The Robert Jerk Journal

With the recent cancellation of CNN’s “Crossfire”, I recalled the recent exchange in which Jon Stewart, comedian and host of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” accused the show of “hurting America” and accused its hosts of “hackery”. As someone not part of the political establishment, but just as academically qualified to comment on it as any of its members, I decided to put together my own guide to some of the political columnists, hosts, journalists, and frequent guests you see on the talk shows and shoutfests currently populating television, radio, and newspapers.

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Year-end retrospective shows were ALL OVER the cable news networks this past weekend. I have to admit that while Keith Olbermann’s “Countdown” show on MSNBC had a pretty funny special, others were unintentionally funny. For example, Chris Matthews of “Hardball” seems really proud of having done a crappy job interviewing Zell Miller last summer. Also, Fred Barnes on “The Beltway Boys”…sigh.

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Exploiting religion to secure political power is one of the reasons we have a First Amendment in this country. Unfortunately, its only going to get worse before it gets better. Already, not to be outdone in the “crappy idea” contest politics has become in the last…I’ve lost track of how many years, the Democrats are latching on to this. As the pendulum of political ideas continues its proverbial movement to the right, the Democrats seek to survive by latching on to it, rather than staying put in their ideals and being there to catch it when the pendulum makes its inevitable swing back to the left in few years.

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"There is not such thing as a red state or a blue state. They're all purple."
-Howard Dean
December 11, 2004

Howard Dean has a point. Considering that John Kerry got over a million more votes in Texas than he did in Massachusetts (and conversely, George Bush got a half-million more votes in California than he did in Texas), he’s 100% right to observe that states are not these monolithic enclaves of like-minded voters the national media makes them out to be. Clearly, Dean would not have given up on so many states were he the 2004 nominee. This may sound like a recrimination about the past, but it is actually a practical observation for the future of the Democratic Party.

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"We don't need a study, if I remember my biology correctly, to show us that those people who are sexually abstinent have a zero chance of becoming pregnant or getting someone pregnant or contracting a sexually transmitted disease."
-Wade Horn, the assistant secretary of Health and Human Services in charge of federal abstinence funding.

Thanks for the insight, Wade. How Margaret Spellings got the Dept. of Education job and not you is a total mystery. No one was asking you to prove that abstinence works, you were being asked if TEACHING abstinence works. Every time I get comfortable with the idea that George Bush will be President for another 4 years, he or someone in his administration does or says something monumentally stupid that snaps me back into a depression befitting a 15 year old girl whose parents won’t let her go on a date. Ugh, says I, and pass me that copy of The Virgin Suicides.

Bush, who apparently never had sex himself until he was 31, wants more funding for “abstinence only” sex education in the range of $230 million. The premise of such programs is that telling kids not to have sex will cause them to not have sex, and teach them about safer ways to have sex is the same as condoning it. I’m sorry, Mr. Bush, but you’ve been a parent for HOW long?

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If you look at the map, its a sea of red. I probably have more people standing in my backyard right now than in entire Wyoming counties, and there are city blocks in NYC with bigger populations than the entire state of North Dakota. Bush only got 51%, which means 49% of the people still hate him.

If people want to turn the Democrats into a carbon copy of the Republicans, then we really will be left with no choice on election day. I'm not willing to sell out my values just to win an election. I'll agree that it'd be nice if someone would run on the issues that everyone cares about, instead of wedge issues, but that's not what the average voter responds to.

Kerry didn't loose because he was too liberal. Most people don't sit around with ideological scorecards picking where someone sits in relation to an imaginary political spectrum. If you were going to survey the average American about where they stand on specific issues, Bush might win on gay marriage and education, but that's about it (Kerry really didn't have a different position on military spending than Bush, despite what Bush claimed). Most people were against the war in Iraq once the truth came out about it, and most people want expanded health care, legal abortions, and higher taxes for wealthier people.

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There are a few terms I am completely tired of hearing from the pundits and journalists when it came to this election. “Battleground state” would be one. Another would be “undecided voter” (I’ve suspected the undecided voters were really just people who told the pollsters “None of your business” when asked who they were voting for), and my personal non-favorites “red states” and “blue states”. For some reason, after the 2000 election (yes, that recently), all of the networks decided they’d have a uniform color-coded mapping system detailing who was winning which state with red for Republicans and blue for Democrats. The terms “red state” and “blue state” became pundit short-hand for states where either party had a numerical advantage, and the other party had no chance of winning.

This led to a “no chance” mindset that caused both President Bush and Senator Kerry to adopt a strategic mentality that told them they should just give up on winning certain states and concentrate on ones where things are more closely divided. This sounds logical, but its also cynical and unfitting the highest office of the longest surviving democracy (or, technically, democratic republic) on Earth. Both camps decided early on that they could afford to try and appeal to enough states to get them to the magic number of 270 electoral votes.

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Throughout the ongoing presidential campaign, several charges have been leveled at the Democratic Party’s nominee, Senator John Kerry. These charges have been taken by many as absolute fact by Republicans, some Democrats, and many non-partisans who support President Bush’s reelection. After surveying the vast amount of anti-Kerry speeches, campaign speeches, literature, internet blogs, and television commercials, I have compiled a list of allegations that have been made against Kerry. Armed with the impartial FactCheck.org, and news sites like Newsweek and CNN, I will present my reasons why these charges should not stick, and why Americans who feel like our nation is going in the wrong direction should have no problem voting for Kerry this Tuesday.

