The Politics of Mythology

[marmar]

from Consortium News:



The Politics of Mythology
May 23, 2012

Fighting for real journalism – or even caring that political comments connect to actual facts – often seems a fool’s errand, given how big money especially on the Right has overwhelmed the democratic process with distortions and lies, a problem that Danny Schechter dissects.

By Danny Schechter


Increasingly, politics is a game driven by often-invented beliefs and myths that are firmly detached from facts and their interpretation. The parties and their factions live not only in parallel universes but in different worlds of information.

Even as progressives complain that Barack Obama has moved Right even if he occasionally talks Left, the hard-core right-wing see him a black revolutionary shaped by Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s black liberation theology with allusions to Malcolm X and Kenyan communists thrown into the mix to “prove” their case.

Never mind that Obama threw his one-time religious mentor Wright under the bus in 2008, or that his policies rarely speak of the needs of a black community suffering under the burden of high joblessness, foreclosures and growing poverty.

In fact, real black revolutionaries like Cornell West and so many others find the President a sell-out and an embarrassment even if their community embraces him more as an identity issue or on the basis of shared pigmentation, ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://consortiumnews.com/2012/05/23/the-politics-of-mythology/