Hatin'...

On Wolf Blitzer. Jesus, I want to smack that guy with a stick. And somehow, in past few months, it's gotten to a point where he's on CNN like fifteen hours a day.

(Yes, I watch CNN. I don't care if they're communists - they have more reporters and guests than FOX)

All day long, it's been Wolf yammering and trying to play "gotcha!"

"Did any of the Democratic candidates step on their cranks? Not yet! Maybe next time!"

"Let's talk to LTG Petraeus and see if we can get him to say something we can play out of context for four days!"

"Look! It's George Tenet! He's yelling!"

God damn it, major media outlets. You are charged with reporting the news, not desperately combing through interviews and haranguing public figures until they say something you can shriek about.

Facts are our friends, and they are damn hard to come by these days. This endless game of what-can-we-trick-him-into-saying virtually guarantees that no public figure will ever utter anything other than a carefully crafted talking points.

The downside of this is, of course, that all we hear are irrelevent leading questions answered by meaningless soundbites.

One of my favorite places to go for ground truth is the DoD's press site. I like to read transcripts, because I tire of letting agenda-driven media "interpret" what's already been clearly said. Last night I stayed up late and read the Inspector General's report on the Pat Tillman investigation (click on the link and it's over on the left sidebar). Long, but interesting. And every single day, even when some drug-addled whore has died in south Florida, they publish the names, units and general locations of the dead.

There are places we can look for truth, but increasingly, the mainstream media isn't a very good source. I keep the TV on because it lets me know when there's something happening I need to look into.

It takes work these days to try to understand what's going on in the world. But these are precarious times, and it's really our responsibility to compare and constrast the information we're fed.