34 Hours.
All eyes on Haiti, and speaking to Bloomberg's William Varner, to Larry Johnson, No Quarter, re SOUTHCOM's response, to Karen Hooper, Stratfor.com, on the last two hundred years of abuse and abandonment of Haiti by the Western Hemisphere colonies and states. There is also the ongoing melodrama in Massachusetts or (or "Massachusettes") with the Martha Coakley supporters going negative on very clean Scott Brown; and with the Brown supporters making low key videos (above). Also the banks too big to fail sent their chiefs to the Hill to defend their poor practices of 2003-2008. Haiti reporting does dominate the news cycle, now at 34 hours since the quake first struck, with aftershocks as recently as ten minutes ago. The Obama administration is responding ably and swiftly. The USS Carl Vinson and the USS Bataan are inbound, with a deal of Coast Guard ships accompanying. The Massachusetts race will slip from the front pages, and so will the bank news, as the scale of the disaster takes hold on the TV. This may not surpass the death toll of the tsunami in 2004, but it will look worse because the victims are to be buried and they are all in once place. Mass graves and a vast problem of corpse disposal will dominate the TV. No real news can match this until the refugees are in camps and the US military has secured Port Au Prince. The Coakley and Brown race will need to play out more quietly. All the anchors, all CNN, all cable leads, all hard news, is now fixed on the rescue and grief. The Coast Guard send a flyover video (below) of the city and outreaches in daylight.
The American people will have to learn to figure out which news stories are legitimate and which aren’t. Haiti, big; Health Care, big; Brown vs. Coakley, big; Tiger Woods, not important; what Harry Reid said (about anything other than Health Care), not important; NBC’s nighttime scheduling problems, not important.
I listed both the Haiti earthquake and the Brown vs. Coakley contest next week as seminal. They are both equally important. No priority should be ascribed to either one at the expense of the other. There may be those who would seek to diminish the significance of the Massachusetts Special Election by talking about Haiti or Tiger. Haiti is by far a most immediately compelling issue. The tear in the fabric of humanity is palpable. The cries are real; the pain runs deep – as does the desire to do what we can to help.
The Massachusetts Special Election fight is real as well. It offers us a chance for at least a token roll-back of the Obama Administration’s Marxist agenda for America. I’m not so naïve as to think that a Brown win would automatically stop Health Care legislation. Neither will it undo other, to my mind, detestable things that have already been done. It’s the symbolism here that’s important. It’s to show that there’s still some fight left in the opposition; that there’s still hope; that there might still be enough of us to right this listing ship of state. And that if this spirit can be found in Massachusetts (of all places), it can surely be found anywhere else in triplicate. Were such a signal heard throughout the land, momentum would build for the consensus to do something – NOW. Not next year; not next election; not two elections from now.
Barack Hussein Obama must be stopped NOW. He and those encouraging him must be shown that they are cutting against the grain of the American experience. They must be convinced that by pursuing this course, they will suffer consequences. Nothing short of a solid Brown win in Massachusetts next week could do more to nudge the current administration toward epiphany. Yes, the earthquake in Haiti deserves coverage and personal effort. But so would an earthquake along the political fault line that runs through Massachusetts at the moment.
Lastly, I would ask everyone to consider just how we would find ourselves in a position to help out in Haiti or anywhere else where disaster might strike if all the egalitarian policies were to become part and parcel of ourselves like Obama wants. I don’t see any of his good socialist buddies from around the world offering to help. Neither have I noted any reluctance by our own country – still operating under the burden of residual (Bush) evil – to do so.
http://peterkoelliker.blogspot.com/