We watched with some interest yesterday as Herman Cain ended his quixotically driven run for the presidency of the United States by blaming everyone but himself for his failure to keep the lead that was so oddly thrust upon him a couple of months ago for the nomination of the Republican party for that office. We do not know which was the more pathetic part of that run for the presidency, his problems with the numerous women who came forward to accuse him of sexual problems, or, his inability to be able to answer obvious questions about things such as President Obama’s policies on Libya and his opinions on their effectiveness.

That fact of the matter is this: the only things that Herman Cain seemed to have any real answers to was how to give the very rich in this nation another extreme tax break with his 9-9-9 plan, or, his opinions that he had been pilloried by the nations press. Herman Cain told his life story effectively and in, for him, a few words Saturday, when he told us how he came from humble parents who had given he and his brother a few nuggets of supposedly good advice about life. It is a shame that they didn’t tell him about the Peter Principle, which, as we remember it, states that people will eventually rise to their level of incompetence. It is apparent, not only with Herman Cain, but with others that inhabit the current Republican field of presidential contenders, that so many of them have risen , not only to their level of incompetence, but, well past it as well.

It grates on me to no end to hear these pretenders to the presidential throne try to foist off on the nation their idea that “any one of the eight of us is better than the current occupant of the White House!� The fact that they can state that, as Newt Gingrich has done, with a straight face, amazes me to no end. The fact is that if the Republican party’s nominee for the White House in 2008--John McCain--had become president, this nation would probably have sunk into one of the deepest depressions that this or any other nation has even seen. It would be the height of hypocrisy for any Republican candidate to think that they could change their stripes and their so called fundamentally held principals enough to have done the things that Barack Obama did to save this nation from the abyss that it, and the world, was looking at in the first months of 2009. Another fact is certainly this: This nation and this world still face very perilous waters ahead and we would feel very restless in our beds thinking that any one of these pretenders to the presidential throne would have to lead us through the situations that this world faces with things like the European debt crisis or the very fluid situation in the Middle East today. If John McCain had been president what we would have done in Libya, by his own admission, would have been far different than what Barack Obama did over there. The fact that Libya, and Egypt, and Tunisia, and so many other nations of that region find themselves in the situation that they are in today is, in large measure, the result of decisions that Barack Obama has made, and, the restraint that he has shown. Would any of these Republican nominees, or even past nominees, have done anything better? Or, would they have done things that are far, far, worse?

We are just ending a situation in Iraq that was the result of a very dubious decision made by an even more dubious individual, George W. Bush, who, if a qualification test was required for competency to be President of the United States, could not have come even close to passing that test. In point of fact, the only real test that we have for the presidency of the United States is the candidates ability to pass the tests laid down for them by the media of this nation. And, in even a more pointed point of fact, the media is not always good at laying down the criteria for stating what that test should be. It is easy for the media to attack someone like Herman Cain because he is so dense that his faults are so very painfully obvious. It is more questionable when the media, as in the New York Times, lets an individual such as Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky engage in a rambling four hour interview where he attempts, with his attorney’s help, to justify what he did to all of those little boys over the time that he did it. One may think that the Sandusky story has little to do with presidential politics, however, the New York Times is one of those paragons of liberal virtue that so many look to for answers and opinions when we face things like decisions over who will be our next president. Allowing a man who states openly that he showered with little boys and blew of their belly’s because he loved “children and the elderly� is a passage and a potential sea change in the way that morals are presented that we cannot fathom at all. Perhaps the Times thought that by allowing this man access to their facilities, that the incredulity of it all might, in some way, educate the populous of the United States. We think that the populous has already been educated in this way far too much already. There are far too many people in this nation who think that what Jerry Sandusky did was not such a bad thing, and giving this man a platform in which to try to justify it only leads many more to believe that it was, in fact, not such a bad thing after all.

We suppose that there is probably no other way for the average American to receive their information than the ways that it is being disseminated to them already. What bothers us, we suppose, is the fact that what goes into this pipeline is so reflective of those that are stuffing it in there with such a great deal of rapidity and regularity. Perhaps the media can do nothing about that fact, however, then you have the end result that is so affected by those news organizations that have no objectify at all. Fox News and the outlets that allow people such as Rush Limbaugh to polarize the population seem to more than overcome those such as CNN that do try to retain some semblance of objectivity. Between and among the entirety of all of it, from beginning to end product, scares and amazes and worries us to no end. People like Herman Cain and Sarah Palin with her “lame stream media� are far from the mark in the way that they try to present their cases. However, the media itself is far from faultless in the ways that it allows itself to be used and to use those that its job is to report some simple and so very obvious facts. What we seem to end up with is a population of voting age who are trying to make some sense of all of it. It would appear that so many have simply given up altogether, or, abdicated their role by turning over the decision making process to whatever media outlet or opinion maker that they have, for whatever reason, come to trust. We remember back to the days when we had three or so television outlets and a host of newspapers and magazines to deliver to us the facts that we used to make our decisions for the future. We remember Lyndon B. Johnson stating that if he had lost Walter Cronkite, he had lost the ability to prosecute a very bad and debilitating war in Vietnam. We have no one like Cronkite around now and the media itself, in so many ways, reflects the shallowness of the candidates that it filters for us to select for the leadership of a nation that needs the best and the brightest far more than it has ever needed them before.

The totality of it all is a clinic in how democracies flail and flounder around, and, just perhaps, on how they begin to die!

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe