Drip, Drip, Drip

A friend once asked me if I could win an election for a regional candidate who wasn't well-known or particularly popular. I said, "Of course not.

"But what I can do, given enough time and money, is create a political climate that gives him a very good chance to win."

The important term is "political climate."  Fish swim in water. Birds fly in air space. Politicians and their political movements flourish when immersed in a favorable  stew of public attitude; that ragout is itself a mix of fashionable beliefs, ideas, misconceptions and general thinking which may or may not be within fifty parsecs of reality.

The base political climate of a country is largely a creation of its information sources, the "news." The media themselves are a mishmash of all that is good, the destruction of Richard Nixon, for instance. Or evil, perhaps exemplified by the destruction of Robert Bork.

Leading us to this morning's news, in the category of Wog-Bombing.  Now, "everyone knows" that when swarthy widows and orphans get bombed, Suspect No. 1 is Uncle Sam, the aspiring imperialist master  of all under Heaven.

The AP,  perhaps unintentionally and as a result of simple editorial ineptness, falls into the pit in its report of bad bombing in Syria. In a lead story it requires readers to endure five full paragraphs of detailed horror description,  geography, and an explanation that Doctors With Borders is sometimes called MSF.

Than and only then does AP reveal the first "W" of basic reporting: "Who?"

Turns out it was the Russians. At least the Brits say it was Putin's air force.

As most any readership study of the past fifty years will report, by the sixth paragraph of any new story readers will have flocked away by massive percentages and turned to the comics or the scores. And those people will have no reason not to believe the United States bombed the hospitals, maybe on purpose because, y'know, like, that's what Uncle  does.

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Not to let Reuters off then hook while I'm chastising the wire service which still helps feed me.  The Brit version of AP leads today with a piece on the replacement for Justice Scalia: "Republicans Gear Up for Supreme Court Battle after Scalia's Death," leaving readers to figure out for themselves that the opposite is also true and just as newsworthy. Democrats are also in gear.

Thus a fellow can be forgiven for the big thought that day-in and day-out, decade after decade, a water drip at a time, the political climate becomes a closed-circuit sewer