Some More Politics and the Overall Degeneration of Society as We Know It

Like a lot of Americans, I knew absolutely nothing about Barak Obama before the democratic primaries just over a year ago.  And very little about him on the day he was elected.  As Hillary Clinton said, his qualifications and achievements were limited to a "pretty speech" at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.  So how did we make him President with so little (or no)knowledge of his views and beliefs?  


I got a very interesting glimpse of the way the average, or quite possibly above average, American gathers information about politics and politicians.  I was in a hardware store and overheard the young - middle 20's - cashier telling his co-workers about the unfair criticism of President Obama's delayed response to the Christmas day attempt by a terrorist to blow up an airliner with an underwear bomb (brief bomb?, probably not, boxers are less constricting!).  He said that Jon Stewart said that the President's critics weren't being consistent.  Stewart said that President Obama spoke to the nation only 10 days after the attempt.  Mr. Bush (it's never President, or former President Bush, always Mr.) waited two weeks to say anything about the 9-11 attacks!  I was pretty sure that President Bush spoke on the evening of the attacks in a national telecast, but I am over 40, 45 now, so my memory might be foggy at best.  So I did a very un-old fogey type thing and did a search on Youtube for President Bush 9-11 speech.  And guess what?  My foggy memory wasn't as foggy as I feared!  


One week later when I was in the store again, the same young man (I have spoken to him a lot and he's very intelligent and friendly, which in itself makes this story scarier), was working.  I mentioned what I had overheard the week before and he repeated his concern about the unfair treatment of the President.  I asked him to do the same Youtube search I had done and said he would get videos of President Bush's great speech that begins "TODAY America came under attack."  Some creative, obviously young, techie types have created some very moving videos with President Bush's speech over photographs of the World Trade Center towers collapsing, spliced in with the day's news reports and music by REM and Enya.  He was very polite and said he'd look it up.


I saw him again a couple of days later and he said he had seen the videos and that obviously Jon Stewart was wrong (I'd say LYING).  Being well on my way to becoming a grumpy old man, I recommended that in the future, he should get his facts from more than one source, and the Comedy Channel is probably not the best place to start!  In complete contradiction to the stereotype, he agreed.  Maybe there's hope for us after all.