What about “the children” …

It’s always about “the children,” isn’t it? 

We can’t deport illegal immigrant parents because of “the children.” We can’t stop unaccompanied minors flooding our borders because of “the children.” Or deny healthcare and other benefits to illegals because of “the children.”

We can’t curtail rampant food-stamp fraud because of “the children.” We can’t force deadbeat parents to pay up for school lunches because of “the children.”

We can’t do a damn thing to control our borders, kick the undeserving off public assistance, and wean able-bodied people off cradle-to-grave addiction to government money because there’s always the possibility it might hurt “the children” in one way or another. 

Children have become the ace in the hole for anyone who doesn’t want to face the consequences of their own actions. Children trump the disabled and the elderly in the hierarchy of victimhood. They are number 1 with a bullet. All anyone has to do is trot out “the children” and politicians of all stripes cave to whatever demands, no matter how ridiculous and unwarranted.    

Illegals and their supporters know this. Social activists know this. The poverty-industrial complex practically wrote the book on this.

I have nothing against children. I despise people who use them as pawns.

Especially their parents.

There is a special place in Hell, I hope, for people who refuse to take even the most fundamental responsibility for their offspring.  Like protecting their children from danger. Feeding their children. Ensuring their children get at least a basic education.

And particularly those parents who use their children as leverage – hostages, really – to gain greater benefits for themselves. Or to avoid the consequences of breaking our laws.  Or as an excuse for their own bad behavior.

I have zero sympathy for the illegal immigrant parents of “dreamers” smuggled in here as children; the parents knew exactly what they were doing. I feel even less compassion for illegals who come here pregnant expressly to deliver an anchor baby they can use to hold off possible deportation in the future. 

In both cases, they are using their children as pawns. That’s despicable. Anyone who does this should be deported as soon as they are discovered – immediately, a year from now, or 20 years or more from now. There should be no time limit. 

Their children might be blameless, but they aren’t.   

However, much worse happens among our own legal citizens.

How many times have we heard of a seven- or eight-year-old shot or run over after midnight on a school night? Then they can’t find the mother, or father, because they’ve abandoned the child to his or her grandparents. Or the stories about a toddler left to die in a hot car while the mother was shopping, or gambling with her boyfriend in a casino, or shooting up God knows where?  Or about one or more disabled children kept in closets or basements and starved while their mothers and their boyfriends collected benefits intended for those children?

Or the recent horrific local story about three-month-old Ayden beaten to death by his father, Larry Perry, because the child wouldn’t stop crying? Quoting from the Orlando Sentinel website: 

“Perry threw Ayden into the bedroom wall two or three times, hitting the back of his head, he later said when he recreated what happened for police. He put Ayden on the bed and twisted his neck, picked him back up, brought him to the living room and dropped him onto the floor. Then he stomped on his face and chest, leaving what the medical examiner said were bruises in the shape of the pattern on the sole of Perry’s house slipper on Ayden’s cheek.”

I am absolutely enraged when I hear stories like those above, and especially this last one. And some still wonder why I believe people should be licensed to have children. 

Although this won’t help bring back Ayden, an Orlando jury just did the right thing and voted unanimously for the death penalty for Perry. Stoning would be appropriate.   

On a less tragic note, but still disturbing, is the trend toward government taking over virtually sole responsibility for feeding school-age children from low-income families. 

I don't want low-income children to go hungry, but this is spiraling out of control.  

It’s not just school lunches, but now breakfasts, lunches, dinners and snacks. It’s also not just during the school year, either – it’s becoming a year-round thing. This, mind you, is in addition to the SNAP (food stamp) program for low-income families that gives added benefits for families with dependent children.  As a reminder, participation in the SNAP program has increased by 70% since 2008 to a point where almost 47-million Americans now receive benefits.

With so many families now getting SNAP benefits from the government, why can’t so many low-income families provide food for their own kids? And since when is it not the parent’s responsibility to feed their own child?

This is one of the most basic parental responsibilities I would think.

You can’t blame families for taking advantage of this.  Nobody leaves free money on the table; it’s just basic human nature. However, it is addictive and sends the wrong message.    

Let me explain.

If you tell parents that their kid’s school will feed their kid lunch for free, they’ll take it.  The same goes for free breakfast, dinner and snacks – if parents don’t have to pay for it themselves they won’t.  It’s free money, and they can use their SNAP benefits for something else; maybe a fancy birthday cake or other extravagance like porterhouse steaks or snow crab legs. 

