ASAP—Awesome Satire and Parody

By William L. Garvin

“My fellow Americans in all 57 states, the time has changed for come. With our country founded more than 20 centuries ago, we have much to celebrate – from the FBI’s 100 days to the reforms that bring greater inefficiencies to our health care system. We know that countries like Europe are willing to stand with us in our fight to halt the rise of privacy, and Israel is a strong friend of Israel’s. And let’s face it, everybody knows that it makes no sense that you send a kid to the emergency room for a treatable illness like asthma and they end up taking up a hospital bed. It costs, when, if you, they just gave, you gave them treatment early, and they got some treatment, and ah, a breathalyzer, or an inhalator. I mean, not a breathalyzer, ah, I don’t know what the term is in Austrian for that.”
Sarah Palin, Satirical Compendium of Obama Malapropisms

If you could only get information from the modern mainstream media, you would readily come to the conclusion that there never has been a conservative qualified for public office. Conversely, there has never been a liberal who was unqualified. This distorted viewpoint has come about for several reasons.

First, just as with university faculty, the vast majority of journalists self-identify as liberals and Democrat. Thus, they gaze more favorably on those who hold similar views to their own. Secondly, they see themselves as more informed, more intelligent, more knowledgeable and therefore more entitled than the vast majority of citizens. They see themselves as part and parcel of the “ruling class” or the elite of American society. Finally, they see no longer see themselves as objective reporters of fact but as image shapers and king makers.

The contemporary confluence of these critical concepts results in an inequitable and unfair presentation of facts to support their chosen ideology. For example, they continually disparaged George W. Bush as a country bumpkin, a slacker, and just flat out dumb. They chose to ignore the fact that his college grades were superior to their intellectual giant, Al Gore, who received a “D” in science while at Harvard. This was not the nadir of Gore’s academic experience: he dropped out of divinity school after receiving five F’s and then entered and dropped out of law school! According to syndicated columnist, Larry Elder, Bush also scored higher on his verbal SAT than did Rhodes Scholar, Bill Bradley.

Let’s not forget our current gaffe-a-minute Vice-President (as the media generally does) and his not so famous statement about that “…three-letter word—jobs. J-O-B-S, jobs.” That must be the new math. Maybe he was thinking about his strategy to divide Iraq into three parts, a concept that given closer examination would have qualified the author for psychiatric evaluation.

However, if a conservative slips up, then it’s a different story. Then it’s front page news and Pulitzer Prize time! The perfect example came when Sarah Palin inadvertently referred to North Korea as an ally. In the context of the interview, it was clear that she knew the difference between North and South Korea and referred to them appropriately several different times. The media chose to ignore all that in order to fabricate their own self serving story. The already vicious Palin Derangement Syndrome turned into a fresh feeding frenzy nationally and internationally—“she thinks North Korea is an ally!” What balderdash!

To point out the hypocritical double standard employed by the mainstream media, Palin penned a Facebook post that started out with the satirical paragraph quoted above. Observers of the political scene will recognize that it is a compendium of ten verbal slipups made by President Obama with little or no attention from the media. It parodies his predilection for malapropisms when not dictating from a teleprompter. It did not include his continued mispronouncing “corpsman” as “corpse-man” or his repeated failure to recognize our Creator as the source of our inalienable rights. All of these verbal gaffes are easily documented.

Now does President Obama really think there are 57 states (60 if you count the one he had yet to visit plus Alaska and Hawaii) or Europe is a country or Austrian is a language? Of course not. Neither does Sarah Palin think North Korea is an ally. Therein lies the failure of modern media. They show their bias in not only what they print but also what they fail to print, what they cover and what they fail to cover. They can’t be trusted and that’s a sad state of affairs for America.