David McElroy

I’ve never been good at telling whether kittens are boys or girls, so I didn’t realize Charlotte was a girl for a long time. From the beginning, she was the dominant kitten of a litter. She was so dominant, in fact, that all of us thought she must be a little boy — trying to boss her sisters around.

It turned out that all of the kittens were girls. Charlotte was just a bossy young lady. (That’s her as a kitten in one of the drawers of my desk on the right.) The dark fur pattern of her forehead at the time led several people to remark that she looked like a Vulcan — with their angled eyebrows — so her early nickname was Mr. Spock. She lived up to the fearlessness of the fictional Vulcans from the beginning.

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I get varying reactions when I tell people that I quit watching television 15 years ago. Some people look at me as though I’m a alien from Mars. Many, though, nod knowingly and say, “Oh, I don’t watch the stupid shows. I just watch it for news.”

What those people don’t understand is that they’re watching the most dangerous thing on television. If you want to watch so-called “reality” TV or low-brow humor, I might laugh at you, but you aren’t under the impression that you’re educating yourself. You know exactly what you’re getting.

The people who watch the TV news channels, however, are under the mistaken impression that they’re being educated about the issues. They don’t seem to realize that what they’re getting is entertainment in a news format. They don’t understand that “television news” is the ultimate oxymoron.

This is counter-intuitive for most people, who assume they’re doing a good thing when they avoid the “stupid shows” and they instead watch news and similar programming to “educate themselves about the issues.” So why do I claim they’re mistaken?

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If you really want to be successful in politics — in a big way — you need to first sell your soul to the devil. Or, at the very least, you have to shred your ethics and learn to lie. Without that foundation, you’ll never make it far.

Some people believe I’m being cynical or maybe just kidding when I say such things, but I’m not. I’m dead serious. If you’re really going to tell the truth and keep your promises and be consistent with what you’ve said before, you’re in big trouble, because you’ll be living in a world where pretty much everybody else is willing to change stories or ethics or principles as they have incentive to do so.

I could pick on almost any major politician, but the story that brings this to mind right now is something going on with Barack Obama’s administration.

When Obama came to power, he made a lot of noises about having the most ethical administration ever. Blah, blah, blah. That’s all I hear when politicians start saying such things. Pretty much every president comes to power making similar noises, because he’s been “cluck, clucking” at the other side for their infractions on his way to office. Once they’re in power, though, their administration does the same things the other ones have done.

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