Sadly, These Kooks Were Made For Talkin'

Technically classified as Genus Bullscatus, they are indigenous to every nook, cranny and gin mill on the planet and are farther removed from the endangered species list than cockroaches and cookout flies.

Although billing themselves as gurus in one or more areas of information dissemination, they are to truth and accuracy what rutting moose are to gentlemanly restraint.

You're most likely to encounter them on TV talk shows - events so called because they are almost totally devoid of listening by any of the participants.

Therein, participants are frequently introduced as either Democrapic or Repooplican strategists, a term derived from the Latin word stratum, referring to material deposited in layers.

Aside: Sorry if I'm belaboring the scatological metaphor, but it's too good not to be true.

Unfortunately for us-all of the unwashed masses, our daily diet of "facts" is filtered through the spin cycles of these pseudo-experts, as well as candidates, bureaucrats, officeholders, office-seekers, political pundits, analysts, journalists, bloggers, pettifoggers, boob-tube professionals, YouTube amateurs, rumor mongers, propagandists and, alas, more than a few fellow practitioners of opinion columny.

Hors de combat in this Tower of Babble is an elusive element called, in the parlance of my Philadelphia boyhood, the straight skinny.

The information and misinformation tsunamis that wash over us are so enormous that too many of us latch on to talking heads or standing ideologies as a means of staying afloat and paddling our personal can-knows.

More's the pity that partisan rhetoric, sloganeering and sound-byte sniping have taken over the high ground of meaningful debate which characterized the nose-to-nose exchanges of Lincoln and Douglas, wherein there was a full airing of the issues.

To say that our present system is a joke would be a cruel disservice to even the lowest form of humor.

Megamillions of dollars are spent broadcasting pledges that won't be kept, accusations that can't be proven and ad hominem attacks that are no more important, say, than the number of divorces one candidate has survived or what another paid for a haircut.

Let's face it (even if "they" will not): There is no miracle cure for any of the major maladies facing our nation and our successors in citizenry, but there are compromise solutions that must - and will, sooner or later - be reached.

The sad side of reality is that, given the mean-spirited and intractable level of political battling, later is far more likely than sooner and, in the interim scuffles, virtually nothing will be gained and most certainly a great deal will be lost.

Early in my business career, I was taught (and taught others) to apply three tests to advertising claims and promises of profit : "Who says?" and "So what?" and "Specify!"

None of these criteria are used to evaluate public pronouncements, nor is there any penalty for dodging them.

As a result, it's a field day for trivial pursuits, reckless promises, dirty tricks, irrelevant issues and hollow oratory, with skillful spin doctors ever at the ready when the opposition takes a vulnerable position or their own worthies inadvertently pee on the carpet of political correctness.

Would that we could impose the rules of proper debate on the contentious content of Fox News, MSNBC, et al, so that each statement had to be followed by direct rebuttal and re-rebuttal until the issue has been fully analyzed.

And how about having hard-nosed moderators who saw to it that speakers either stuck to the subject or addressed a dead microphone?

And why not equal talk-time for all participants, with no interruptions?

Instead, we're forced to endure endless and dreary recitations of predictable "talking points" and exchanges of pros without cons, points without counterpoints, questions without answers, promises beyond reality and the unrestrained slinging of mud (or substances similar in texture).

The mainstream media could also use a positional purgative, despite their protestation of even-handedness.

All the while, fair play and full information is buried under the mounting strata of you-know-what, augmented or revised by those ever-present "strategists" hovering on the sidelines.

Somewhere thereunder is the "straight skinny" which would enable us to seek the truth, separate the wheat of wisdom from the chaff of blah-blah-blah and select leaders whom we can follow with confidence.

Better them than con artists who will lead us down primrose paths and/or perpetrate the ruses by any other names with which we have become painfully familiar.

Talk may, as they say, be cheap, but cheap talk can be costly indeed.