Here's who to blame . . .

and it isn't the Republicans or the Tea Baggers. Many of the comments I hear about the results of the recent mid-terms, both from private parties and from bloggers, radio hosts, talking heads, so forth, express amazement that so many people actually seemed to vote against their best interest.

What's so mysterious? When you have some candidates refusing to talk to reporters, others telling outright lies that the press then dutifully parrots as fact, constant yammering from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity, and a dumbed-down, willfully ignorant, mentally lazy public, there is ZERO chance of anything approximating a fair and impartial contest between candidates. Nationally, Fox News has been allowed to set the agenda for public discussion. We end up talking about Birther psychos instead of finding ways to haul ourselves out of this recession and feed our poor, and we continue to lend credence to morons like reindeer-killer Sarah Palin.

Fox News' collusion with the Republican and Tea parties is nauseating. One example serves to illustrate: During the health care ruckus, Fox manipulated public perception by deliberately calling the public option the "government" or "government-run" option, because, as Republican pollster Frank Luntz argued on Sean Hannity's August 18 Fox News program, "if you call it a 'public option,' the American people are split," but [...] "if you call it the 'government option,' the public is overwhelmingly against it."

This is breathtaking. It removes hard facts from the forefront of the news and creates an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty in which people can be led to believe whatever you want them to believe, because they are afraid and do not have the will to think for themselves. It's bad enough that Fox News indulges in this kind of garbage; it's positively tragic that a lot of media outlets determine what to cover based at least in part on what Fox News is covering on any given day. The assumption is, what? That Fox News is just so damned good and impartial that they always get it right?

They get it right for sure. And if it isn't right, they make it right. Just not that kind of "right."