Being a liberal is not a sin.........

Chaos reigns in American politics. Nobody likes anybody very much. House Speaker John Boehner could help solve a number of problems,  but the Republican Right will not permit it. Boehner is ruled by factions constantly sinking their teeth into his tender hide. I bet he wishes he never took the Speaker’s job.

The media continues to comment, critique, castigate, exaggerate, spin, guess, and stress over every single word and action of key players. Surely, many other Americans share my contempt for hours of dribble sold as expert instant analysis produced by network (CBS, NBC and ABC) and cable  (e.g. CNN and Fox) broadcasts.  My solution is to send the news analysts along with elected officials on a three-year re-orientation program to drought-stricken Oklahoma.

It is impossible to believe that any of our leaders actually care for the public. Washington’s biographer, Paul Johnson, should be installed as Conscience of the House and deliver lectures to both chambers of government about patriotism, sacrifice and public service. Attendance should be obligatory and should include the Administrative branch as well. Sadly, this would not help as the model set by our founding fathers has long been broken and abused. Above all else, George Washington was a gentleman. It would be difficult in the extreme to find an elected official of Washington’s ilk in America today.

The saddest aspect of American journalism for me is the blatant lack of international news. Our CNN is a watered down, emasculated, politically correct and tepid version of what CNN broadcasts to England and the rest of the world. The BBC World Service News broadcast here is abbreviated, edited, and annoyingly interrupted by commercial breaks.

I am not familiar with the hundreds of syndicated political columnists in the US, but many are well respected and astute in their observations. Yet, they have a tendency to make predictions and analyses that are often off spec. I believe this is because the journalists feel a compulsion to say something important, sensational and revealing on an almost daily basis. Hence, they stretch their minds and often torture the facts. We know the rest.

America is also full of periodicals and websites of a politically analytical nature. These are scattered between right and left with some holding moderate ground. Examples include Politico, the National Review, Taki's Magazine, The Huffington Post, Foreign Affairs and many many more. We also have our think tanks that spill over into print and punditry. Wikipedia lists about 75 of them, although many of these are not exclusively political in nature.

It would be remiss to neglect the special political broadcasts on network and cable TV such as Fareed Zakaria's GPS, Gwen Ifel's Washington Week in Review and several other Sunday morning reviews of weekly events. Meet the Press, for example, has been broadcast for years and is still going strong. There is some outstanding journalism in these reviews that take much of their inspiration from the inimitable, Walter Cronkite. All of these programs offer in-dept follow-up of their broadcasts via on-line connections. One of my favorites is GPS which is sponsored by CNN. As of late, however, interviewees have been political hacks promoting the party line, i.e. the Obama administration. CNN has a liberal orientation.

Reputedly, network (ABC, NBC and CBS) programs are middle-of-the-road in terms of their political stance. The political right might disagree and charge the networks with liberalism. I doubt that anyone would have called Cronkite a liberal during his reign as America's number one newscaster, but he was. In those days, being a liberal was not a sin.