A Dollar and some Change from Iowa

I don’t want to hear it from the mass media. Only a few days ago, they predicted Edwards and Romney to win in Iowa. They were wrong. And to prove that two wrongs don’t make a right, they are again wrong about why Obama and Huckabee won.

They believe that if you put a dollar into Iowa that you will get two cents back in change. So much for their two cents worth of opinions, I would rather trust the America people’s true sentiments. Put a dollar into Iowa and you get a dollar and two cents change back.

Explaining that kind of math to my 83-year old mother was hard. She still sees tearing a dollar in two and giving half to the Republicans and half to the Democrats. Her thinking is influenced by the media that still sees a country divided and dichotomized along party lines and polarized by partisan thinking.

The new math goes like this: Of all the Iowans who caucused, Obama won 38% on a message of Change; Huckabee won 34% on a message of Change; and John Edwards won 30% on a message of Change. Altogether, that’s 102% in Change, or “A Dollar and Two Cents” in Change.

What does that mean?

It means a resounding repudiation of President George Bush. No change for him, just a message of stay the course. He doesn’t get it. People are crying for change. Bring the boys and girls home from Iraq- the sooner the better. We cannot go to war in the name of a lie and turn around and make it right with after-the-fact rationalization. People no longer see Weapons of Mass Destruction. They see a fight over oil and oil is no longer cheap.

There was a time when we put on blinders and went to war. Although we hate bombing and killing other people, we would shrug our shoulders and say, “Well at least we are benefiting from cheap oil prices.” No more. All we see now are the faces of our children displayed on the nightly news, killed in action, maimed for life, and traumatized by endless recurring deployments into the combat zone. The American people are crying: “Bring our children home. We are tired of fighting over oil in the name of national security. Maybe we can broker peace in the world by talking to all parties, including reconciliation with our former allies.”

But isn’t a repudiation of George Bush a repudiation of the Republican Party?

Wrong again. That’s what the dumb media would have us believe. A dollar and some change in Iowa is a Return on Investment made in 2006, when the mass of American people kicked out every possible politician they could- out of Washington, out of state houses, and out of local office. The mass media don’t get it either- the fact that we are sick of looking at and listening to double-talking incumbents. A dollar and two cents worth of change says kick all the bums out. We want a complete change. We want a dollar in new economic hope. We are just longing to wake up one morning with a new outlook, instead of watching our job being outsourced overseas.

Notice also, we said nothing about Obama’s color or race. Yet the first to mention the fact that Obama was African-American was the mass media, who still sees everything in black and white. Talk about playing the Race Card, was it African-Americans or the media who started this whole thing about white Iowans and a black presidential candidate? The young voters have spoken: “The times they are a’ changing.”

Who, but the dumb media, is doing all this Monday morning quarterbacking? They slice the dice and come up with idiocies like this: Obama overcame the racial gap, the gender gap, the age gap, and the income gap. But when we look at 102% of what the Iowans were saying, there is no gap, only gap-makers.

I don’t have to listen to the mass media, because the credibility of mainstream journalists is gone the way of the winds of change. Everybody knows now that media commentators and pundits are doing nothing more than “mouthing” the sentiments of their sponsors- for the sake of their paychecks and for the sake of more corporate hegemony. But for two cents worth of opinions, they have come up a dollar short.