As IF Times

link Romney energizes campaign with feisty debate performance | Fox News.

By now, the media is all a-twitter about the big collapse.  No, not the Ryder Cup, that’s another story.  We’re referring of course to last evening’s first Presidential debate.  As we skim through the expected comments by pundits in the aftermath of the great debate, the most striking tone that emerges is the surprise at how well Mitt did versus the relatively flat performance of Barack.

This is amusing because Romney did not do anything different than he has been over this entire campaign and really, since he started public life.  It has been the reporting of it and the perception that has been exposed.   There were no surprise policy positions offered at the debate, nothing that hadn’t been pooh-poohed by the media for months.  For anyone who has been paying attention to the content and not the editorials of his positions, what he offered has been there for everyone to consider for at least the past year.

What changed was the stark juxtaposition of Romney’s pragmatic positions versus the ideological ramblings of Obama’s, laid bare for everyone to see, stripped of spin or embellishment.  It’s akin to the old chestnut about how the young man at 25 years of age, is amazed at how smart his once clueless father became over the past 10 years of their lives.

What I find truly amusing, actually alarming, are the comments by the so-called independents who admitted to being swayed by last night’s debate.  It truly illustrates the shallowness of most of the voting public.  It also shows the residual power and influence of the general media which, though subtle can greatly influence opinions by steadily offering a concocted version of events.

Despite inarguably having the greatest access to education and information in the history of mankind, the ability of people to think independently is overwhelmed by an American Idol culture in which groupthink is rampant.  Many people think that popularity equals legitimacy.  It is a particularly unique trait of humans to do things that are actually detrimental to their own survival, something that you would never observe in the animal world, with the obvious exception of lemmings.

Conservatives shouldn’t take too much joy in last night’s debates as far as swaying the hard core liberals.  We know that even if the liberal candidate were found to have bodies stuffed in a freezer in his house, he’d still get the liberal vote. In the 2010 elections, Californians had the choice of candidate A, a person with renowned business skills who ran a multi-billion dollar enterprise employing thousands and who spent their own money on their campaign; versus candidate B.  This candidate was a relic from the past who essentially had no plan but was a darling of the entertainment community.  Californians were faced with crippling debt loads, massive flight from the state because of taxes and regulation and in dire need of proven fiscal management expertise.  Sure enough, the B team won.

link Protesters dispersed in Cairo; fury over anti-Islam film hits Australia – CNN.com.

In a long forgotten movie from 1983 entitled “Yellowbeard”, there is a scene in which a blind man is offered a roast chicken but is actually a loaf of bread.  The blind man takes a bite and says, “mmm, great chicken”.   The ongoing narrative about the uprisings in the Muslim world is an amusing parallel to this.  What we hear from news outlets of all stripes is that the rioting, shooting, setting ablaze of buildings and killings of ambassadors is rooted in anger over an obscure YouTube flick in which their religion is slighted.

Purveyors of news think that the public are just like the blind man in the movie, willing to accept the narrative as allegorical chicken when it is in fact, bread.  Think about that.  In many of those muslim nations, having a change of clothes would qualify you as middle class, yet we are to believe that because of some YouTube video, young men are willing to get their hands on RPG’s, riot and murder people.   For this kind of over reaction, you would think their hockey team lost a playoff game.

You would have to believe that on the anniversary of 9-11, in simultaneous attacks across a dozen countries,  young muslim men collectively decided to protest a crappy video.  (Imagine if they had seen any of Will Ferrell’s movies )  Somehow, en masse, they decided that freedom of expression in another country would not be tolerated.  This dubiousness is perpetuated by no less than the Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton who denounced the video as inflammatory and disgusting.  As well, UN ambassador Susan Rice also chimes in with her condemnation of the video.  So we have the entire world condemning some low budget video as being the root cause of the violence towards Americans.  Except for Al Qaeda.  They actually issued a statement saying that the violence was in response to the killing of their number 2 guy.   http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/12/world/africa/libya-attack-jihadists/index.html  Of course, Al Qaeda doesn’t have as much credibility as the New York Times or the Huffington Post.

Because of this narrative, subtly but surely, a free western world has to be on eggshells worrying about what words  may or may not invoke anger among  otherwise peaceful and tolerant muslims.  This of course is an extension of an entire generation of people in the west being fed the bs of ‘root causes’, as in “the root cause of the axe murderer’s rampage was being denied candy at the age of 5”.

Let’s hope that the muslim world doesn’t catch on to the new Wendy’s triple bacon burger.  The very idea that people can consume something like that has to be offensive at some level.