Drowning in Jackson

By Alan Caruba

The now day-long “coverage” of Michael Jackson’s death continues unabated. It is what I call the “Five Known Facts Syndrome”; the endless repetition of the time and place of his death, the speculation about a drug overdose—medicinal or not, the amount of record sales, ad nauseum.

This Jacksonalia, the complete submersion of the nation into a baleful mourning of the performer’s passing, suggests the low state of our supposed news media. It's the news version of water-boarding.

These are people who constantly tell us that they decide what the news is or isn’t, but they have managed to demonstrate their complete ignorance and complete indifference to events that will sink our ship of state.

The result is seen in this example from the Nielsen Wire report:

“The breaking news of Michael Jackson’s sudden death dominated the web yesterday (and today), causing spikes in traffic and overwhelming social networks such as Twitter and Facebook with bursts of information and updates from millions of users. In comparison, discussions of Jackson far exceeded those of the swine flu scare as well as the inauguration of President Obama.”

While this is going on, Congress is trying to pass the highest tax in the history of the nation, “Cap-and-Trade”, a bill that exceeds a thousand pages and whose co-author admits ignorance of what’s in it at this point. Essentially, it asserts that carbon dioxide, something that every living person exhales, is causing “global warming” and the government must “limit” it and, of course, come up with a crazed scheme of "carbon credits" to force companies to pay for permission to produce or use energy.

Typically, members of the House of Representatives are being asked to vote on it without the opportunity to actually read it. That's not just stupid, it's suicidal.

There are likely only a handful of people in the nation who grasp this concept and it is doubtful that the President is one of them since he keeps babbling about “clean energy” and "green jobs" while finding new ways to ensure there will be no energy and no jobs.

In a similar fashion, the news media has yet to have publish big headlines quoting the President saying, AMERICA IS OUT OF MONEY. This apparently is an unimportant detail as Congress pursues legislation that will require a totally broke nation to borrow more and more and more to pay for things we cannot afford and should not be doing at all.

But, while we're at it, let's also destroy the nation's healthcare system despite the fact that most people like their insurance coverage just the way it is.

So, Michael Jackson is an odd but appropriate symbol for what happens when one indulges in too much spending, too much self-indulgence, while passing off decadent behavior as “entertainment.”

An America led by stupid people, i.e., Congress and the White House, and composed of at least half the population stupid enough to have voted for them, is hanging by a mere thread while everyone pretends that everything’s just fine.

It’s like pretending that Michael Jackson wasn’t seriously deranged even while watching him “perform” or pretending that his odd behavior could or should have been excused by his “talent.”

Michael Jackson is dead.

The party’s over.

And the piper is demanding to be paid.