A Tale Told by an Idiot

...is the title of a terrific Salon piece today dealing with the media coverage of the Schiavo case. You'd never know from the way the case has been handled by the broadcast media, particularly the cable monster that still persists in calling itself "news", that over four-fifths of Americans did NOT believe it's the government's job to interfere in a family tragedy, and that most of them would NOT want to be kept alive by whatever means necessary. Instead of focusing on the majority of Americans who are still sane, and who realize, however reluctantly, that death is a necessary part of life, the media decided to ride the Republican self-described "culture of life" pony. Not once have they recognized the inconsistency of advocating life by whatever means necessary for Terri Schiavo, but to completely ignore the ever-mounting casualties of the Iraq war, and the ten Native Americans killed in last week's Minnesota school shooting, or Sun Hudson's termination of life support, or the cruelty of much of the legislation the Republicans are bulldozing through Congress, or for that matter, the 160,000+ lives lost in the December tsunami in southeast Asia.

All this takes place against the backdrop of last night's HBO broadcast of Left of the Dial (review at Mixed Reviews to come next week), the documentary about the rise, fall, and rise of my own personal life preserver in the snake pit that my country has become, Air America Radio. Yesterday marked the network's one-year anniversary, and finds the network on a reasonably solid financial footing, with a new, entertainment industry-savvy CEO in Danny Goldberg, and a lineup that belies the right-wing meme that liberals have no sense of humor. Contrary to the fondest wishes of the wingnut noise machine, AAR has NOT disappeared, and combined with the relatively sane results of the polls on the Schiavo case, indicate that those of us who do NOT see America's mission as being a fundamentalist Christian theocracy still have a pulse, and that at least a shred of sanity still exists in this country.

Of course, with the newly-released report on intelligence failures being responsible for the errors of judgment that led to the Iraq war (color me skeptical) also stating that we are ill-prepared to recognize threats that may be building now, all of this remaining sanity can be crushed in an instant with another terrorist attack. Given how much the Bush Administration benefitted from the 9/11/01 attacks and the blank check most Americans have given it in the aftermath, don't look for the Administration to fix those problems any time soon.