Which they will. Just watch the use of EBT cards in your local grocery store or Walmart.

Free food at school becomes addictive. Low-income parents have already now factored that into their household budgets. So when anyone talks about curtailing or tightening qualifications for SNAP, or God forbid, doing the same for free school feedings, there’s an uproar.

You’ll be hurting “the children.”  Because while their low-income families have become accustomed to saving money on feeding their kids to finance a better lifestyle – with the latest smartphones, cable TV and high-speed broadband, and dressing themselves and their kids in the latest fashions – making them pay more to feed their own kids would jeopardize that.

So, in the end, it’s almost never about “the children”; it’s almost always about their parents.

The same money-on-the-table theory applies to health insurance for children as well. You can have a pretty good household income and still get subsidized insurance for your kids.

In New Jersey, for example, for a family of four you can have a household income (HHI) of a bit over $87,000 a year and qualify. That rises to an annual HHI of about $102,000 for a family of five, and about $117,000 for a family of six.  

Candidly, that's far from "poor." 

Why do states do this? Simple. A lot of parents – no matter how well-off – just aren’t willing to cut into their lifestyle to pay for health insurance for their own children. Hell, they don’t even want to pay for their own health insurance, much less their kids’.  

Once again, insuring and protecting the health of “the children” is the rationale. But in reality, it’s just another government-sponsored bribe to get people to do what they should do anyway if they were responsible parents. 

Liberals know that once something is free or heavily subsidized by the government, there will be Hell to pay to ever claw that back. “The children” are just an excuse to keep the free stuff and discounts flowing to their parents. And to ensure recipients of this government largesse continue to vote for those who promise to retain it.  

Curiously, those on the left like to play “the children” card whenever it suits them, but typically support Planned Parenthood – which has made a profitable industry out of aborting potential children and selling their body parts and organs. It's hard to imagine any other organization more clearly not on the side of "the children."  

These same ardent advocates on the left for “the children” are also almost always opposed to school vouchers in any form. This hurts low-income parents who actually give a damn about their kids’ education and want to move them from failing public schools to better and safer charter and parochial schools. But because the teachers’ unions – big contributors to Democrat and liberal politicians – are opposed, school vouchers always face fierce opposition from the left. 

Finally, and perhaps the most egregious disregard for “the children,” comes from our own courts.  Ultra-liberal judges seem to hand out astonishingly weak punishments to parents who repeatedly abuse their own children or allow their children to be abused by others.       

So spare me the moralistic preaching about “the children.” If you are really interested in protecting “the children” then you should address the parents who don’t really give a damn. And the politicians who use "the children" as mere props.  

They’re the ones selfishly using and abusing children.  

There’s nothing lower.  

Careful what you wish for …

The Republican Party is dead.

That’s something a lot of Democrats and the left have dreamed of for decades.  It’s something I also believe they will regret in the years to come.

The Republican Party essentially committed suicide. For years Republican Party leaders have whined about not having enough control of the House, Senate and Oval Office to put through their agenda. If only Americans elected more Republicans, great things would happen. 

Well, Americans elected more Republicans to the House and Senate. They even elected a nominal “Republican” as President.

And the result has been nada, zip, zed, bupkis.

Republicans can’t seem to accomplish anything. They can’t repeal ObamaCare. They can’t push through meaningful tax reform. They don’t have a plan to reduce deficits or cut wasteful spending. They haven’t dealt with the skyrocketing cost of entitlements. They appear unable to fulfill any of their other promises, too, even though they have controlling majorities in both houses of Congress and the Presidency as well. 

They’ve entirely missed the point of the last election. Voters wanted real change. Voters wanted ObamaCare to be killed and insurance premiums to come down.  Voters wanted tax reform. Voters wanted deficits cut and wasteful spending curtailed. Voters wanted to tighten the rules on who gets entitlements and to stop rewarding able-bodied people who could work but won’t.  And voters wanted to stop or at least slow down illegal immigration.

So far Republicans have delivered on none of these. If anything, elected Republicans in Congress have proved entirely incapable of passing any legislation of note. Oh, there are many reasons for this, but the bottom line is this: they have failed to deliver on any of their promises. 

It would be easy to blame Trump for their legislative impotence. Yet the truth is only Trump seems to be focused on delivering on his campaign pledges. The party that should be backing him lacks the spine, or perhaps even the political savvy, to do what voters demanded. 

