wither in the light

This morning's New York Post confidently declared that John Kerry had chosen Dick Gephardt as his running mate, just hours before Kerry announced that Senator John Edwards was in fact his choice for VP. The Post did a quick turn-around that would have made the Ministry of Disinfomation proud, but as usual The Smoking Gun managed to snag a copy before it all went into The Place of Forgetting.

Two things come to mind:

In the last election, the sheer weaseliness of BushCo might not have been enough to give them the edge, but when FOX News declared him the winner all of the other newspapers in the country figured if FOX said it, it must be true, so they said it too. After that the damage was done, the people were strongly divided and turning against each other, and even if Bush's daddy didn't own most of the Supreme Court they'd have had to give Bush the win. Think about the Rodney King thing - popular opinion can sway a court's decision, especially if the populace in question is burning a whole bunch of shit down while the court is thinking about what to do.

It's a pity that just as the court can be swayed by popular opinion, so too can popular opinion be swayed by the media... FOX News is just a legitimized version of the National Enquirer as far as factual content goes; they're the granulated white sugar of news media.

The other thing is, and I say this with whatever respect Dick Gephardt may or may not be due: we've had a Dick as VP for the past 4 years. (And more abstractly, one as pResident as well.) It's time to get the dicks out of the White House.