BartBlog

July 12, 2011

How is a columnist like a fighter pilot?

Filed under: Guest Comment — Tags: , , , — Bob Patterson @ 12:24 pm

President Obama’s expects blind fanatical devotion from Liberal bloggers that reaches the same level of intensity as did the evening TV newscasts from Berlin during the era of the Third Reich. Many teabagging journalism critics may be surprised to learn that even before CBS radio started to recruit newspaper reporters for the gang that became known as “Murrow’s Boys,” Germany had a nightly newscast on TV. The 1936 Olympic Games were telecast but it used a convoluted technology that got images that were a minute old from freshly developed movie film. The German leader devised the publicity generating ploy of the Olympic flame. The nightly TV newscasts were suspended long before VE Day. The pro-Obama bloggers slogger on.

Conversely, curmudgeonly online columnists are accorded the same broad amount of permissiveness as are the fellows who deliver the opening monologues on the late night marathons of promobabble. Columnists are free to lampoon the President if they stumble across any potential for hilarity such as (hypothetically) if a President from the Democratic Party inadvertently began to help the Republicans achieve their dream goal of dismantling FDR’s “New Deal.”

Imagine for a moment that Johnny Carson were able again to do such a monologue recently and that he laughingly speculated that if the CIA had been permitted to use their famous “enhanced intorogation” methods, the Casey Anthony case would have ended with a confession. He could get away with such an example of a hilarious hypothetical, right?

Any Liberal Blogger who attempted to emulate such impunity would be given a time out and sent to his/her room if not actually dismissed from the roster of daily boosters of the President’s cause.

Cynical columnists would defend their obstreperousness by pointing to page 285 of Donald L. Miller’s book, Masters of the Air, because the author delineated the different qualities that were considered when picking bomber pilots or fighter pilots. If someone showed “rapid hand-eye co-ordination, aggressiveness, boldness, individuality, and a zest for battle,” they were more qualified for fighter pilot training. The ideal candidate for bomber pilot training displayed “physical strength, judgment, emotional stamina, dependability, team play, discipline, and leadership.”

Bert Stiles was both a B-17 pilot and a fighter pilot (P-51 Mustang). After completing his 35 bombing missions and qualifying for reassignment back to the states, he asked to be reassigned as a fighter pilot. We read his book “Serenade to the Big Bird” while in high school.

Newspaper reporters would be more like bomber pilots and the columnists would be more like the fighter pilots.

Bloggers are much better at doing what they are told to do and they will help President Obama get reelected so that he can continue to work his magic for four more years. They will ignore the reliability factor of the electronic voting machine results because if they don’t they will sound like conspiracy theory nuts. Capiche?

A blogger will accept his mission unquestioningly. You will hammer home the point about the possibility that the next President might get to make some important nominations for the Supreme Court.

The permissiveness for columnists often reminds his audience of the passage in the aforementioned Miller book (again on page 285) that goes: “This often encouraged explosive recklessness and dangerous exhibitionism, . . . .” (“Capt. Willard, are my methods unsound?”)

Would a rogue columnist be reluctant to challenge his audience to imagine President Obama saying to Rupert Murdock: “Please, I’ll do anything you ask if you will please, please, please quash this story.”?

Wouldn’t Freddie Francisco (from Berkeley CA), also known as “Mr. San Francisco,” also approve?

Bloggers will not be free to point out that the 2011 Presidential Election is shaping up to be a competition between an extreme Republican and a moderate Republican seeking reelection.

Is the Red Barron’s mantle of invincibility greater than Obama’s reelection chances?

How many unearned electoral votes will the electronic voting machines award to the Republican candidate? Will it be five or six? Was “Dirty Harry” a fighter pilot in WWII?

The chances that the average voter won’t be as effectively represented in the Debt Ceiling crisis debate as will the folks in the “no millionaire left behind” squadron suggest to this columnist that he should make a concerted effort to do the fact finding that would be needed to frame the Debt Ceiling issue in the form of a basic plot paradigm from the film noir genre. (Maybe not today. Mayby not tomorrow, but some day soon.)

Wasn’t it in the film “The Great McGinty,” that Claude Rains said: “Ricky, I’m shocked. I’m shocked to learn that fraud is being suspected in the electronic voting machine elections!”?

George Raft has said: “I must have gone through $10 million during my career. Part of the loot went for gambling, part for horses, and part for women. The rest I spent foolishly.” Would that have been in the form of campaign contributions?

Now the disk jockey will play “Sky Pilot,” “Snoopy and the Red Barron,” and the Pogue song “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda.” We have to go hunting for our copy of “Catch 22.” Have a “bombs away!” type week.

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