So, the "Reading Rainbow" -- you know, the PBS television show that tried to teach kids to love to read -- is being canceled after a 26-year history. That's not news. TV shows come and go. But what is news is that some hack journalist at NPR blames it all on President Bush.
That's right. It has been a joke for quite a while that if anything in America went wrong then the blame rests solely on the shoulders of one man's administration. And now cliché becomes real life.
"Reading Rainbow" is being canceled because of Bush. But there's no word on what is replacing it. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the replacement show was another show that attempted to teach kids Spanish like "Maya & Miguel" or "Sesame Street." But, in the end, we can probably blame Bush for that, too.
An acquaintance of mine invited me to join a group of conservatives via email. He told me that we were like-minded and that I would enjoy the deep intellectual group think. I'm a sucker for abuse and agreed that he could share my email address with the Borg. (Note to self: Next time give 'em something from fakemailgenerator.com.)
Today, I've been a member of this passel for four days and have received no fewer than 23 emails. Of those, five simply had a satirical picture attached. Four were replies. And the other ... well, you do the math. The others have only included excerpts and links to blogs, many of which are at World Net Daily: Home of good editorialists like Thomas Sowell and Herman Cain, but with more than a fair share of "birthers" and other right-wing nuts.
So, for days, my inbox has been filled with alarmist diatribes about Obamacare, Red diaper babies, Saul Alinsky and even a slur about The Comedy Channel's Jon Stewart. All day long, I get emails that passionately adjure me to read the "interesting" articles at said links because they will "scare me silly." And -- have I mentioned I'm a sucker for abuse? -- I click and scan and sigh and click the little X in the upper right-hand corner.
After reading all of the emails and tiring of the repetitive nature, I replied to one today and asked if anyone had a blog. And, sure enough, quite a few responded with links. And, as it turns out, all of the blogs are what I call "link aggregators." You know what I'm talking about: Each blog post has a short introductory paragraph singing the praises or calling your attention to another website. The post then quotes from the source, just enough to not break any fair use laws, and then the author provides a link. And uber-example is michellemalkin.com.
With this all said, I ask, Where are the thinkers? Where are the great political minds like Alexander Hamilton, Edmund Burke and de Tocqueville, just to name a few? Where are the men and women who write completely original material and do so in an intellectual, engaging and convincing manner? Gone are those days, I think. Now we get the scribblings of Tea Party groupies ("Revolution is brewing." Get it? Sigh.), people who are unnaturally fixated on a Kenyan or Hawaiian birth certificate and the rantings of self-proclaimed good Samaritans who think they are the lifeguards at the pool we call an American two-party political system.
You know what? One day we will have a revolution and that revolution will resemble the movie "Idiocracy," a movie that I have not seen, but about which I have read a plot synopsis. Seriously, where are the thinkers?
Update: From Wikipedia.org:
Michael Medved, a prominent conservative talk-show host, has attacked birth-certificate theorists as "crazy, nutburger, demagogue, money-hungry, exploitative, irresponsible, filthy conservative imposters" who are "the worst enemy of the conservative movement" and "make us look sick, troubled and not suitable for civilized company."
Update 2: I don't want to address point-by-point the refutations of the "birthers" here. That's not my intention because I don't have the time or energy. And I certainly don't support the liberal, Marxist, ungodly policies of the Obama presidency, but, in the comments of this post is a link to an article at Newschief.com that asks the question about Obama's travels to Pakistan. The link piqued my interest, so I investigated.
In the article, the author explains that Obama must have used a British or Indonesian passport (or, as some others have said, traveled into Pakistan illegally) to travel to Karachi because "Pakistan was on the U.S. State Department's 'no-travel' list in 1981." The problem, as I have discovered, is that there was no travel ban. In fact, there is a travel advisory dated August 1981 that is evidence that the only requirement for travel to Pakistan was a 30-day visa. On top of that, there is a NY Times article in the Travel section dated in 1981 describing an American tourist's visit to Pakistan.
I'm thorough and, therefore, have taken the necessary time to confirm a gut feeling. It's definite. Twitter is pointless and a complete waste of time.