Reply #15: just a few days ago... [View All]

[progdonkey]

I'm friends with this girl from Texas who's a full-blown Republican, but really because she's just very uninformed (not misinformed, where she has the facts of an event wrong, but rather where she doesn't even know an event has occurred), and she's very entrenched in Republican Texas. She and I met when we were studying in Germany (she was doing a one-month program).

I'm telling you all this to set up the situation. After the floods, I mentioned I had been watching the ZDF news broadcast detailing Bush's visit to Biloxi. My friend asked me "what's Germany saying?" and I told her that the reporter in Biloxi said that, as far as she and other she's spoken to could observe, aids workers had come and left with Bush, and that nothing was being cleaned up, there was no help for the residents outside of a single emergency medical station, etc. Instead of even attempting to give me some Republican spin, or detail how ZDF is unreliable, etc., her reply was simply, "Well, what the fuck do they know?"

Here was a news report from a reputable news agency (yes, it's German so it admittedly doesn't defer to Bush in the least) leveling certain charges at Bush that fit in perfectly with Bush's past performance and with his general response to Katrina specifically, and the only thing she could say was to just call it bullshit and leave it at that.

I mean, I've been on the receiving end of embarrassing news (real or not) about Democrats, and I always try to find out where it's from and either try to defend them or admit, "Yeah, they fucked up." I can't imagine myself ever saying just straight up that, for instance, the field reporter for a reputable news agency who's actually on location doesn't know shit when they state simply what they've seen.

(If anyone wonders why I'm friends with her, she's very nice otherwise. She just has blinders on when it comes to Republicans--Bush especially. One of her best friends was a Marine who died in Iraq, so I figure she just can't allow herself to believe that he died for nothing and that she voted both times for the guy that sent him off to die for nothing.)