It's nearing the end of the latest election cycle and until now I've been able to maintain my cool by letting my anger out 140 characters at a time, but today a bayonet finally broke this horse's back.
Politicians and partisan media hacks for months have been grabbing out of context soundbites and running wild with them and that is nothing new; my problem is that the pathetically uninformed voter then goes out and spews out false aural sewage as though it was stone writ upon Mount Sinai and they themselves were there to witness the burning bush. Are we all just that fucking stupid?
From
Big Bird to
women in binders and
not optimal to
horses and bayonets, the Presidential candidates have both been attacked continually for the words they've spoken, though almost never with the original context intact.
When Mitt Romney said he loved Big Bird, but would cut PBS, he was simply trying to put forth his fiscally conservative vision for America. He was not trying to say PBS or Big Bird are the devil. When Mitt said he was handed binders full of women, he didn't mean he was literally handed a harem of women inside a magic box that would burst out if he merely rubbed the book properly. CNN, MSNBC, and other left wingnuts grabbed at these "gaffs" and attempted to paint a picture to sway the uninformed idiot from voting for Romney.
Likewise, Fox and other right wingnuts completely ignored the question Jon Stewart asked just prior, and also the way in which the President spoke his answer during not-optimal-gate. Instead, they tried to portray Obama as an uncaring, callous Commander in Chief to whom the lives of the fine people serving this country are nothing more than statistics.
Finally in last night's debate on foreign policy, Obama called Mitt out on his remark about the Navy. He said and I quoth:
"You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916, well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military's changed."
I won't go in to the fact that VP candidate Paul Ryan voted for the bill set to force the DOD budget cuts which Governor Romney attempted to blame President Obama for, instead I will simply focus on the context of the President's statement and how it is being completely ignored.
He was using the tool of analogy to explain that trying to compare uncontextualized numbers of ships in the Navy from a century ago to today is foolish. To spell it out for the slow: our military fields far less horses and bayonets today than compared to the military of 1916, yet we are still the premiere fighting force on this planet. Technology has advanced drastically since 1916 and simple numbers cannot be used alone to tell the story.
We've got more Naval power than the rest of the world combined. We've got more Air power than the rest of the world combined. We have so much technological superiority compared to today's enemies, that we don't need sheer numbers to maintain the status quo. It is intellectually insulting to think we need more ships than we had in 1916 to maintain our role as World Super Power. We've got flying fucking robots that can circumvent the world multiple times whilst dropping a whole fuck-ton of pain anyone we so deem as needing to feel it. Does this not count? Can we not shoot missiles or drop bombs over bodies of water?
Also, many people have decided that even though President Obama said
fewer in his statement,
what he really meant was
none and that he was completely oblivious to our use of horses during the beginning of the Afghan War or that there are still a bayonet or two laying around that he is equally unaware of. This is fucking retarded. Do we not teach people how to comprehend analogies anymore or was my original premise correct in that everyone is a fucking moron, only able to parrot weakly the biased falsities given to them via the media.
It all leaves me frustrated and with only one, simple question that I will leave you with:
