This is a tricky post to write, because the point I want to make is that what I want to write about already has been written about far, far too much. (Clear Enough?)
Yesterday Ms. O"Donnell supposedly won an astounding victory, a clear harbinger for future elections.
Boehner, (The Hill)
"The voters of Delaware have spoken, and you're going to continue to hear the American people speak — not just last night, but you're going to hear them speak come November,"
The problem of course is that barely anyone spoke. Everyone talks of the difference in terms of percentage: 53% vs 47% does sound pretty impressive. But the actual difference is about 3,500 votes. This is less than 1% of the people that voted in Delaware in the 2008 election. The total number of votes she received yesterday, a whopping 30,561 votes, is about 1,000th of 1% of the population of America.
The same thing happened with last Saturday's rally against the mosque in downtown Manhattan, led by Pamela Geller. I was there. I'm being generous if I agree with the consensus that 1,500 people were in those two blocks of West Broadway which were cordoned off. At least a third of them were either Pro-Mosque, 9/11 Truthers, or curious people who wanted to bring their cameras and see what all the fuss was about. (like the Bustard) But even granting her the 1,500, we're talking about nothing, bupkas, nada. This is far less than march in the annual Hare Krishna parade. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has had a show of Picasso's work for the last few months - 6,700 people visit it every day. That's right: more than four times as many people attend a single art show daily than attended the Geller hate fest. According to Wikipedia, the Mermaid Parade in Coney Island attracts hundreds of thousands of people. Ever heard of it? Yet on Sunday afternoon at 5:30 P.M, even the excellent TPM had three center column, photograph articles about this non-event.
Somehow we have to ensure that these stories, covering absolute liars and grifters whose only skill is media manipulation, receive the attention that they deserve. None. The coverage they do receive only proves how dysfunctional our democracy and our media are.
(h/t memeorandum)