Laura Bush and the press

I guess I ought to weigh in on Laura Bush's stand-up performance in which she told jokes about male strippers and milking a male horse. Now the jokes don't really bother me. I'm not a prude. I just know the same jokes would have caused outrage had they been told by Democrats. But our lap dog press just laps it up. David Rossie, in his article, "Bush league media behave like lap dogs" discusses the issue:

Imagine, if you will, Teresa Heinz Kerry or Hillary Clinton going on national television and telling a joke about her husband masturbating a horse.

And had that happened, imagine the reaction of some of our more ardent moral preceptors such as Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly, Falwell, Dobson, Savage and Bennett. The outpouring of pious flapdoodle would have been of tsunami proportions.

But since it was Laura Bush who laid that shopworn gag on the crowd at the White House Correspondents' Association's annual dinner, it was acceptable, because, well, because she and her husband go to church regularly, and because Republicans are exemplars of moral values, the odd off-color joke notwithstanding.

Rossie then proceeds to describe the reality of our mainstream press today:

As Robert Kennedy Jr. pointed out in a recent Vanity Fair article, the far right not only has control of the legislative and executive branches of government, it has virtual control of most of the mass media. The extreme right controls talk radio. Conservative corporations control the purse strings of the major television news operations, not just Fox News, which is an unabashed organ of the Republican Party.

It was not by chance that Bob Schieffer was named moderator of the final presidential debate last fall. As Kennedy noted, Schieffer asked not a single question about the environment, concentrating instead "on abortion, gay marriage and the personal faith of the candidates, an agenda that could have been dictated by Karl Rove."

And who's to say it wasn't?

He ends with a quote by Bill Moyers:

We have an ideological press that's interested in the election of Republicans, and a mainstream press that's interested in the bottom line. Therefore we don't have a vigilant, independent press whose interest is the American people.

It's going to be hard to turn the tide in this country without a truly free press and with suspect voting machines. Here's where we need reform the most. Let me close by recommending the website Media Matters. It's a wonderful watch dog for the lap dogs. Media Matters regularly exposes factual inaccuracies, omissions and the blatant bias of the mainstream press. As far as the voting machines go, I think the only thing to do is hound the Democratic National Committee about it. Until they raise hell and keep raising it, nothing will happen.