BIGFOOT SPOTTED IN D.C.
In the looking glass world of the Bush campaign up is down, failure is success, wrong is right, and the media is liberal. Here’s a real gem from the Conservative brain trust.
“The major media will give at least $2 billion worth of friendly coverage to Democrat presidential candidate John Kerry this election year.” So NewsMax Magazine reports in its June cover story ominously titled, “Media War on Bush.” NewsMax arrived at the $2-billion figure by calculating, “the effect of anti-Bush and pro-Kerry coverage by the major media outlets.”
Fascinating. NewsMax has taken Tarot cards and slide rules and made some mathematical calculations based on non-existent media coverage of events that haven’t happened yet. That’s cooking with calculus! The magazine’s staff has also projected the “effect” of future reportage, placed a dollar value on it and charged the whole shebang to the Kerry campaign: a little soft-soft-soft-money gift from the godless fag-loving cabal that is the liberal media of tomorrow.
Let’s say a super-secret epistle from President Bush to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld with a cc to Attorney General John Ashcroft gets leaked to the press. The imaginary memo which could always turn out to be real in the future reads, “Torture those Iraqi pricks till their peckers bleed and their little brown nuts are the size of Texas watermelons.” Now if the media is irresponsible and reports this story without also pointing out that John Kerry is still a boring jerk with funny hair who’s clipped prostate makes him a woman and a feminist and entirely unfit to governÑand if the public reacts to the “Peckergate” in a way that isn’t advantageous to the Bush campaignÑ then all this unbalanced news coverage will have the same dollar value as an anti-Bush ad bought and personally paid for by that Boston asswipe Senator John Kerry. This somehow proves that the American media has a liberal bias, or that it will have a liberal bias by the time the future rolls around. And nobody wants the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud of Kerry votes in the heartland do they?
But let’s be fair about all this and play by NewsMax’s rules. 100% of Fox’s news content would have to be chalked up as an “added value” to the President’s ad buys, now wouldn’t it? Who among us wants to tick up the price of “Mission Accomplished?” And don’t forget to factor in the cost of keeping an aircraft carrier that was supposed to be docked at sea, and also the cost of keeping all our sailor boys who were supposed to be out visiting their families, or catching the clap, or doing whatever it is our fighting seamen do when they’re on dry land these days, on deck for the big show. The production costs alone had to cost millions.
If this isn’t all pataphysics (which it surely is) by NewsMax’s example I may offer honest appraisals of things that have actually happened, right?
Poor NewsMax. It’s become the Weekly World News of political discourse. Conservatives, read the breathless bulleted items hawked on the website and weep for your cause:
“¥ Exposed: How the book publishing industry planned its attack on Bush two years ago — and how you see this bias in almost every bookstore in the nation today.
¥ How Hollywood is giving Kerry a huge boost with an unprecedented amount of anti-Bush propaganda into summer films, from “The Day After Tomorrow” to Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.”
¥ Learn the identity of the angry Hollywood sitcom queen whose anti-Bush propaganda blew up in her face.
¥ Revealed: how the late-night comedians such as Leno and Letterman use their monologues to hurt Bush and help Kerry.
¥ The real reason Hollywood hates Bush (no, it’s not about the war; it’s his Christian faith!).”
Shocking, scandalous, and about as newsworthy as…
Yes. It’s a picture of bigfoot.
