Race to the bottom.....

Okay the morning before the big debate tonight.

I had the chance to sit down with some old friends last night, who fall on opposite end of the political spectrum and I was reminded of how bias works. We got into a bit of a kerfuffle over whether Fox News channel was as biased as MSNBC. I took the position that they are both fairly partisan networks. I was disagreed with vehemently. Not exactly sure why that is. Simply because you happen to agree with the commentary doesn't make it less partisan. And that is problem. People intrinsically believe their own opinions to be correct, even if that isn't the case (yes I know the irony present in that statement).

Whether you support one candidate or another, you shouldn't allow your perspective to be completely shrouded by partisan leanings. That is in my estimation, is the difference between MSNBC and Fox News. Fox will run stories on Obama's possible terrorist leanings, his supposed Muslim faith and the "angryness" of his wife Michelle. Yet MSNBC has yet to run a story decrying McCain as a "Manchurian Candidate" or delving into his wife's substance abuse problems. All those charges are disingenuous at best and down right scurrilous to say the least.

Also to my knowledge MSNBC does not have any convicted felons with their own shows (Oliver North was convicted of obstruction of justice and admitted to lying to Congress, that is a felony). So it is going to take a little bit before there is parity between the two networks at least in that regard.

But anyways, back to the point, the McCain Campaign has begun to take that last dangerous path. When this is the sort of rhetoric showing up at your rallies, you really need to check the message you are trying to send. Dana Millbank over that Washington Post has a disturbing anecdote:

Worse, Palin's routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."

To my conservative friends, when you wonder about the vitriol you see spewed in your directions, it has little to do with your own personal beliefs and more to do with this sort of commentary. The individuals who make these sorts of comments are what is seen as the face of the modern conservative movement. That is the stereotype you are up against. Whether conservative principles or thought has any merit is lost in the demagoguery that has replaced most of the mainstream conservative echo chamber.

So each time a member at a rally calls Obama a terrorist, or threatens to kill him or a racial epithet is used I hold the entire conservative movement culpable. When you party has been in veritable control of the government for 14 of the past 20 years, you bear some amount of responsibility for the current state of things.

Almost as a bookend to this statement Gallup just released a new poll on the general feeling of the electorate basically 9 out of 10 respondents think the country is headed on the wrong track.

Sorry for the rambling post, still parsing a lot of data this morning on the competing Fed plan as well as the pending debate, and the sleaze-o-matic tactics the McCain camp has unveiled this week.