Republican incumbents in Congress will be punished for this. Harshly, I suspect. Trump will remember all those who waffled on his agenda, and especially those who fought it. I fully expect him to support primary opponents of anyone who stood in his way.  And it would be wise for everyone to remember that Trump won last time by running against the Washington establishment, and the Republican Party poohbahs in particular.     

He’ll remind voters of what they wanted. He’ll point out who was too afraid to stand up and be counted when push came to shove. He won’t care what Republican Party leaders want; he’ll only care about electing people who will back his agenda, which might even include some Democrats or Independents. At the same time, he’ll put the fear of terrible consequences in other Republican incumbents up for re-election after this cycle.

Yes, that’s bullying. But voters put him into office to bully the weak and force the wishy-washy, go-along-to-get-along Washington lifers to get with the program. 

Voters have tried to send a message to Washington through successive elections in recent years. Voters want real change. Voters don’t want a continuation of liberal and “compassionate conservatism” policies anymore – they want heads to roll in the bureaucracy, deadbeats and fraudsters to stop fleecing taxpayers, real immigration enforcement, and people in government to finally act more on the behalf of the legal citizens than themselves or special interests.   

Democrats misread the voting public’s disapproval of what Republicans in the House and Senate are doing – or, actually, what they haven’t been able to do – as a golden opportunity to put more Democrats in office and regain control.

They are hearing the wrong message. 

Voters dislike Congress – both Republicans and Democrats – and the inability of Congress to get anything useful done. It’s not about the two parties; it’s about the way Congress operates, seemingly oblivious to what the average American voter really cares about. Voters now are so thoroughly disgusted with the antics of those in Congress from both parties that Congress’ approval rating hovers around 20%, with about 74% disapproving of the current Congress.         

The media like to constantly point out Trump’s low approval rating. But at 37% approval of his performance, even after all his missteps, Trump’s a rock star compared to Congress.  Plus, he’s still got three more years in office ahead to turn things around. The media and Democrats’ constant attacks on Trump are so hyperbolic and frenzied these may boomerang over time and ultimately may make him a more sympathetic figure. It’s happened before. 

Trump aside, with Congressional Republicans in disarray Democrats are clearly salivating over the 2018 House and Senate elections.

They shouldn’t. Voters dislike them as much as Republicans.  And as the recent special elections should have demonstrated, simply being a Democrat opposed to Trump isn’t enough. 

If things continue as they are, I expect another wave election in 2018.

I expect Democrats to lose more seats in each chamber. I also expect some incumbent Republicans to lose seats in both chambers as well. 

How is that possible?  Quite simply, I expect some incumbent Republicans to be primaried out of running by more conservative, and more aggressive challengers only nominally affiliated with the Republican Party, much like Trump.  Many of these new challengers will go on to win in the general election against increasingly left-leaning Democrats. I also expect some Senate Democrats in states Trump won handily to lose to more Trump-like challengers this time around.

So “Republicans” will likely maintain control of the House and Senate but with some new faces in the seats their more timid predecessors once held. The newcomers will likely be less tolerant of business as usual, or even House and Senate “traditions,” but also more focused on getting meaningful things done quickly than those from the old Republican Party.

And that will spell the end of the Republican Party as we’ve known it. 

If Democrats hate the Republican Party now, just wait until they have to deal with what comes after it’s gone.  What comes next will be far less pliable. Far less interested in “reaching across the aisle.” Far less interested in making deals with moderate Republicans, much less Democrats. 

And if Republican and Democrat Party leaders don’t get the message voters have been trying to send in recent elections, I think this trend will continue on through 2020 and beyond, until voters have put as many of the Republican and Democrat establishment as possible out to pasture.

A third-world country with a big army …

That’s Iran. That’s North Korea. 

That’s also Russia. 

Which one is the bigger threat?  That all depends on who you talk to. 

For my money, it’s a toss-up between Iran and North Korea.

Iran is a theocracy run by mullahs espousing a religion which in its most extreme forms has all the hallmarks of a death cult. There aren’t a lot of other world religions that reward those who die while killing non-believers – including women and children – with an express ticket to Paradise.  Plus, the leadership takes every opportunity to proclaim “Death to America,” even while negotiating with our diplomats over slowing Iran’s nuclear weapons program. 

Did that ever give Barack Obama or John Kerry pause?  Nope, not for a minute. What could possibly go wrong with that?  

