had special significance for Alaska, where fish traps were usually operated and owned by people from “the Outside,” as Alaskans say, and seen by the fleets of Alaska’s independent fishermen as a symbol of exploitation by absentee commercial interests. Where Washington was long unwilling to ban “Public Enemy No. 1,” as the fish traps were known back then, the drafters stepped in — perhaps, Governor Palin, tough government regulation hasn’t always been such a terrible thing for Alaska.

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BY the way, fishermen weren’t the only ones whose rights were secured. Written at the tail end of the McCarthy period, the Constitution even protects political smear victims, a timely reminder at a moment when our own national presidential campaign threatens to take a dirty turn.

Although I spent only a brief time in Alaska, and too many of my non-military hours were devoted to consuming more than my share of mooseburgers and whooping it up with the boys at Anchorage’s latter-day Malamute saloon, which stayed open until the sun set, and in summer the sun never seemed to set, as you can see, Alaska made a deep impression on me.

Odd as it may sound, what I miss most (other than the multicolored northern lights zinging around the firmament) is the weather, mainly because of the way in which the fierce Alaskan winters functioned to unite the populace against it. Parka-clad Sourdoughs and Cheechakos, rich and poor, would huddle and joke and complain together; there’s nothing like an Alaskan ice storm to get democratic camaraderie going.

One freezing night, William A. Egan of Valdez, the convention president (who like me had hitched a ride on a truck to get to Fairbanks), interrupted a contentious floor debate to announce that “the temperature is now about 40 below and if the delegates have their cars out there, they probably should start them in order that they will start.”

I’m not sure that this story holds any moral for the Republican candidate for vice president of the United States, who has her own views on the limits of what we can do about climate change, but she should know that by the time the delegates returned, tempers had cooled, and the spirit of compromise that enabled this convention of, yes, mavericks to agree on what many political scientists now regard as a model document, prevailed.

Now that I think about it, Governor Palin could do worse than take a refresher course in her own extraordinary state’s extraordinary Constitution. The document is, after all, a short one.

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Victor S. Navasky, the chairman of The Columbia Journalism Review and publisher emeritus of The Nation, is the co-author of “Mission Accomplished! Or How We Won the War in Iraq: The Experts Speak.”

More Articles in Opinion »A version of this article appeared in print on October 12, 2008, on page WK11 of the New York edition.

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So when you see a dum dum like Keith Olberman wax on and on about Sarah Palin from a comfy New York Studio, you begin to understand what a dimwit Keith Olbermann really is.