Those pesky professional journalists always beat me to the punch. In Sunday's Chicago Tribune, journalist Naftali Bendavid wrote an article about the new trend in politics, which is to create a sound byte of a political foe saying something onerous and then demand an apology from that person. In Chicago, the most familiar example of this is Senator Durbin's comparison of the Guantanamo Bay prison camps to such things as the concentration camps in Nazi Germany or the Soviet gulags. He later apologized after a number of policiticans from both sides of the aisle criticized his statement, but the fact still remains that prisoner treatment at Gitmo is a very contentious issue. But whether or not Durbin was correct in his assessment, the big story was his comment, not the subject of his comment.
These days, it seems like everyone is throwing around zings, criticizing the other party for their policies, their associations, their actions. But as Bendavid's article points out, the big policy issues that people should be discussing are being overshadowed by contentious statements people are making about those who support the policy. Few are talking about the real issues, instead turning them into insults that aim to discredit the other side and turn the public against them in time for the next election. Yes, some people are examining prisoner rights in Gitmo. Jon Stewart questioned the validity of Howard Dean's statement that the Republican party is made up of white Christian men (you know that show segment was funny!). But Dick Cheney, on Hannity and Colmes said of Dean's statement, "Maybe his mother loved him, but I've never met anybody who does. He's never won anything, as best as I can tell." Yeah, except for that little race for Governor. Five times. Dean's statement was worth looking into for statistics of the makeup of the Republican party, and Cheney zinged back by saying only his mother loves him. Way to be a Dick. These days, it's all about political capital. Avoid the real issues--the important thing is to make your political foes look bad. That way, in the next election, even more people will vote for you just because they like you and hate the other guy, not because they agree with, or even know about, where you stand on the issues.