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One evening on Fox News Channel...

BRIT HUME: BREAKING NEWS!!!
According to a new story in the L.A. Times, the sky is blue.
But is the sky really blue? Liberals say yes, but we've got experts from the Air Force Veterans for Green Skies with hard-hitting new evidence that it might not be. At Fox News, we report, you decide!

Later that night...

BILL O'REILLY: "Blue" is well known to be a color symbolizing the Democrats, and L.A. Times has a well known liberal bias. This is just another case of the media trying to hide the facts from the American people.

GENERIC L.A. TIMES REPORTER: We've got pictures.

O'REILLY: Those pictures were taken using a digital camera and processed using technology developed by Microsoft. Everyone knows Bill Gates contributed heavily to Bil Clinton's presidential campaign.

Even later that night...

HANNITY: Obviously, Alan, this whole "the sky is blue" thing is just a desperate attempt by the liberals to take attention away from the fact that John Kerry likes to drown baby kittens. The L.A. Times distorts the facts its up to us here at Fox News to report both sides of the issue!

COLMES: Well, Sean, the sky IS blue---

HANNITY: So you admit it! John Kerry DOES want to drown baby kittens! We'll be right back!

From the news...

NO WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION IN IRAQ

Bush said he, Kerry and many others thought Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and could give them to al-Qaida. He didn't mention that there were dissenting views within the U.S. intelligence community that his administration ignored.

The president also asserted that U.N. sanctions weren't working in Iraq. But a report this week based on a 15-month inspection led by the CIA weapons inspector found that Saddam hadn't restarted his nuclear weapons program since the 1991 Gulf War and had no chemical or biological weapon stockpiles or any concrete programs to make them.

The inspector, Charles Duelfer, did find Saddam was manipulating the U.N. oil sales system in ways that enriched powerful individuals and groups he selected as a means to gain influence with countries that could help him lift sanctions. Duelfer concluded Saddam hoped eventually to redevelop weapons to deter Iran and enhance his regional power, not to attack the United States.


The sanctions were working, and this Iraq war was unnecessary. Bush did have good reason to think that they weren't, but that doesn't make him less wrong to committ the troops.

The tight rope that Bush and Kerry are walking is that while we know we had no justification to do what we did, we are morally obligated to turn Iraq into a productive member of the world community.

Bush talked himself into a corner, since while every reason he gave turned out to be false, he still has to stay positive or else his chances of turning Iraq into a productive member of the world community will diminish. Meanwhile, Bush gets labelled "stubborn" for not conceding something which undermines the chances of his mission succeeding.

Kerry can afford to take a different position because he's not the one who ordered the invasion, but he's walking the same tight rope. If elected, Kerry must also do everything in his power to help Iraq. He can't come right out and say that he'd have left Saddam in power because that would also undermine the chances of the mission succeeding.

If my only intention by writing this was to answer the question who the better debater between George W. Bush and John Kerry was, this would be a pretty damn short column. Of the participants, John Kerry obviously won, but in a larger sense, the American people won. The American people won because they finally got to see the real differences between the two candidates. But, in a more literal sense, yes, Kerry won.

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WHY DO I THINK BUSH IS INCOMPETENT?

Here are my six reasons:

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Three Reasons Why Gay Marriage Should Be Banned

One of the most important issues facing our nation right now is not the war in Iraq, the budget deficit, or affordable health care. The single biggest issue facing America right now is gay marriage. This may come as a shock, or even defy what you already think, but I encourage you to keep reading. I have come up with three undisputable reasons why gay marriage should be banned, and the importance of this issue will become clear before you are finished with this humble article.


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Every week, for the last few months, I have read the latest issue of a fairly popular news magazine. Every week, for the last several months, they have printed a map of the United States showing which of the states favor the Democratic nominee, and which of the states favor the Republican incumbent. While there are a considerable number of undecided states out there, and a considerable number of states which favor President Bush, his opponent seems to have a larger number of states solidly behind him. This is even after, as of the first week of September, Bush is clearly in the lead in terms of the popular vote.

Those of you in touch with irony might already see where I’m going with this.

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Conservatives' faith in the free market is greater than everyone else's faith in the free market.

That's what this really comes down to, isn't it?

Its hard for most people to have faith that the market place will be fair and efficient because we don't see the theoretical side of it as much. We're kind of stuck between two extremes, you see.

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“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

-The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

The First Amendment has stood for over 200 years as a testament to the wisdom of the men who wrote the U.S. Constitution. Many documents were written in the early years of the United States that express ideas and ideals that are still revered to this day. Unfortunately, however, ideals do not always match actions. Despite the proclamations that all men were created equal, the equal rights of common men have been infringed by the U.S. government to this very day. Opposition to equal rights, in some cases, has been justified using religious texts such as the Bible.

Do not misunderstand me, though. I am not saying that the Bible is right or wrong. But it is a religious text and not admissible as a legal document or a justification for public policy.

And THAT’S where we start having problems.

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