Failing Upwards

It seems the older, the more decrepit, the more delusional John McCain gets, the more and more desirable he gets. The addition to the ticket of a former Alaskan mayor of 7000, someone who promises to be George W. Bush in drag, should've been met with dismissive laughter and universal ridicule. Instead, it's energized his campaign and helped turn Sarah Palin into a self-fulfilling prophecy: An illusion, or delusion, of change.

Yet virtually every major national poll has McCain ahead of Obama by two or more percentage points. I cannot believe this is the result of a massive conspiracy on the part of America's top polling services in order to make the race more competitive than it actually is in order to artificially amp up TV ratings and air time advertising revenue.

However, it does seem odd that Democratic voter registration would be higher than Republican registration while the polls state that Obama is slowly losing his momentum and grip on the race.

One answer to this anomaly, of course, is that more registered Republican voters are being sampled than Democratic voters. Yet, while that wouldn't answer the question as to why these polls are so top-heavy with Republican voters, the bigger question is how this tactic would result in McCain not only establishing a lead but even widening that lead and grabbing ownership of Obama's change mantra that, until recently, he'd ridiculed.

This is a trend that we'd seen before Obama touched American soil after his, by all accounts, successful trip through Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East.

While that, too, was being ridiculed by the McCain campaign (after ridiculing Sen. Obama for not visiting Iraq), that same campaign is proudly trumpeting Sarah Palin's single, brief trip to Afghanistan as a bullet point in her foreign policy resume.

And the press, the vast left wing conspiracy, was only too glad to resurrect what was once a routine and forgettable photo op with the Alaskan National Guard and to present it as something almost on a historical par with Gen. MacArthur visiting the Philippines.

Certainly, the MSM are complicit in the double standard coverage in looking at everything Obama's ever done or said, everything ever done or said by everyone that's he's ever passed on the street with an electron microscope while looking at both McCain and Palin as through a backwards telescope. They hardly even blinked an eye when McCain spit in CNN's face by canceling a Larry King Live interview because Campbell Brown had the nerve to ask a mild question, namely an example of Palin making an honest-to-God foreign policy decision. McCain's faux outrage was bluster masking what amounts to an inability to come up with such an example.

If they were doing their job, we wouldn't be hearing about how Palin's family is offlimits even after they thrust their five kids into the limelight, including the foul-mouthed hockey player who knocked up the Governor's daughter while proclaiming that he didn't want kids. Where was this respect for family privacy when the actual First Family just a decade ago was slid under that same electron microscope over what should've remained a private family matter?

However complicit as the press is, we as free thinking people, as Americans, may be dependent to a large extent on these media outlets but ought to still remain discriminating and independent-minded enough to be able to form our own conclusions. The media have as much as the government a lot of credibility at stake and credibility begins with being taken seriously and believed.

Over the last eight years, we've paid the price (over 4600 families paying the ultimate price) for unconditionally believing whatever the MSM tell us. It was the mainstream media that told us there were WMDs in Iraq. It was the mainstream media that showed us a ready-made poster of all 19 of the 9/11 hijackers, complete with nation of origin, age and underwear size within hours of the attacks and that Mohammed Atta's passport allegedly used to meet with Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague was found blocks from Ground Zero in pristine condition and without a singe mark on it.

And it's the mainstream media that is telling us even now that the McCain campaign is offering an attractive alternative to a fresh, dynamic new force in Democratic politics who stands a real chance of actually bringing about change.

Yet the media have been complicit in letting John McCain use Obama's own popularity against him as if popularity is something that Obama can fraudulently produce by rubbing on a lamp and not, instead, conferred on him by caucus and primary voters who vaulted him over Hillary Clinton and every other Democrat running for President.

It's McCain who's fraudulently producing his own popularity out of nowhere and it's the media and we the people who are letting him get away with it. You don't believe me? Read any poll taken over the last week.