North Korea is a dynastic dictatorship with a near-religious worship of the Kim family (Koreans put family names first), including the current ruler Kim Jong-un. The Kim family has maintained control over North Korea for many decades now, living quite luxuriously while the population – except for the military – starves. North Korea does have a huge army, masses of artillery on its southern border with South Korea within striking distance of Seoul, and is developing and testing not just nuclear weapons but also the means to deliver these on new generations of missiles. 

Like Iran, North Korea hates us and everything we stand for.

For decades diplomats around the world including our own have tried to convince North Korea to tone it down a tad. They tried bribing North Korea with food, fuel, economic assistance, and foreign investment. None of this ever worked. Also like Iran, North Korea has the same death-cult mentality. However, in the North Korean leadership’s view it’s better for all North Koreans to die if they can take out everyone else in the process.

At least the Iranian extremists have a goal – unite the world’s Muslims to establish a global theocracy governed by Sharia law.  I don’t think anyone is sure what the North Koreans want as an end game. I don’t know if even Kim Jong-un does. 

Both Iran and North Korea are irrational to many of us. And scary. 

But to Democrats and Republicans like John McCain and Lindsey Graham, and of course our media, Russia is now the real threat to us.

There’s no doubt that Russia is a geopolitical rival. Then again, so is China.  Yet I can’t remember either one of those – since Khrushchev and the passing of Mao – ever threatening to annihilate us.  Iran and North Korea do that all the time. And they are both developing the means. 

It wouldn’t be in the economic self-interest of either Russia or China to start a war with us.  Their respective leaders may be duplicitous and conniving – most world leaders are – but they aren’t crazy. Also, both countries lost millions of people in WWII alone and aren’t willing to lose millions more in what would surely be an all-out nuclear holocaust for little if any gain. 

Iran and North Korea, on the other hand, seem to welcome a war; Iran expects to survive with help from Allah, while North Korea doesn’t seem to care if anyone survives. 

So why the recent obsession with Russia?

Well, the Russians are well-documented weasels. They have a lot of conventional weapons, a big army, and huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons, which make them dangerous, but not really our equal militarily for a variety of reasons. The Russians realize that. 

So instead of getting into a head-to-head military face-off with us even with conventional forces, they tend to focus on stealth and misdirection to accomplish their objectives.  That’s how they got Crimea, pretending they weren’t involved when they actually were, behind the scenes. 

They’ve become very good at using disinformation, cyberattacks, and subterfuge to confuse and disorient their adversaries to achieve their strategic objectives. That’s much less expensive, in manpower and resources, than using troops, tanks and artillery to get what they want. That’s important because the Russians really don’t have the money to go all out in traditional warfare. 

It’s actually pretty smart. And they don’t have a lot of alternatives.

Their army may be big, but it’s not very good, very well equipped, or very well trained.  Or even that highly motivated.  The same goes for their air and sea forces.  About half their armed forces are comprised of poorly paid conscripts serving 12-month service obligations; that’s not a great way to establish a professional military. We know from our own experience. 

Russian specialized units – such as Spetsnaz – are on par with similar units in other parts of the Western world, but the rank and file members of the rest of its armed forces aren’t.          

The current – and probably for the foreseeable future – leader is Vladimir Putin, who rose through the ranks of the KGB to lead post-Soviet Russia.  Putin has made no secret of his desire to reassemble the Soviet Union. He’s moved on parts of the Ukraine, annexed Crimea, and used Russia’s oil and gas exports to intimidate parts of the old Soviet Union. 

He’s not a good guy. Again, most world leaders aren’t. But he is smarter than most. He knows how to game international politics and leverage the power he has like few others. 

Nobody should trust him or his word about anything. Or doubt his resolve to maintain and build power. His political enemies inside Russia go to jail, or get killed. Protestors and journalists get beaten or sometimes disappear altogether. He’s a de facto dictator, albeit popularly elected. 

The majority of Russians love him. His popularity there is off the charts. He’s making a lot of Russians proud by standing up to the rest of the world and – in the eyes of many in Russia – reclaiming the role the old Soviet Union had as a world power to be reckoned with. 

Still, he leads a country that continues to be a third-world nation with a big army. They make and sell pretty good weapons systems and produce a lot of oil and gas, but that’s about it. There’s not much else to their economy beyond that.

Maybe that’s why Barack Obama laughed off Mitt Romney’s assertion that Russia was our biggest geopolitical threat today. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1980s Democrats didn’t see Russia as a big deal. Even before then, they often ridiculed Reagan for his focus on the Soviet Union as part of the "evil empire."

