Come on. Why do you (or I) have a right to a Dr’s hard earned toil. What does he/she have a right to that you own?

BTW, umbrella man was a nickname for Chamberlain.

You don’t get it. One has to work very hard, spend a lot of money and sacrifice a lot of his life to become a doctor. It is something you attain. Do you nimmer or frame have a ‘right’ to that doctors toil and sweat? Just take it away from him? Have the government point a gun at him and say: go provide service to nimmer or frame or we will put you in jail. What do you give up in return that is worth as much? Movie reviews or Internet posts?

And yay Thatcher! Sure, she left the country in ruins spiritually and culturally, but that’s what we want, because we’re on the right wing and we’re sociopaths!

And who needs health care! Why should Doctor who spent years at university training in medicine, be asked to actually heal people without also taking their money at the same time? This is America! Essential services, schmessential services, you get sick, you pay for it. It’s your own fault anyway.

Okay. You’re an idiot. Nice talking with you …

So you think the health care system sucks. Why not do your own health care? Why should a doctor who goes to school forever and does hard work 24/7 thereafter, be forced via a government gun to give away his service to you?

“Cool’ Libertarian Dugger

Um, expertise and experience are two different things. As I personally experience the health insurance system in this country, it sucks. All the rosy media reports in the world ain’t going to change that.

No, actually, I think that is a conspiracy.

Why am I not surprised?

I love your country. Maggie Thatcher is one of my all time heroines. And Blair ain’t bad. But lets not forget umbrella man, “peace in our times” and the Oxford Union declaration earlier.

frame,

I do not see any sort of national conspiracy – no more than a wild mob trying to lynch somebody is a conspiracy (there’s probablya better desciptor). Of course, there are times when the media is less or more biased. While there is bias, strong bias IMO, the media still are a collection of independent -mostly baised- entitities who still might react diffrently at diffrent times. My case is that the media is predominately – not totally- biased. You will always (I hope) be able to point out individual contra indications to my conclusion.

And health care as a national issue -the costs, ramifications and impacts- do fall outside of most people’s areas of expertise.

Yes, health care falls outside my realm of personal experience. Jesus keerist.

And as for Iraq, there is an obvious cognitive dissonance between what the Bush administration itself is saying about Iraq and what is actually happening there. If the Iraqis are starting to take the lead, why do we need to send more troops? If the Iraqis haven’t taken the lead up until now, how will 20,000 more US troops suddenly allow them to step up?

And Dugs, I don’t see a left wing bias in the media, if anything I see a right wing bias. But let me ask you this: Did the media have a left wing bias when Bush’s poll numbers were soaring just after 9-11?

And if the media was then as it is now, how do you account for the serious erosion of Bush’s popularity and support for his policies? Was it the constant drumbeat of left wing bias or the consistent failure and incompetence of Bush’s policymaking?

Which answer sounds more plausible: A vast, unspoken media conspiracy to undermine a sitting president or a genuine popular response to expectations gone unfillfilled?

OK, I agree that at some point people will (stubbornly?) resist a medium message that does not correspond with their personal reality (“Bush says the economy is good but we’re having trouble making ends meet”). The problem is that portion of the world and events therein that are outside their personal area of observation/experience and for which they have rely on others for knowledge. Like Iraq or national health care. Re your Germany example, evidently enough people bought into the message – the image to sustain Hitler for a long time. But totalitarian states aren’t the best example. They’ll just murder or clap non-party-line media persons in jail. More important in a free society where we want our populace to be truly smart and independent and thereby, theretically, give us good govrenemnt (maybe limited government).

When you and duros etc poo poo liberal media bias, I hope you understand others don’t see the world the way you do and have had very different life experiences. Its quite possible for several intelligent, honest people to have completely different but logical opinions on many things – including bias.

The media does indeed distract people from the reality of their own lives with endless pap and bullshit about celebrity divorces and American Idol.

But when the media does report on issues of importance that impact people around the globe, most of those people effected by those issues will know when they’re being fed a line of bullshit.

Look at Nazi Germany, as classic an example of modern state controlled media as they come. No one could say that Goebells didn’t get Hitler’s message out while, at the same time, doing his best at distracting Germans from their daily lives with endless amounts of puff and pap (his model for the Nazi film industry was Hollywood, afterall).

But for all his efforts, average Germans still knew they were being fed buckets of shit. Tragically, they either couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything serious about it. From the link:

“The Germans were by no means powerless victims of propaganda. Many saw through the games played by Goebbels and his consorts. This didn’t change the fact that the country was sucked down into a whirlpool of crime in the space of just a few years.”

The point being that if so much of what the so-called liberal media was saying about Bush contradicted what people here and in other countries understand about US policies based on their own personal experiences of them in their own lives, you’d get a different result in the polls.