Do They Think We Are That Stupid?

Are we a reflection of the media or is the media a reflection of us?

Put another way - are we as stupid as they think we are or are they?

We are being treated like fools again over this issue of the death penalty for the Bali bombers.

Both major parties have long standing policies against the death penalty. Both major parties hold the basic principle of equal rights for all. Australia signed the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in 1949 and has since confirmed that view many times.

Somehow there are those, possibly in both parties but certainly in the Liberal/National Parties, who are able to ignore logic and principle and agree that the knocking off certain people is OK.

Now I am confused. Does that mean that it is OK to kill people or not? Is it OK to kill people, for instance:

• if they are in another country?
• if they are in another country and are not Australian?
• if they are in another country and have killed Australians?

Does that mean that just killing Australians is bad? How does that fit with our long standing, bi-partisan national position?

There doesn't seem to me to anything terribly complex or difficult about putting such questions but, faced with politicians running obvious lines, the media have ignored logic and gone completely to the so-called 'populist' position. They are running Alexander Downer's lines as if they mean something, not putting obvious questions to John Howard and gleefully tearing into Robert McClelland as somehow incompetent for stating the bleeding obvious.

Maybe we are fools. If we let the media get away with this sort of rubbish over and over again then it is arguably so.