Catching up with the News

CATCHING UP WITH THE NEWS

Cosmo, as a retired political science professor and a novice blogger, I thought it sufficient to use blogging as a teaching device. My progress on the learning curve has now made it clear that you can't ignore what's happening on the front page of the newspaper.

So, playing catchup ball on recent headlines, it seemed that something needed to be said on the Shirley Sherrod and Afghan Papers stories. And the most economical thing to do is to merge both into a single, seamless blog.

First, the most redeeming feature of the WikiLeaks stories is that they drove the Sherrod episode off the front page. Once given the full context of her remarks, it was a great story about the small ways in which people learned to exorcise their own personal forms of racism. But the ugly part of the story was that it also featured and exposed once more how easily the media can be manipulated. And while the out-of-context story was launched initially by right wing Fox News, the rest of the media quickly adopted the Fox version to make sure they were not left behind in the electronic news cycle.

But the story also took us into the Jonestown world of right wing talk radio where hosts such as Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, and Rush Limbaugh asked their listeners to believe that the whole episode had been orchestrated by the White House to discredit Fox News.

Now fade to the Afghan Papers.

As a preemptive strike (all tongue in cheek, of course) on right wing talk shows hosts, I would like to advance the theory that the leak of these papers is a deep, subterranean plot by the White House to build up anti-war sentiment and thus empower President Obama to stand by his commitment to begin our exodus from Afghanistan next summer. This argument is given substance by the fact, at least so far, that the papers released came out of the time of the previous Bush administration and thus lets this White House off the hook for the events and mind sets found in the leaked papers. Now, if it hasn't happened already, we can expect Beck, Limbaugh, and Savage to adopt this line of reasoning. If their arguments go in that direction, it will then be a contest of who says it first with the most embellishments. Beck and Savage presented their manipulation theory on the Sherrod case on July 21. Not to be outflanked by his right wing bretheren, Limbaugh made his case the next day. (The struggle among talk show hosts of who speaks most extremely for the right is a stay-tuned saga.)

But when the Afghan Papers leave the front page, what will come next? Perhaps Limbaugh, Savage, or Beck will accuse the White House of having manipulated the creation of the Mayan calender predicting the end of the world in 2012--if Obama is not re-elected.