Now, of course, it’s an entirely different matter.

Why? Because Democrats need a scapegoat – a pure evil boogie man – to blame for their historic losses in the last election and the easiest play is to blame Putin and the Russians.  After all, didn’t Trump say he wanted better relations with Russia? And that he admired Putin? Then there was Trump’s joke – or was it? – that if the Russians could find Hillary’s 30,000 missing e-mails he’d appreciate it.  

Democrats and the media are in a frenzy about all things Russian.    

That’s helping take the focus off bigger threats, I believe.  

Okay, so maybe the Russians actually did hack the DNC and released e-mails from that hack to WikiLeaks. 

To which I say: So what?

Compared to real existential threats from a nuclear Iran and North Korea – two looney-tune countries who openly want to destroy us – Russia is mouse nuts.

Half of our population are nuts …

And we can thank our politicians and media for that. 

The crazies only watch the media outlets that confirm what they already believe. In a bizarre form of codependency, ratings – and ad dollars that follow ratings – increase for those outlets by pandering to conspiracy buffs, instead of reporting factual news. 

The constant barrage of half-truths and fake news only feeds the collective insanity.  And make no mistake, there’s a lot of intentionally misleading “news” put out every day. Reporters and their bosses know much of it is unverifiable and quite possibly entirely untrue, yet they run with it anyway.  It’s what their respective audiences want, facts be damned.

So much for ethics in journalism and objectivity.

Now, “ethics,” “journalism,” and “objectivity” have been non-sequiturs in this country since the founding of the nation. Even in my Journalism 101 class decades ago the instructor made clear that no one can be completely objective when they write the news; at best a “true” journalist should always strive hard to maintain as much objectivity as possible when reporting news.

Very few bother anymore. Objectivity makes for boring news.  And boring news – however factual and valuable to public discourse – doesn’t get the ratings advertisers demand. 

Conspiracy theories, no matter how outlandish, do. 

When Obama was running for President – and later when he was President – conservative media focused on conspiracies about him. Was Obama a U.S. citizen?  Did he have something to hide in his college transcripts? Was he really a Muslim? Did he bow to the Saudis?

And for the online black-helicopter aficionados:  Did he have Federal agencies try to buy up all the ammunition so gun owners here couldn’t get any?  Did Obama secretly plan to create a parallel para-military force he alone controlled?  Oh boy. 

Today we have the Russian conspiracy to hack and alter the results of the last election. Was Trump’s campaign working hand in hand with the Russians?  Is Trump refusing to release his tax returns because he has something to hide?  Do the Russians have damaging info on Trump involving sex with prostitutes? Is Trump a sexual predator?  Is he possibly insane?   

It’s all unverifiable bullshit. But it helped build ratings. The crazies eat this up.    

Ratings for Fox News and conservative talk radio soared during Obama’s term.  Now that Trump is in office, ratings for CNN and MSNBC are way up. The reason for both surges is simple:  Fox News and conservative talk radio catered to audiences that didn’t like Obama and his policies, or the more progressive direction in which he was pushing the country.  CNN, MSNBC and most of the major urban newspapers now cater to the mirror image: people who don’t like Trump and his policies, or the direction in which he apparently wants to push the country.

While Fox News and conservative talk radio focused on Obama’s failures during his term in office, CNN, MSNBC and the New York Times and Washington Post now do the same to Trump. 

That’s not surprising.   

However, in fairness to Fox News in particular, I don’t think Fox’s reporting about Obama’s failings was nearly as harsh as what we’re seeing from CNN and others about Trump. There’s a new nastiness, pettiness, and vindictiveness, and at times wanton disregard for the facts, from the more liberal media about Trump that’s unparalleled in my memory. 

While most Americans take what CNN, Rachel Maddow and the New York Times and Washington Post report with increasing skepticism, this isn’t the case overseas. Their bias may be obvious to many Americans, but it’s not apparent to many international media outlets.

That’s causing us serious problems internationally. 

Every now and then you see a poll of Europeans about Trump. Spoiler alert – they think he’s a buffoon. So do many world leaders. 

And here’s why: Almost all the “news” they get about America is from CNN, the Times or the Post.  Having just returned from Europe, I can tell you that the BBC and practically all the other “international” news broadcasters extensively and almost exclusively draw from these three American media outlets for the “American perspective” they report. Whether you are in an airport or hotel in London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, or any of the other major European cities, or on a European cruise, the only English-language channels you’ll see are CNN or BBC.        

