BLACK IS WHITE, WRONG IS RIGHT – WE HAVE OFFICIALLY
ENTERED UPSIDE DOWN WORLD

by R J Shulman

SANTA FE, New Mexico – (PTSD News Service) – When former part-term half-baked Alaska Governor, Sarah Palin opined that slavery wasn’t all that bad because it was more like the national debt than something terrible and inhumane, MSNBC commentator Martin Bashir observed that maybe a reenactment of historical facts could change her mind if she were to suffer the fate of a slave who displeased his master, a cruel and unusual punishment that Bashir described in graphic and horrific terms.  Palin was outraged and said something to the effect that those with a microphone and a pubic stage should take responsibility for their remarks, although getting through her syntax was a bit of an uphill climb.  Bashir apologized but was suspended and then “resigned,” most likely not of his own free will.  

A short time later, Phil Robertson, star of A&E’s Duck Dynasty opined that prior to the passage of civil rights laws, blacks were happy singing in the fields and loved their white bosses.  Robertson also said that gays, well, were, less than human.  Robertson’s homophobic comments created a stir and his comments about African Americans exaggerating their historic mistreatment was eerily similar to Palin’s earlier white-wash distortion of history. 

A&E indefinitely suspended Robertson.  Then came the outrage from the right, led by, you guessed it, former part-term half-baked Alaska Governor Sarah Palin who claimed that A&E’s action to suspend Robertson was a violation of free speech.  The right gathered in droves, crying foul, stating that Robertson had a right to thump his Southern Baptist Bible in support of his bigoted beliefs, the very same bible, if these ignorant right wing-nuts has any clue about history that was thumped by those who said that God supported their enslavement of those with darker skin.  By the way Robertson, unlike Bashir, not only did not apologize, but defiantly defended his comments.  It was a surprise to no one that A&E after a week of looking like they were taking some kind of high road recanted and reinstated Robertson, who didn’t even miss the taping of one episode of his show.  

The irony of this whole set of circumstances seemed to be lost on the media who were more incredulous that A&E should shoot itself in the foot for suspending the star of their highest rated program than the hypocrisy of the right wing pundits.  There has been no ground swell to reinstate Bashir or to bring back Dan Rather for his essentially correct report about Bush that used a bad document.  However, Rather’s network, CBS did not fire Lara Logan and her producer, but just put them on leave for their embarrassing and atrociously wrong partisan report about Benghazi that was based on complete lies.  Walther Cronkite and Edward R. Morrow must be turning over in their graves. 

This twisted media focus should not come as a surprise to anyone paying attention to what passes for news and commentary these days as this is the same media that finds nothing out of the ordinary when it comes to reporting and in many cases, supporting right wing/conservative solutions to some of the major problems facing America today.

However, a quick review of oft-repeated conservative answers to current problems will erase any doubt that just as certain as the fact that African-Americans have suffered mistreatment since they were dragged to this continent, that, thanks to the media, America in now firmly living in Upside Down World.  Let’s take a look at some conservative reasoning that is being spread by the media.  Ready?

1.      The problem of income disparity between the ultra rich who have seen enormous growth in their wealth and the stagnant income of the frighteningly shrinking middle class is the result of poor people and the lower middle class having too much money.  These shiftless people have too many benefits, they say.  They are paid too much.  Unions force employers to give them all the breaks.  This has to stop because the poor ultra-rich just don’t stand a chance under the current set of circumstances.

2.      The solution to the problem of too much gun violence is to make sure there are more guns.  Get teachers guns, get preachers guns, heck, get creatures guns.  Encourage citizens carry guns into bars, hospitals, schools and churches and then maybe to kill two birds with one stone, make sure that fetuses have firearms at the ready just in case a mother thinks she may not want to be a mother.

3.      The problem of the out of control greedy Wall Street money shufflers and bad acting avaricious bankers is caused by too many government regulations.  Let the free market be free, free from pesky rules and regulations that could in some way interfere with the most important right guaranteed by the Constitution, the right to make unfettered profits on the backs of the less fortunate.

4.      The way to solve the problems with American health care, which by all accounts is the world’s most ineffective and expensive health care delivery system is to try and try to repeal the only set of laws in over sixty years that has attempted to improve the American profit driven insurance company haven, your-money-or-your-life health care scheme, while providing no alternate plan for the one they so desperately want to repeal.  That’s right, let’s go back to the good old days, when the pre-existing condition was king, and when insurance company profit minded panels sent their customers to grizzly deaths by cancelling their policies in the middle of expensive treatment without any government interference and when these greedy insurance companies could jack up customers’ premiums at their whim so that executives could meet quarterly profit projections and enjoy projected executive bonuses.

5.      The way to solve the problem of American students falling behind the rest of the world in math and science is to teach less science and teach more creationism.

6.      The way to solve the problem of the deficit is to cut income (taxes) and to increase military spending and embark on expensive military exploits in Syria and Iran.

7.      The way to spread democracy is to pass laws that severely restrict voting.  The excuse for these laws, tailored to limit who can vote, is the phony claim that there is massive voter fraud, which despite massive amounts of money used to uncover this alleged fraud, has found that such wide spread  voter abuse simply does not exist.

8.      One way to stop the creeping abuse of government intrusion into a citizens’ privacy is to use governmental laws to force pregnant woman to have invasive procedures done to their bodies by doctors before they can make choices about such private decisions as to whether or not to have a baby.

9.      A way to stop the government from infringing upon the religious beliefs of citizens is to pass laws that force your religious beliefs on others, and to allow your religious prayers in public schools and your religious beliefs and icons to be displayed on government property.

10. The way to get more jobs into the economy is to fire government workers, grant tax breaks to large multi-national corporations for sending jobs overseas, and to cut unemployment insurance to force people to begin working at jobs that don’t exist.

  11     Try and address the imbalance of different voices in the media, which in radio is over 90% conservative talk, by defunding PBS and eliminating the few remaining progressive talk stations.  If the media was so liberal, as conservatives claim, then this can’t be blamed on liberals, but must be must blamed on the huge conservative corporations who own almost all of the media for not properly supporting their own best interests and incompetently and negligently allowing all of this socialist liberal communist propaganda to flood out from every pore of their very own newspapers, radio and TV stations.

Yes, we are living in Upside Down World, where such insanity as listed above not only continues unquestioned, but is supported by around the clock talk radio, and around the clock so-called news outlets.  This is the world where a deliberate lie about weapons of mass destruction that led to a pre-planned war that was responsible for killing more Americans than were killed in 9-11, and killed more than a half million other human beings, displaced millions of others, and bankrupted the treasury by funneling millions of tax payer dollars into the Vice President’s own company and into the pockets of the President’s contractor and oil business buddies is a lie that is less of a problem than a so-called lie by another President who seems to have misrepresented a fact that affects a small group of Americans who were led to believe they could keep their bad, rip-off, crappy, useless insurance policies.  Yes, behold the sheer horror of this current president’s outrageous lie.  These victims of his dastardly lie might be forced to pay for an insurance policy that would actually cover them if they get sick.  Certainly this lie is an impeachable offence - just turn on talk radio, they will tell you this again and again.  This is the news world we have today in America, where start-up problems of the deliberately underfunded Affordable Health Care website are reported to be equivalent to letting a major American city, New Orleans drown.

We are officially an insane nation.  But don’t worry.  We are America.  We are number one.  We’re number one.  We’re number one.  But wait.  In Upside Down World, doesn’t that really mean we’re last?