Now It All Makes Sense...
This article about Sarah Palin appeared on RedState.Com and highlights a serious problem that exists within the ranks of journalists, commentators and members of the 'professional' punditocracy:

They haven't got a fucking clue...

So now it all makes sense; the reason we see such mediocrities, crooks and idiots as Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, Charles Rangel, Hillary Clinton, Rod Blogojevich and most recently, Princess Caroline (Take note: the majority of them are affiliated with which party again?) , vault to the top of the political heap in this country is because the general media -- the very people we depend upon to bring us information that we can use to make informed political decisions -- are themselves confused, biased, partisan or just plain ignorant, and often all four at once.

These people can't even agree on the definition of basic political terms: conservative, republican, libertarian, progressive, democrat, etc. which is symbolic of the way in which political discourse has become bastardized in this country to an incredible degree. It has gotten so bad that one pundit's conservative is another's libertarian, one columnist's bible-quoting avenger is another's paragon of reason. To what extent this phenomena is intentional is arguable -- I'm not a great believer in conspiracy theories. I don't, for example, believe that the reporters from the New York Times, Slate and (P)MSNBC get together in a secret underground bunker and plot the deliberate dumbing-down of the American electorate, and co-ordinate their activities to that end. Instead, that they do manage to dumb the American electorate down is more a by-product of their own stupidity and partisanship, which radiates out from the central point of their newspaper or broadcast, falls like raindrops from the sky, and eventually gets enough people without a metaphorical umbrellla (i.e. sans critical faculties) wet enough to have that effect.

Consider it the trickle-down theory of ignorance. I'll apply for the patent as soon as I finish writing this.

The first thing that becomes apparent to me is that these folks are mostly making it up as they go along. There is no other way to explain it. It's almost as if they wake up and have decided that whatever they write this day must be divorced from reality, delivered with a sneer, and given a dash of snark intended to make certain the peasants know their place on the Great Media Food Chain -- "Hey, I'm a fucking expert on this...you just have to buy it, not necessarily understand it."

The second thing that becomes apparent to me is that one's point of view is now inextricably tangled up with one's persona feelings and political proclivities. There is no longer even a pretense towards objectivity, facts are to be ignored if they are inconvenient, language and definitions are to be mangled in order to often make a case which should probably be strangled in the intellectual cradle. If delivered with greater degrees of hyperbole and invective, all the better.

This is the system of information dissemination the American people had at their disposal this past year, and viewed in this light, the election of Barack Obama makes perfect sense. See you on the bread line sometime soon because of it. I do hope that Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews are there too -- so I can kick them both in the balls.

Update: This seemed entirely apropos.