If you watched enough Fox News during the Obama years, especially the commentators rather than the straight-news reporters, you came away concluding that Obama was an ultra-progressive ideologue who abused his power and ran roughshod over the Constitution, and in the process tried to shift America away from what conservatives thought of as our traditional values. There was never any talk about his mental stability or that he should be impeached, however. 

If you watch enough CNN or MSNBC or read the Times and the Post now – from the commentators, as well as the tone of the “straight news” – you get the distinct impression that Trump is nothing less than a racist, sexist, unbalanced barbarian who unlawfully stole the last election only because the Russians helped him. It’s not a stretch that their audiences would then see Trump as wholly unfit and not entitled to be President, and someone who must be driven from office by whatever means necessary – including impeachment. 

Or even a military coup or assassination as suggested by some Hollywood celebrities. That’s exponential nuttiness I haven’t seen before.    

The looney left’s preferred media outlets are more than happy to feed this narrative with unproven conspiracy theories about Russian tampering with the election, behind the scenes financial dealings with Russian operatives, sinister meanings behind every tweet Trump issues, and various pop psychologists recently purporting that he may in fact be clinically insane. 

There’s absolutely no proof whatsoever that Trump is the monster portrayed by CNN, MSNBC and their liberal allies in the newspaper business. Despite all the leaks from our own intelligence community, and the breathless hyping of specious claims about ties to Russia, nobody has been able to find a single thing – financial or otherwise – that proves a untoward link between Trump and the Russians. 

And he’s certainly not insane – he couldn’t have built a multi-billion-dollar empire if he’s as bat-shit crazy as they suggest.   

Sure, he’s at times crass and childish – well, maybe too many times – and he’s certainly not like our other Presidents. I’m sure he’s scared the crap out of the Washington establishment, and especially the bureaucracy, and some in the international community as well.  But he’s a reflection of a desire by enough voters to overthrow the way Washington has been operating here and abroad, so in effect he’s delivering what his supporters wanted. 

By using Twitter as a direct conduit to the people he’s also challenging the power of the mainstream media to unilaterally shape the news we see and read to support their preferred narrative, instead of objectively reporting what’s demonstrably true.  

His use of social media to counteract and disparage reporting he finds “fake” and unfair has allowed him to put some liberal-leaning media outlets on the defensive. This is extremely hard for the media to take, accustomed as they are to believing their profession has the unbridled right to attack anyone with little fear of push back. If anything, they expect modern-day politicians to cower before them and curry their favor.  Trump’s not doing either.  So it’s not surprising that many in the media have the long knives out for him.

So far, except for the nuts on the far left, and unfortunately too much of the foreign media, our left-leaning media’s antipathy toward Trump isn’t making much of a difference. Those here on the far left – politicians and media alike – engage in wishful thinking that there’s fire because they see smoke; those here on the right only see falsely manufactured smoke, but no fire.   

There’s no middle ground. That’s not all that unusual in this day and age; the polarization of the American public has been accelerating for many years now, fed by scorched-earth politics from the far left and far right, magnified by a gleeful media thrilled to report every insult and smear.

Sadly, we’ve become so accustomed to this that it’s almost impossible to discern what’s true and what isn’t anymore, and, frankly, increasing numbers among us don’t care.  

Distrust of the media is at an all-time high. That suggests to me that while ratings are going up for far-left outlets such as CNN and Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, and far-right media such as conservative talk radio, those numbers reflect mostly extremists on the left and right, respectively.

Meanwhile, because ratings are up especially for left-leaning media they think they are on to something big. Except they aren’t.

Only half the population believes any part of what they are being barraged with. And only about 34% of the public – including both left and right as well – trusts the media at all.  So even the nuts aren’t wholly convinced. The media can keep on the way they’re going and the only folks buying it are others in the media and the lunatic fringes; certainly not the broader American public. 

And that’s where the other half of our population is.  Benign indifference.  Personally, I think we’re all busy living our lives and consider the current hoopla background noise, somewhat like elevator or supermarket music, but more annoying.

You can only take so much of it before it gets on your nerves.  Or you just tune it out. Like most normal Americans did after months and months of the Clinton-Lewinsky mess, despite the wall-to-wall media coverage, the endless Congressional hearings, and the ceaseless pontificating.

Only the nuts hung on.  And that’s what’s happening now.