Blogging Funk and the New Evil Empire

Commentary By Ron Beasley

As I noted below my hope for change has morphed into a depressing funk.  I have had a difficult time putting that funk into words but fortunately Randall Amster has done it for me. Like Randell I grew up in the US and remember when it was the beacon of hope and good.  But that was then and this is now.

Unfortunately, that America
-- even in its illusory state -- has ceased to exist. We are no longer an abstract
beacon of hope to the world, but rather a purveyor of concrete hellfire. We rain
automated death from above and commit orchestrated theft from below. We export
despair and import disdain. We've abandoned even keeping up the pretense of fair
play and adherence to principle. We've become global pariahs and domestic
piranhas. Awash in a sea of surfaces, distractions, and palliatives, we unsurprisingly
have failed to notice that the sun has already started to set on our adolescent
empire.

As I noted here and here the American Empire is nearing an end and the US is on it's way to becoming a failed state.

Indeed, by most measures, the U.S.
is rapidly becoming a failed state. Educationally, economically, politically,
culturally -- all of our national gauges are pointing in the wrong direction.
We're moving down the list on health care, democratic governance, productivity,
environmental protection, academic achievement, official transparency,
incarceration rates, transportation, and public services. We're ruled by an
increasingly emboldened elite class that rewrites the rules at will,
increasingly represses dissent, and openly enriches itself at our expense. We
hardly make anything on these shores, but still consume everything in sight. We
have few public intellectuals of renown, yet are bombarded daily with the
foibles of celebrities who are in many cases famous simply for being famous.
Our food supply is tainted, our energy is unclean, and our water is drying up.
And racism remains as deeply-rooted as ever.

There's much more so go read the entire thing but this jumped right out at me:

We
have few public intellectuals of renown, yet are bombarded daily with the
foibles of celebrities who are in many cases famous simply for being famous.

Today in Politico Jim Vandhei and Jonathan Martin admitted this is true and that it's the fault of the media which is more concerned  with getting eyeballs than reporting the truth.

Why the mainstream media loves Sarah Palin

Fox News has been making a serious charge about mainstream political reporters: They hate Sarah Palin.

This is not just wrong, it�s absurd. The reality is exactly the opposite: We love Palin.

And if Palin does not exactly love us, she�s smart enough to recognize how quickly reporters devour every provocative remark she utters. She knows how to exploit our weakness to guarantee herself exposure far out of proportion to her actual influence in Republican politics.

It�s a tangled, symbiotic affair � built on mutual dependency and mutual enabling.

For the media, Palin is great at the box office. Among modern American political figures, she is second only to Barack Obama in generating clicks (for Web sites such as this one) and ratings (for the cable news networks hungering around the clock for fresh material).

The media is no longer "news" but infotainment writing and broadcasting what they think their audience want to hear not what they need to know to make intelligent decisions.