Spanking the AP

It isn’t often I stop and analyze the incompetence, ignorance and complete disconnect on a news story about which the author knows little or nothing.  But it was Thursday’s tripe concerning the struggles within the Republican Party written by Associated Press staff writer, Bill Barrow that finally ground my gears.  Let’s take the first two paragraphs of this story to task:

    “Republicans see the 2014 midterm elections as a chance to capitalize on voter frustration   with the problem-plagued  healthcare overhaul, but the GOP must first settle a slate of     Senate primaries where conservatives are arguing about the best  way to oppose President Barrack Obama’s signature law.”

Personally, I would have made that ‘run-on’ into two sentences at “healthcare”, then placed a comma after “primaries”, but hey, I’m just a plumber.  Maybe they have different grammar and punctuation rules at the AP.

But as a writer, Bill needs to know the difference between “healthcare” and health insurance and the difference between “problem-plagued” and abject, total and complete abysmal failure from the moment a Democrat led Congress voted on this POS without having read the bill. 

And finally, he represents all Republicans as “conservatives”, which is a little like saying all women are Phyllis Diller.

It is clear by this first paragraph, Bill doesn’t have a friggin’ clue what he’s writing about.  But wait, there’s more!  He goes on:

    “In ‘intra-party’ skirmishes from Georgia to Nebraska, the GOP’s most strident candidates and activists are insisting on a no-holds barred approach.  They accuse fellow Republicans --including  several incumbent Senators-- in being too soft in their opposition to the Affordable Care Act and to the president in general.”

At least Mr. Barrow restrained himself from referring to ‘strident” candidates, as Teabagging loons, like many on the MSM.  And it would be far more illustrative to say from Maine to Florida and from New York to California, because no state is immune from the coming 2014 massacre.  As for the “No holds barred”, that’s simply pointing out just how ugly Obamacare is and what it is attempting to do to the United States of America. 

 And it’s particularly telling when a writer refers to it as the “Affordable Care Act”, which is about as accurate as, “You can keep your doctor“, “You can keep your plan” and the mother of all lies…“It will lower the cost of your health insurance“, as we all now know isn‘t going to happen.  The nom de plume is the antithesis of the developing rollout nightmare.

No, what we have here is a writer blindly weaving an inaccurate and misleading article from whole cloth.  It mischaracterizes the relationship between Republicans as a strident vs. too soft.  In reality it is Conservatives vs. RINOs, with conservatives believing in smaller government, lower taxes, adherence to the Constitution and personal responsibility, while the RINOs are siding with Democrats for the exact opposite. 

So you will forgive me when I lurch to the Right when reading such nonsense.  It is patently deceiving, misrepresents the situation and only drives readers to the Left. 

Because if you can’t write it Right, don’t write it at all.