The importance of saying nothing

I just finished listening to our Supreme Leader give an hour-long + news conference on NPR. I liked listening to it on the radio as opposed to television because this medium allows you to concentrate on the actual words spoken. I think that media spectacle and all those similar put on by current and recent government officials serves to highlight a major problem with the current state of our so-called democracy:

Politicians and other civic leaders have perfected the art of saying absolutely nothing of consequence while still managing to talk profusely for lengthy periods of time and still sound to the lazy listener like they are knowledgeable. No one is better at this than Bush. In fact, this is accepted by the public and so is the only form of communication used. No one in the media seems to have the guts to publicly pose tough questions to this president nor point out his most glaring contradictory statements. Bush and his fellow politicians (elephant and donkey alike) do this through a small set of established and brutally effective tools - all those below are taken from the transcript of Bush's conference today:

Generic and insincere talking points and mislabels so general or circular in logic and so vague as to appear little more than rohrschach blotches to the public and repeated ad nauseum:

1. Iraq's "unity government"
2. "These are tough times in Iraq"
3. "Our strategic goal is a country which can defend itself, sustain itself and govern itself"
4. "making sure the young democracy of Lebanon is able to fend off the extremists and radicals that want to crater that democracy"
5. "the most solemn duty of the American president, in government, is to protect this country from harm"
6. "interrogate high-valued detainees"
7. "Iraq is a part of the war on terror"
8. "cut and run"
9. "My attitude is, don't do what you're doing if it's not working; change"

Constant fear mongering:

1. "brutal killers"
2. "the stakes are high"
3. "they want to plot and plan and attack us again"
4. "a nuclear weapon in the hands of a sworn enemy of the United States"
5. "the Democrats will raise taxes"
6. "The American people know that our biggest job is to protect this country from further attack"
7. "we must take a threat seriously and defeat an enemy overseas so we don't have to face them here"
8. " if we were to leave early, before the job is done, then the enemy will follow us here"
9. "If we were to leave before the job is done, the enemy's coming after us"
10. "it's a war"

Outright distortions and lies and denials:

1. "restraining spending in Washington"
2. "we will work with the United Nations"
3. "this report is one -- they put it out before [estmating Iraqi deaths at 600,000). It was pretty well -- the methodology is pretty well discredited"
4. "I obviously look at all options, all the time"
5. "we care about how people live, we care about people starving, we care about the fact that there are large concentration camps"
6. On Abu Ghraib: "Now the world is seeing that we've held those to account who did this"

Attributing behavior to the enemy that is more applicable to themselves:

1. "There are extreme elements that use religion to achieve objectives"
2. "it's a struggle between extremists and radicals and people of moderation who want to simply live a peaceful life"
3. "they really don't care what other countries think, which leads to further isolation"

Hopefully we'll have these clowns out of office and replaced by slightly less evil and corrupt buffoons soon...