PANIC EATS YOUR BRAIN

Pic via Gawker

Here's a problem: leech-like O'Reilly Factor producer Jesse Watters snuck into the GE shareholders' meeting to hassle CEO Jeff Immelt about the leftward slant of MSNBC. Meeting attendees, some presumably egged on by Fox, some not, joined in the tirade, slamming the cable network for boosting the president. It's unclear how much of the screaming was News Corp in origin, but the point is actually a quasi-valid one: MSNBC is a liberal network supporting a president who may give its parent company a heaping helping of federal money.

On the other hand, Fox News is an organization that wouldn't know journalistic ethics if they danced a kickline through the newsroom.

The problem here is less that no one is listening to these bozos and more that people are only hearing ridiculous "Obama is a Marxist" conspiracy theories from halfwits and scaremongers, while avoiding the actual conflicts of interest that stand to harm you, me, and everyone we know.

So here it is, in small words that everyone knows: The people with the money will fuck you.

Simplistic? Possibly. But if I hear another conservative wax rhapsodic about the good old days of the Reagan Administration, I'm going to spam everyone I know with copies of this. The world is not better when we trust the rich to give more money to their workers out of noblesse oblige. Read a Dickens novel.

The right used to know that, sort of, although their love of a literally demented cowboy actor blinded them to some of the finer points. Now, though they only seem to get angry when somebody in the government tries to give money to poor people. The Obama bailout/budget is populist to the max: it creates blue-collar jobs, gives money to the needy, and cuts taxes on everybody but the extraordinarily rich... and yet we now have "tea parties" in which people who voted for George Bush twice run around screaming about government spending because Newt Gingrich told them to.

And conservatives continue to whine about tax hikes, which are not in fact happening, and how the government is usurping the role of private charities and secularizing the nonprofit world.

That last one really gets my goat: "The government should not give money to poor people; it should let religious organizations take care of that." Why, because you've done such a shit-hot job of it up to now?

I wish to Christ someone would argue with me about this stuff, but everyone is zonked out on the Swine Flu, of which there have been a whopping ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-TWO (mostly nonfatal) CASES WORLDWIDE!!!! I've also been hearing about a deadly disease called CANCER, rumored to be affecting people in the MILLIONS! WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE, LIKE, NOW!

Here, America, buy one of these and use it to get a grip. Then focus on the pork, not the swine.