I don’t know if I can even stand to listen to another minute of talk radio or talking head news punditry. At what point, in America, did the population stop thinking? Look at McCain and his choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate. Look at the boon of support it gave to his rotting campaign? Just take in for a minute the mountains of bullshit the media unloaded in to the cars and living rooms of the American People.

Suddenly, pundits who were saying that if Hillary couldn’t take the blows from the men candidates she should drop out of the race, are saying that the cruel media make it hard for women politicians to get a fair shot. Those who dismissed Senator Clinton as a candidate that pandered to the lesbians and the feminists were quick to point out that in 2008, it’s unfair to make such stereotypical claims about someone just because of their sex.

I know it sounds cliched, but in just watching the gears of our new system turn, I feel like the exchange of ideas is becoming the consumption of ideas. People have completely given up on forming their own opinions. They opt, instead, to adopt someone else’s philosophy, for the sole reason that they are on TV, and that they claim that they’re right.

Long, Long ago, the idea was that in order to get on TV and lecture about how right you were, that somebody has checked to see if the things you say apply to the same reality that we all live in. This is no longer the case. Out of the hundreds of people that CNN, FOX, NBC, CBS, Ad Nauseum, would call experts in some way or another, are only experts at looking in to a camera and talking for two minutes straight. They have about as much business talking about politics and policies than Clayton Bigsby has talking about white supremacy.

Take FOX News. They have a show called Hannity and Colmes, a ‘fair and balanced’ debate show featuring the greatest manipulative mastermind in the known universe, Sean Hannity, and some idiot who couldn’t argue his way out of a french bathroom.

I guess the Competitive Media look at it like this. They have 24 hours in a day, the entire time they are expected to be on the air talking about the news. Since you couldn’t possibly objectively report the days events for that long without losing market share to the weather channel and that one channel that plays a local radio station and a PowerPoint presentation promoting local events, they are forced to make the news interesting by making the discussions adversarial in nature.

I can sort of understand the logic behind that. Ideally, Discussions equal discourse, discourse is the cornerstone of democracy, and your news station is no longer bland and neutral, it’s exciting and patriotic.

So, they come up with the two archetypes of American politics; the Neo-con and the Flaming Liberal. They put them in a room together, they turn on a camera, and they throw some money in the middle and film the bloodbath.

So, you get extremists on both sides, both of which have to make legions of yes-men want to watch them. Neither of the two are capable of understanding the first thing that happens in our government. Nevertheless, pick your issue. One of them is fanatically in favor of the topic, the other is fanatically against it.

I used the term Competitive Media, and I think it works in the purview of this topic. The American People asked the Corporate News Media to inform us. The Corporations decided that they would take on this stupendous responsibility, and then - after a track record of doing a decent job with it - finally decided that it’s duty to our society just wasn’t making them enough  money. So, they decided to dedicate more time to the news throughout the day, and exponentially piss all over the quality of the journalism to make it entertaining.

The result? Nancy Grace, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and every author and bobble head that makes it in one of those little camera output squares. You know, the ones that are being interviewed by the CNN anchor you’ve never heard of who was hired because he could read a teleprompter and banter during the segways.

It’s been a glacieral process. It started when the American People decided that TV news was good enough and felt secure that religiously watching 24 hour news channels was a sound method of staying informed. It’s inevitable result? A population that will accept any answer you give it. A castrated America that couldn’t make an informed decision if civilization as we knew it hung in the balance.

That’s the real irony here, isn’t it? Even the atheists are starting to worry about the apocalypse. Yet, we have one political campaign telling us that we need bumper sticker quotes and lackluster legislation, and we have another who’s telling us that we do, in fact, need bumper sticker quotes and lackluster legislation, just from a different tent.

We have hour and a half debates where candidates are encouraged to keep their responses to short blurbs, and even then, all they do is call each other liars and cheats. The issues are swept under the rug, if you were reading a transcript, you wouldn’t even be able to tell the two apart.

Yet, when people step up with opinions which go against the two usual talking points, those people tend to be censured.

These people, who arbitrarily make up the sides to the opinions of the day, poll the population on which of the sides they came up with they agree with. Then, they use that polling information to justify what they’ve been saying all along.

This is what passes for news in my country. This is the main reason my country will be in a recession for the next decade, and probably taken over by the British in the decade following.

By “you”, of course, I mean You - the one reading this now, and to those of you involved in making this debate possible. The Athiest’s agenda is an interesting question? First, the main reason I didn’t like Krauss in the mentioned forum was because he kept telling us how he likes to seduce people in to athiesm.

What the fuck are you people talking about, anyways? Seducing people in to athiesm, to me that’s a moral argument your both on the wrong side of. By middle school, I refused to enter in to the religious debate with the folks who firmly held their ground on their standing with God, or the merits of Christianity as a whole. Of course, if you were around often enough, we’d probably have a decent conversation about it, but this idea that Atheism is somehow a closeted choice, and a ideology with a firm standing in any scientific ranking is absurd.

Listen to me, this is important. Atheism is not a belief system, it’s not a system of morals or ideologies, it’s simply a label for one who does not believe in a theist ideology of any stripe. Although it’s universally assumed that these people would hold the scientific understanding to substantiate their claims, that is no more the case than a twenty six year old kid who knows Jesus Christ to be his personal savior actually has the Theological background to substantiate his claims through scripture.

No, In our society we are forced to be beings who chooses one or the other. You either believe in God, or you don’t. Your either a Christian, especially in America, or your an athiest. Of course, we phrase it differently in the verbage as ‘believe in god or not’, allowing the other religious minorities a chance to pick a side.

The liberals, they get the intellectual pals, the athiests and the marxists. The conservatives, they are the Christian majority. So, you go to an Obama rally and he talks in that seductivly loud tone, with the microphone where his lapel pin should be, talking about hope and how We Can, in the face of adversity.

He talks for forty-five minutes, and it’s all circular reteric designed to insight facism and nationalism. Then, you look over - across the isle - and you have Rush Limbaugh telling republicans to register with the DNC and vote for Hillary so she’ll keep beating up on the obvious nominee, effectively doing McCain’s job for him. McCain, who is just sitting back enjoying the show, is watching the two only viable Presidential Candidates in the entire country destroy the others creditability.

Yet, our News Media won’t report that story. You have to get online and piece it together yourself, and listen to Rush on the Radio gloat about how well it’s working. The media focuses on Rush’s involvement, and ignores the fact that his ‘Operation Chaos’ handed Hillary the Indiana victory.

Our News media has picked sides. Fox News on the right, CNN on the left, others scattered in between, who bring up ‘issues’, decide who’s on which side, and then encourages folks to vote in polls to get their opinions on if it’s good or not. You have rich people and poor people, believers and non-believers, we are an adversarial society, and we tend to choose one side over the other.

It’s Good versus Evil with y’all, it’s Right versus Wrong. It’s Yes versus No, it’s Hillary versus Obama. Coke versus Pepsi, ad nausium.

Keith Olbermann has done his homework, ladies and gentlemen. This clip is right at 17 minutes long, and shows a comprehensive timeline of the War on Terror, from the point of view of somebody who is forced to watch the blatant propaganda perpetuated by the likes of Fox News and the Bush Administration.

He’s right, a similar video, correlating this stuff with the phases of the moon, could be made - however his conclusions and insights are worth the length of the video.