NOT POLITICAL

I really am not going to begin posting on politics again, but I really have to comment on some of the media stuff that I see that fits into my professional background. The first is the press conference given by Senator Obama in which he wished his opponents and the media (mostly, of course the more conservative media) to quit picking on his wife for what she says and does in public. Michelle Obama is a graduate of a prestigious university and sits (or has sat) on the boards of both major corporations and not for profit corporations, some of them educational. With that kind of background, she should already have learned the lesson that I learned as the moderator of a college radio/TV program when I was a sophomore in college.

The lesson is this "When microphones are around, and television cameras are on, either shut up, or turn on your brain before saying anything." Microphones and television cameras make your most stupid, off the cuff comments permanent parts of the public record.

I hate to try to tell Senator Obama anything about public communication, because, as I have stated many times publicly, he is one of the most masterful public communicators I have ever seen or heard, but if he wishes to keep the folks from doing what he called "low rent" business on his wife, he is going to have to quit allowing or encouraging her to stand up before microphones and TV cameras in his behalf. Perhaps he should provide her with a Burka or keep her in a closet. Campaigning against Hillary Clinton he should be constantly reminded that the off the cuff or on the cuff statements by a president's wife are going to be publicly analyzed by that presidents friends and foes. (and though I am not thrilled about it, I deeply suspect that he may be the president and have to cope with this fact)

Second:
I have very mixed feelings about what is going on in the courts, the press, and in general, relating to the folks from the Yearning For Zion Ranch, in Texas. I don't have any fondness for the FLDS types that were there, and I agree that the toleration of some of the things that the press says happened there must be difficult or impossible if the press reports are true. On the other hand, it doesn't take much of a legal or constitutional scholar to know that acting on what now appears to be a fictitious complaint by one young girl against one man (who has been identified and was not at the ranch at the time, or at any recent time) is darn poor grounds for going in and traumatizing hundreds of kids. (I personally think that the actions of the Texas authorities seem much more in the line of abusive than any thing that has been evidentially demonstrated to have happened on the ranch.) I think all of us who hold strong opinions, politically or religiously should feel a chill when that stuff comes on the air.

Having said that, I want to get to the point. The other evening I tuned into the Nancy Grace show on Fox TV. I listened to that obscene little monster orgasmically drooling over her quotation of the Texas Judge to one of the mothers in question. The mother of eight children stated to the judge that she would follow all of his instructions in order to regain custody of her children, but she hoped that those instructions would not cause her to violate her commitments to God and to her religion. The judge was quoted as saying something like "My judgements trump those of your God and your religion".

Nancy Grace (misnamed, she has no grace) was bouncing up an down in her chair screaming the judge's words, and commenting further on what else he could have done. I wonder if she doesn't wake up at night sobbing that she was born too late to have been around for the Salem Witch trials where she might have been able to personally hang, or light the fires under a burning "witch". Talk about drooling, there's something with which that ugly little (apparently female) obscenity could have "got it on" .

When I was doing some amateurish work on a college radio/TV program in the fifties, I got cut off the air because one of the politicians I was interviewing called one of the others a "Son of a Bitch" on the air. He said the words and I looked at the monitor to see the flag waving and the sounds of "Oh beautiful for spacious skys, - - -" ringing out to our stations. Nancy Grace opens her mouth and obscenities stream out (though she is careful to couch them in non-obscene words. I believe in Freedom of the Press as I believe in Freedom of Religion (both Constitutional guarantees) ,but both the FLDS and Nancy Grace give me pause in that belief.