This is “Super Tuesday” primary night in America where 24 states help decide which individuals will represent their party for the Presidency in the general election in November.  Note, I didn’t say today’s election will decide our future President and Commander in Chief.  This site is a political spin free zone.  But right now, my blood is boiling as I earlier watched the orgy of coverage that the mainstream media is giving to this evening.  The simple reality is that men and women go to their local voting places and vote.  And at some point, all the votes will be counted and an election official certifies the vote.  Then a winner is declared. And the process will continue to an eventual election in November with the Electoral College deciding the future President.

      And yet this evening, the chattering class in America, the self proclaimed cognoscenti, pontificate, punditize, spin, wax nostalgic, interpret, analyze and otherwise, tell all of us stupid people what happened….and more importantly, from their massive brains, flows forth….why.  And it’s all utter BS.  If you spent 10 minutes watching any of the following TV news channels: CNN, FOX News, CNBC, MSNBC, Bloomberg, CNN International (repeat of CNN), ABC News, CSPAN 1, CSPAN2, and then later all four regular networks, you saw massive collections of information systems, screens, computer generated images, constantly changing lists of state information, with Brady Bunch boxes of Talking Heads, all pointed at some eventual goal: to “call a state.”  What they SAY, means nothing, they project a winner and then I guess when they have the “Oscars” of television punditry, they must all sit around and beatify their great minds and their correct projections and polling, while lathering praise on each other, kind of like Caligula meets Hardball.

      What an absolute bunch of crap.  Do not get me wrong, I love our country and the way we elect our leaders, I think those that created this system 200 plus years ago were brilliant but consider this:  for all of the technology backing up these non stop news machines, for all of their self promotion, none of them were smart enough to know that Florida had two time zones and the polls in the western part of the state closed later.  I watched those returns in 2000 when everyone “called” Florida for Vice President Gore and I looked at my watch and said to the folks I was with, western Florida is an hour behind and it has probably more Republicans and conservatives, this ain't over yet.  Well, we know how that went.

      Now, imagine if 1/100 of the money, the talking heads, staffs, cameras and technology had been devoted to analyzing terrorism in the 90’s or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan now?  Do we need an active and free press, you are damned right.  But when the best actual reporting out of a combat zone is coming from the likes of Michael Yon and Michael Totten both self supported independent bloggers, and some of the best analysis of terrorism and the world we live in are coming from websites and self funded operations like Small Wars Journal, and The Long War, dont be surprised when our media is blindsided again.

      There’s this saying attributed to legendary baseball coach Tommy Lasorda:

"There are three types of baseball players: those who make things happen, those who watch it happen, and those who wonder what happens."  By the way, to refresh your memories, here’s the link to what Bin Laden said in 1996, had anyone bothered to read it, titled quite simply: “Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places."