…zero dark hundred hours and dawn (a more than frequent Seth consciousness time), I’m sitting here in my office and thinking about things in general, and asking myself the “is it all worth it?” question – no, not a prelude to suicide, LOL, just weighing the hypothetical options between carrying on and simply going off into the limbo of total retirement from society, or what’s left of it.

Let’s see, what do we have here?

We blog, we attend demonstrations when we can get to them, we defend the conservative point of view in conversation and debate, we send donations to, and support, political action committees, we write or call our political leaders to express our opinions, we vote…

And it seems that no matter what we do, we run into a solid wall called the mainstream media (MSM). This is a left leaning kollektive that abuses a great and sacred trust – that of keeping the people informed on the current events level, giving us the tools we need to form honest opinions so that we might be able to plan our lives according to the directions taken by political and economic trends and, just as important, that we will be qualified to vote for political leaders based on viable data.

In short, the MSM, by accepting the privileges of access they enjoy, has an awesome responsibility: They are the keystone of Democracy – the accuracy or inaccuracy of their reporting, given that the vast majority of Americans look to them for news, is directly responsible for the outcomes of our elections.

The fact that the MSM has become nothing short of a propaganda outlet for the liberal side of our political equation and a champion of the War on Bush, the War on Homeland Security, the War on Corporations, the War on America and American Values, the War on Decency, the War on G-d, the War on Any Semblance of Morality and the War on Common Sense leads me to this grim conclusion –

They have all but decimated our entire political system.

I mean, how can we say, after an election, that “the people have spoken” with any kind of confidence in the outcome when we know that The People went to the polls armed with disinformation? Garbage in, garbage out, right?

The same can be said for opinion polls. How can we have faith in a poll when we know that its participants had formed their opinions based on lies that they were led to believe as truth.

Take Iraq as a prime example:

In this post at Robert’s most excellent blog, Conservative Commentary, is a first rate list of many of the positives that have been achieved in Iraq since we “fired” Saddam, began helping the Iraqis form a democratic government and helping them to rebuild their country and their infrastructure. My comment on that thread got me thinking and formed the basis for this post I am now typing.

Go do some reading there while I go grab another cup of coffee, then come back.

So, you read the list, now compare it to what you read in MSM newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post or watched on the news at the alphabet networks.

Pure doomsday exaggerations — Quagmire, another Vietnam, our troops are being butchered in the cross-fire of a vicious religious civil war, our presence over there is getting thousands of Iraqis killed, it’s all about the oil, it’s all about profits for the evil Halliburton, yadda yadda yadda… But we see or hear no mention of what has been accomplished (see linked post and list) thanks to the coalition presence in Iraq.

The American people, looking to the MSM for hard, accurate, full story news, are instead saturation bombed with what amounts to pure, one-sided liberal propaganda.

Global Warming is another issue in which the MSM misleads the American people.

There hasn’t been a shred of evidence, other than unproven statements made by “authorities” on the subject, that anything mankind does has any effect on climate change – for that matter, there has been a paucity of credible evidence that the atmosphere is heating up to any significant extent – yet the MSM supports the left’s assertion that man is creating a catastrophic scenario that promises certain doom, melting the Arctic, causing the likes of Hurricane Katrina, etc, etc.

Once, it was blame it on El Nino… Now, it’s blame it on Bush.

While these portside media venues have yet to produce any viable conclusive study results backing up the Global Warming Armageddon story, they have simply moved on to portray it as “understood” as a reality, while ignoring any and all infinitely more credible evidence to the contrary. They deny equal time to those who might prove them wrong, because they could not find any effective counter argument. After all, it’s profoundly difficult to defend a lie against detailed truth.

Taking the two above examples, we have…

1. The bulk of the American people believing the left’s falsities regarding Iraq, and

2. The bulk of the American people believing the left’s falsities regarding Global Warming.

Just look at the poll results, which are based on those “garbage in, garbage out” news reports.

And these examples are only the tip of an iceberg.

Acceptance of the first by the American public could ultimately result in the premature withdrawal of our forces from Iraq, the penalties being not only the slaughter of tens of thousands or more Iraqis by Islamofascists and the country itself becoming a virtual terrorist firebase, training, logistics and deployment center for terror organizations targeting the west.

Acceptance of the second by the American public could ultimately result, by way of the Kyoto accords, in severe damage to our economy, including millions of lost jobs – all due to an unproven – and disproven – myth.

The first would endanger large numbers of the populations of the U.S. and other western countries. The second would cause the necessity, in order to preserve the lives and security of millions of unduly financially challenged American families, to move closer to the socialist blueprint envisioned and sought after by the left.

In short, the MSM has become an enemy of the state rather than a source of accurate information, but they are “winning” – they have indelible credibility status among the American people, and they enjoy the advantage that they can ignore anything that refutes the opinions they interweave in their “news” reports.

It is in my very nature to fight to the death, but I have begun to feel just a bit like a certain Cervantes character. At what point does one finally reach across the chessboard and lay down ones’ king?