Everybody talks about the weather but…wait a minute! Why is everybody talking about the weather during the election year political conventions? First we had the liberal media trying to shame the Republicans into cancelling their Tampa convention entirely on the theory that it would be heartless and, yes, racist to “party” while Hurricane Isaac was “drowning black folks” in New Orleans. That was disgraceful and stupid, and now the conservative media, led by Rush Limbaugh, is claiming that there is a conspiracy by Democrats to blame the weather in Charlotte—and even to get liberal media outlets to falsely forecast a storm–to provide cover for the change of venue for President Obama’s speech from a 70,000 seat open stadium to a 20,000 seat arena. I’m not kidding—all the conservative talk shows were blatherings about this all day, as were many of the red blogs. Their point: Obama couldn’t fill the 70,000 seat stadium, so this is a face-saving measure that the media is assisting by hyping the threat of storms. And maybe that is why the speech is being moved—WHO CARES?
There is a duty on the part of those who engage in high-profile coverage of politics, not merely to be fair and accurate, but not to degrade the process and trivialize our elections in the process. No wonder so many Americans, indeed a majority, are so alienated by the political process and its coverage that they can’t be bothered to vote. With all the issues, critical, nation-defining ones, that the two parties need to clarify and articulate their view on to the nation, pundits are attacking the parties because of their responses to the weather? The conservative weather nonsense is less offensive than the race-baiting over Isaac, but at least twice as stupid. What does the size of Obama’s audience have to do with employment, Iran, Afghanistan, Solyndra, Fast and Furious, immigration reform, the deficit, the debt..anything? This is playground-level nonsense, babies throwing sand in the sand box, and it hurts America. If this kind of utter garbage is going to decide our elections, then why should anyone care about issues or the real abilities and character of the men running for office?
America needs to care and pay attention, yet our trivial, petty, polarized, biased, incompetent, arrogant, nasty, silly, partisan media is going out of its way to make the campaign so sordid and absurd that soon only sordid and absurd voters will be able to stomach it.
_____________________________________
Spark: Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin
Sources:
Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at jamproethics@verizon.net.
Ethics Alarms 
I am convinced we need a viable third party. I know everyone will say “you are wasting your vote on a third party” and “it will split the country”, but I think we need one. We have two, incredibly polarized parties who only care about power and their ideological agenda. You can see it in the Democrats who try to push a socialized medicine agenda to the exclusion of all else during a recession and debt crisis and the Republicans who only seem to want to block the Democrats to regain the White House. No one talks about the real issues or real solutions to our problems. When Paul Ryan is the outstanding example of someone willing to talk about solutions to our debt problems (and he is), we are in trouble. Our debt situation is similar to Greece’s and we have one party that wants to expand social programs and another that wants to lower taxes!
We need a third party because a third party has nothing to lose. Third party candidates can focus on Social Security, what we ACTUALLY need to do about our debt, what kind of healthcare policy can we afford, how a foreign policy of the US needs to act in the interests of freedom AND to the benefit of the US, and how to reasonably balance freedom and security in today’s world. I haven’t heard any of this from our two major candidates. If you think you have, answer a few questions; given that the root problem with Social Security is that expenditures exceed income by 25%, how do the candidates plan to increase SS income (already 14-15% of everyone’s pay) or cut outlays by 20%?, how are they going to fix the fact that we borrow 40% of out current budget given that 61% of our current budget is social programs/retirement programs (basically, our taxes ONLY cover the entitlements, we borrow for all other services of government)? Will they slash social programs by half? Eliminate the armed forces, federal research, road, education, agricultural, immigration, border control, and law enforcement functions?, and we spend 2-3x what other industialized countries do on healthcare despite the fact that we aren’t even covering everyone and we only have about 1/2 the physicians we need, how do they plan on getting a coherent, supportable health care plan to cover all Americans without drastically cutting the costs of healthcare (salaries of healthcare workers)? You haven’t heard any of that from our major parties. We need a courageous third party to get serious media time to discuss these problems and force our major parties to respond. Basically, we need a class A jerk to run a high profile presidential campaign. Where, oh where is Ross Perot when we truly need him?
What Michael said.
I didn’t hear Rush’s comments on this but I doubt he devoted much of his 3 hour show to it. It’s a silly, side-story, yes; but certainly worthy of light discussion. Upon further reflection, I think this story does have some news value: at the very least, it might teach the casual observer to view the machinations of either party with a critical eye. I agree that American politics is less about issues and more about party loyalty and spectacle (has is ever been otherwise?). But stories like this are not the cause but rather a symptom of the current state. Anything that encourages the populace to take a look behind the curtain and encourage critical thinking can be of benefit.