"WHEN FASCISM COMES TO AMERICA IT WILL BE WRAPPED IN THE FLAG
AND CARRYING A CROSS." -SINCLAIR LEWIS

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Ignorance Is Strength

The stuff he said at first was pretty damn dumb but I now suspect he's saying obviously outlandish things just for the publicity. Please tell me nobody is this fucking stupid:

Continuing his reporting from Israel, Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher tried to clarify his remarks criticizing media coverage of war, in a new Pajamas TV segment. He said that citizens “don’t need to see what’s happening every day” in war and said that it should be up to the military to decide what the media learns about war:

WURZELBACHER: you don’t need to see what’s happening every day, that’s my personal opinion, you don’t have to share it. But, you know, okay, you don’t have to see, you know, 800 dead, 801 dead. It’s like they drill that in your head. … They want you to sit there saying there are so many people dying. You know these are large, these are numbers, you know I don’t want to take away from that. Let me, uh, think about how to say that again. Just essentially, they keep drilling it into your head, newscast after newscast after newscast.

I think the military should decide what information to give the media and then the media can release it to the public. I don’t believe they need to be in the front lines with soldiers, I don’t believe they need to, uh, you know, be bothering the military for information or for access to certain areas.

Yes, I can think of no historical precedents to convince me that giving the government absolute power over the dissemination of information from a war zone can possibly be a bad idea. He's a plumber who got famous by being on TV: he fulfills no other qualifications for this job! As was commented on a previous thread, you don't need a license to be a competent journalist but a mastery of language and a working brain are usually prerequisites.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Well, Joe the Journalist didn't last long. He's now Joe the Stenographer?