Of course, we watch the NewsHour, Nova, Frontline and more but we’re in a minority, most people watch commercial TV and a lot of it. And, when they’re watching they’re not reading.

The chicken-egg piece of this interests me: did the people who write and produce TV start making more crud and people got used to it or did people’s ability to pay attention diminish enough so that producers and writers had to go further and further into outrageousness to get their attention?

It might be more accurate that it is the TV that people are watching, just like the ‘red top’ tabloid newspapers that they are buying on this side of the world, which is the main culprit.

And for that you have to blame the choice of the people. Which echoes what you feel about the choice of government, I guess.

Don’t know if we’re any better over here, either.

The problem here is that the middle ground who voted for Bush because of a moral problem with Clinton was not smart enough to realize what they were getting. That’s the part I’m still not happy about and this I can’t hold against Bush: he made very clear what he was going to do and did it. I dind’t like it but the middle ground wasn’t listening and voted for him anyway not really “processing” what he was saying about Iraq, tax cuts, and the like.

Now, they are souring on him but it’s much too late. A lot of damage has been done that will take more than a single presidency to overturn. And, I’m not convinced that if there were an election tomorrow the right person would run opposing him and that Americans would vote for that person.

So, you might ask what I think the cause of this decline is. IMHO the biggest contributor to the dumbing down of America is television.

And I feel that the very things that made America great, and admired as a defender of the good, have disappeared behind the clouds of war for the sake of war profits. Every good American has been damaged by your current Government’s actions.

You know my feelings about this, looking in from the outside, and articulated in a post once on the Alphasmart community forum, and how saddened I am to see it.

But as a nation you have another problem, also brought on by Bush and Co to a great extent, and written very clearly in this Alternet post.

This is one more example on a larger scale of “you’re either with us or you’re the enemy” and if you’re the enemy you’re a terrorist and we torture terrorists.

I wonder how many US citizens they consider terrorists and how many US citizens are being tortured? Timothy McVeigh was a terrorist and even though we executed him, I doubt we ever tortured him to get more info on who else was involved in his plot.

Even if the current movement produces an impeachment, for me the issue is how so many Americans voted for this guy the first and second time. He uses fear and intimidation quite effectively but some of us saw through it while he was governor of Texas. How so many people bought the crap he was selling is beyond me and it does not paint a great picture of the American public.

The other related point is that this administration is out to overturn Row v Wade. Why? They believe in life. Well, what the hell are people who believe in life doing torturing people. When Bush was governor of Texas he executed more people than any governor in history. Some belief in life.