Especially, I hate conventions since they became infomercials for the party or the politicians giving the speeches. Not sure when that happened exactly but it must have been around the time Reagan was President. Everything about his campaign was so stage managed and the conventions just became another piece of that.
Plus now you have the endless media babble about incredibly stupid stuff, horse race stuff, and of course, the inevitable commentariat pundits who are heavily Republican loaded or leaning over backward “liberals” trying to be fair and balanced which means they end up being neither. I could care less what Karl Rove or Pat Buchanan or Joe Scarborough or whomever the house GOP political consultants at CNN think about anything related to the Democratic party Everything is pitched by the cable shows as a controversy or a near controversy or some other bullshit. It’s completely worthless. And even the C-Span coverage bores the hell out of me.
So the only thing I will be watching is Obama’s speech on Thursday night. That seems to me to be the only thing that will rise above the level of ambient noise the media and the party will be putting out for our consumption. But hey, for all you junkies who are really into the details of all this stuff, Geov is on scene and will be filing his reports so thank god it’s him and not me, even though I’m from Denver originally and would have loved a return trip just to see my family.
However, considering the plans of the Denver Police, I’m not sure I wanted to risk getting arrested for standing on the wrong sidewalk or stumbling into the wrong protest group at the wrong time. And getting tasered scares the piss out of me. My family has a history of heart arrhythmia and other heart related problems (father and mother both suffer from it and both grandfathers had heart attacks) so the possibility, no matter how slim of feeling a jolt (or 3 or 4 or …?) of 50,000 volts coursing through my unhealthy body doesn’t seem worth the risk of getting to see famous and not so famous Dems from a great distance, if at all. Better views on TV for the speeches Thurday, anyway.
Besides, I’ve already been inside Invesco Field, and it’s just like every other stadium built on the taxpayer’s dime for the benefit of rich guys who own football teams over the past 2 decades — great if you are going to be sitting in one of the boxes or in the better, club seats on the lower levels, but not so great if you get stuck up in the upper levels where they usually put the hoi polloi like yours truly.
So enjoy the convention reporting and speeches and stuff if that’s your bag. Me? I’ll be keeping an eye out for things going on outside the confines of what our major media deem worthy of notice. It may not attract as many commenters here but to me it’s the really important stuff. Like this story for example:
BAGHDAD (Reuters) – U.S. forces freed a cameraman for the Associated Press in Baghdad on Saturday after holding him for three months without charge, the news agency said.
Ahmed Nouri Raziak, 38, was handed over to representatives of the Associated Press at a U.S. military compound in Baghdad. He had been detained by U.S. and Iraqi forces at his home in the northern city of Tikrit on June 4, the agency said in a report from Baghdad.
Raziak’s release comes two days after the military freed an Iraqi cameraman for Reuters, Ali al-Mashhadani, who was held for three weeks without charge after being arrested while renewing his credentials at a U.S. military press office.
Gee, who’d a thunk a Republican administration would order the military to censor the press in Iraq during an election year by illegally detaining reporters in order to intimidate coverage of what’s really happening over there? Not that anyone over here among our media overlords cares about the truth in Iraq anyway.
In covering the story of Iran’s role in Iraq, far too many reporters have passed on blatant propaganda without the slightest effort to point out its inconsistency with documented facts, much less to try to uncover the truth. But a story by Pamela Hess of Associated Press distributed Aug. 15 sets a new standard for abetting official disinformation.
In the story, she acts as an enthusiastic megaphone for a patently phony story from an anonymous “senior intelligence officer.”
Hess’ hit-squad training story should be assigned to journalism classes for the next generation to open a discussion about what went wrong with American journalism before and during America’s overtly imperial war in the Middle East. And Hess should be seen as a stunningly clear illustration of what happens when a reporter gives up any pretense of independence from the national-security state.
Hess’ lede announces what appears to be a significant development in the otherwise waning U.S.-Iran conflict over Iraq. “Iraqi Shi’ite assassination teams are being trained in at least four locations in Iran by Tehran’s elite Quds force and Lebanese Hezbollah,” she writes, “and are planning to return to Iraq in the next few months to kill specific Iraqi officials as well as U.S. and Iraqi troops, according to intelligence gleaned from captured militia fighters and other sources in Iraq.”
But a careful reader quickly learns from perusing the next several paragraphs that this official assertion is actually based on nothing more than speculation. It is just another propaganda blast in the guise of an intelligence briefing.
They only care about the perception the Bush/McCain team is pushing that it’s all good, we’re winning a great victory (which is why we need to stay there as long as possible) and Obama is a crazy traitorous “Defeatocrat” for daring to suggest we pull out and direct our military resources to Afghanistan. In other words our media world is situation normal – all fricking screwed up.
Which brings me back to my the reason for writing this post in the first place: my explanation for why I won’t be attending the convention in Denver or watching the convention coverage on TV until the Obama speech. Because, to paraphrase Shakespeare, it all will be full of sound and fury, ultimately signifying nothing. Count on it.
