Sunday, June 20, 2010

I Don't Get It

Right now there is a war in Afghanistan which by most accounts is going badly; there is horribly increasing violence in Iraq; the economy is still on very shaky footing; and the outrage of the day is that Tony Hayward went to a freaking yacht race.

Instead of doing what, precisely? How would his eschewing watching the yacht race have in any way affected cleanup of the oil disaster in the Gulf?

President Obama watched a baseball game and played golf; where is the outrage over that? Not that I think there should be, I think it is perfectly appropriate for him to do that; as do, apparently, all of the media mavens. We do not expect a president, with the weight of the entire nation and trillions of dollars in his hands to work 24/7/365, but apparently we do expect the head of a corporation a fraction of the size of a nation to do so.

There are plenty of legitimate grounds upon which to castigate Tony Hayward, for heaven's sake, we don't need to indulge in this kind of nonsensical posturing. Indeed, when we do so we diminish the impact of legitimate complaint.

Such is the nature of our political discourse today. We engage in so much nonsensical posturing that the real critique gets lost in the noise.

1 comment:

  1. and the politicians themselves posture, preen and pontificate while the real issues get ignored and/or swept under the rug.

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