From Wednesday through Friday morning they had a headline on the main page of CNN.com, "Limbaugh says he wants "weak" Obama." Considering most headlines tend to come and go within hours, giving this headline a prominent spot on the front page for over two days shows that someone decided it was worth emphasizing. The gist of it is that now Limbaugh is saying he thinks Obama is more beatable than Hillary Clinton, because he's been weakened by Jeremiah Wright, bowling, the "bitter" comments, etc. Keep in mind, Limbaugh up until Tuesday had been telling his Republican listeners to vote for Hillary because she was "more beatable" than Obama and for the sake of dragging out the Democratic Party's nomination process.
The fact that he's changing gears after Obama has all but been declared the nominee is simple playground-mentality bullshit. He's pretend he's pulling the strings of millions of Democratic voters, tricking us into making choices that play right into the Republicans' hands. I've always thought that Karl Rove got waaay too much credit for being a Machiavellian "mastermind," simply because a semi-paranoid media and Democratic base saw every decision and circumstance as somehow playing into his schemes. Sometimes shit just happens.
In the case of Limbaugh declaring Obama somehow "weaker" than Hillary after conventional wisdom has declared her candidacy dead, well - bullshit. Money, organization, message - Obama is the stronger candidate. Limbaugh's just playing a part for his audience, making them feel good, he likely doesn't even believe what he's saying.
AND YET CNN LEGITIMIZES IT. Not even some kind of analysis like "before Obama was considered by many pundits to be the presumptive Democratic nominee after Tuesday's election, Limbaugh had been encouraging his listeners to vote for Hillary Clinton in order to give an advantage to the Republican Party in the general election." Whatever, I really don't think it matters that much, it just bothers me.
Anyway, the reason I bring this up, is because there's been a headline all day reading, "Clinton holds huge lead in next state." If you read the article, it says there's a poll showing she leads Obama 66 to 23 in West Virginia. No analysis to point out the fact that this isn't going to give her the lead in delegates. Instead they treat it like it could be a turning point in the campaign - it won't be.
Time to bust out the handy dandy Slate calculator.
Okay, so let's take this poll from American Research Group at face value and go ahead and give Clinton 66%. Hell let's give her 66% for Kentucky too, even though I've got a couple of polls that say she wins it by 59% or 62%. Oregon's going to Obama, let's say worst case scenario he squeeks out of that one with 51% of the vote. I don't know what-the-fuck about Puerto Rico, so I left it 50-50 even though it could go 86% for Clinton and still not change a damn thing. As for Montana and South Dakota, there's been no polling that I know of, although conventional wisdom points to those being Obama wins, but I'm leaving it 50-50.
No change.
In fact, let's go into Happy Handjob-land for Hillary after Oregon and say she wins all the delegates in Puerto Rico, Montana and South Dakota.
Oh hey, Hillary's still behind by 58 delegates!
It's not just this that sets me off about mainstream news and CNN in particular, it's the overall implication that THESE PEOPLE DON'T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK THEIR TALKING ABOUT HALF THE TIME. Are they biased? Lazy? Ignorant? Sensationalist? Who the fuck can tell anymore?
It's like intelligence has been sent to die a painful death in this country, and there are those who intend to take full advantage of that by spinning and confusing things until the loser of an election becomes the winner.
Oh wait...
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