seymour

Seymour Hersh was on Democracy Now! this morning. I haven't been paying attention much to the news lately, so it was interesting to get fired up again by some good journalism.

To me, Hersh is the ideal journalist. He plays by the rules, doesn't make stuff up, doesn't run with stuff he can't confirm, but, perhaps most importantly, he doesn't play the phony "unbiased" game. And by that I don't mean that he just looks for stuff that'll back up what he already believes. I mean, he doesn't give lies the same weight he does to truth. And when something or someone is fucked up, he says so.

He's got the right attitude. He says things like "fighting the good fight." It's not dutifully reporting the facts. It's digging in there and showing everyone who's interested what the hell our leaders are doing, especially when it ain't pretty.

God bless him. Because to do otherwise, as so many in my industry do, is to basically fall prey to savvy propagandists.

Anyway, as i said, I haven't been paying much attention to the horrible things that are being done in my name as an American, and I've been pretty happy about that. I've been gardening and reading books and gearing up for what's next, whatever that might be. In the morning, I read Boing Boing instead of the various political sites I had been checking out during the colder months.

And about midway through Hersh's radio chat, I began to feel a bit fatigued. I didn't want to hear it anymore.

I suppose this is a bad thing, but I can't help it. The Bush Administration sucks Satanically. Until something happens to really threaten their power, I'm not sure what more there is to say.

But what's scary about my ignorance prescription is that I actually lost a political argument to my stepdad on Friday. I started to tell him how evil Bush is, especially on foreign policy, and once he conceded that Iraq was a mistake, I didn't have any more ground. Being a regular watcher of TV news and listener to radio, he had a whole bunch more info on the economy and domestic issues than I did.

Of course, considering the sources, I'm guessing it's all bad info. But regardless, I had no ammo to fire back, and I lost.

What to do? I don't want to go digging into that crap any more. Is there a Democratic operative out there who's working up a good catch phrase or two like "flip flopper" that I can just say over and over again, along with everyone else, so we can just get this evil administration shitcanned, so we can move on to the next lesser evil?