Tuning out

Hey, word to the media: I don’t care if Obama doesn’t wear a flag pin on his lapel. I don’t care if Hillary “misspoke” about her trip to Bosnia. I don’t really care about whose pastor said what on what day (ever hear of separation between church and state??). I don’t care about seeing John McCain’s tax records; I can imagine he makes much more money than I do anyways. I don't care that Obama is bad at bowling and that Hillary drank a shot of whiskey or whatever it was in a bar in PA. I don’t care that Michelle Obama said that for the first time in her life she felt really proud of her country since her husband is running for president, because frankly I feel the same: it’s about time that we had a woman and a black man that are both serious contenders for the presidency.

I’m so tired of the mud-slinging, Swift-boating, over-analyzing, ridiculous circus that is the US media. It’s an insult to my intelligence. I don’t want a president who is just like the average American. Look where electing a “good ol’ boy,” someone you’d like to have a beer with, got us: the worst presidency ever (and by the way, I don’t think that someone who was born into oil industry money, who attended Andover and Yale, is technically an “average American.”). I, frankly, expect the president of the US to be much smarter than me, and much smarter than 90% of the rest of the American population. I expect him/her to be eloquent, extremely intelligent, diplomatic, open-minded, non-abrasive, and surrounded by some damn good advisers. Sometimes I wonder if the media just tries to spin non-important things into huge controversies so that Americans will keep being distracted from the real issues at hand (and in between their spins, they place commercials so that people can keep buying shit they don’t need. America goes shopping: the national pastime.).

This is what I care about:

What is the next president going to do for the single mother scraping by on 30K a year, with no health insurance, who gets laid off from her job at a factory because she has to take care of her sick kids?

What is the next president going to do for the Iraqi veteran who comes home maimed, with PTSD, and who receives only substandard care in a roach-infested room at Walter Reed?

What is the next president going to do about the US’ tarnished reputation abroad?

What is the next president going to do to ensure that kids coming out of public schools can read and write?

What is the next president going to do about health care costs going through the roof?

So to the media: get back to the important stuff. Please just stop with all the BS and the scrutiny of minutiae, lifting candidates’ words out of context and turning them into convenient little packages of sound bytes so that you can improve your ratings and increase your viewership. Because I’m tuning out.