Today in Short Answers to Stupid Questions, reader Ann Applebaum asks Lots of Americans Accept Obama. But Will the World?
A good question Ann! The answer is: yes.
This has been another edition of Short Answers to Stupid Questions.
’08/12 Election
The pernicious influence of the media’s portrayal of Hillary
That the media was biased from the start of her campaign, and not for any good reason either, against Hillary Clinton is no surprise. That’s the poisonous legacy of the 1990s and the Beltway media’s ongoing obsession with Bill’s member and Hillary’s pantsuits. How bad it is can be sampled in the video below.
Media bias against the Democrats in general and especially the Clintons is no news, but the effects this coverage has had on the psyche of the average American and the image they have of Hillary has so far been somewhat neglected, other than in the context of what it means for her campaign. But now we finally have a good example of what six months of Hillary coverage can do to a man.
Back to the red pencil
Not every political campaign can boast that it only took two years for their goals to be reached, but that’s exactly what the Dutch campaign against voting computers can do. Of course to a certain extent they were swimming with the political tide, so to speak. The election disasters in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004 had shown the dangers of relying on voting computers and how easy they could be manipulated by people with malign intents, and when that theoretical danger turned out to be not so theorethical as both types of voting computer in use in the Netherlands turned out to be easily hackable, things came to a head. Already the most vulnerable machine had to be withdrawn just before the last elections and last year a parliamentary commission to investigate voting systems came with their proposal for a safer voting computer, but even this turned out to have problems. So last week the ministry of home affairs bit the bullet and decided to go back to the red pencil.
Now if only the US followed suit. (Hattip: Avedon.)
A Musical Message
For Hillary (and Gordon) and the rest of their entire stinking, hypocritical political generation:
My only comfort is that just like so many others are as a result of their policies, they’ll be dead soon too. Brown Clinton Blair Bush and all their fellow travellers and conspiracists betrayed the postwar ideals of their parents and in the name of ‘neoliberalism’ led us into a world where tyranny’s on the rise not in retreat. Yet still they cling on grimly to power despite almost universal calls for their exit.
The music is about all that they and their fellow greedy boomers with their boundless sense of entitlement and equally boundlessly shallow morals will leave behind them that’s worth cherishing.
Guess Who Said This?
On the fact that the two Democratic candidates have spent as much on the Presidential election as it would cost to bail out the UN and save millions from starvation:
“It’s just god awful. If you think about it, if you compare those amounts of money—and I heard this statistic the other day—to maintain, to maintain status quo of world starvation—that means not improve it…but just for people to hang on, we need $700 million. And these two, have generated more than that already and still people are going hungry.”
Was it Chomsky, or Chavez, or some other rabblerouser? Or maybe the pope or some archbishop or other? Nope.
It was David Letterman.