Northern Valley Beacon

Bloggers in South Dakota are having a suckfest telling each other how great it is that blogs broke the news on a legislative groping allegation while the main stream media diddled around with their fingers up...well, you know the drill. The blogs do one thing, even though it is inadvertent. They emphasize that state government in South Dakota is at its most benevolent a Three Stooges business, and at its most menacing a closed frranchise modeled after the meanest banana belt dictatorships.

First of all, there is no main stream media in South Dakota. Even the best journalistic efforts, the Rapid City Journal and Sioux Falls Argus Leader, operate with the small-minded peevishness of the back-country provincials as their dominant editorial concern. It has to be that way. They have to sell advertising to the perpetually peevish to survive. But with their tabloid mentality, bloggers drag the airing of public issues to even a lower, meaner, more petty level. A few try to keep their posts above the level of constant personal attack and witless insult and abuse, but most eventually are subsumed by the pernicious intolerance and stupidity that characterizes most political blogs. No media in South Dakota, especially web logs, are trying to set standards of thought and expression that can lift humans out the mean morass that is politics today, especially in South Dakota.

The abortion issue has rendered many people into a state of non compos mentis from which it is doubtful they can recover. Our Libertarian candidate for the U.S. House has the best take on the subject: it is impossible to discuss it in South Dakota with reason and intelligence. It is one of those sham issues that inspires hatreds and animosities rather than any workable solutions to the problem it alleges to address. In actuality, it is part of that phalanx of diversions of mind that George Orwell described in the softening of the human mentality in preparation for its total subjugation to a totalitarian state. These include the obsessions with slandering, accusing fellow citizens of all the ills and evils in the universe, the lewd, salacious, sensational, even if viewed from a self-righteous indignation. It is the technique of misdirection.

While the pubic clamors over the allegation of a state senator groping a page, it ignores the fact that its government and its fourth estate are dysfunctional.

The case in question is said to have been reported in February. We say "is said to have been reported" because it is all word of mouth. No one has produced a record of the complaint or just what it accuses. It is said to have been turned over to the Attorney General's office for criminal investigation. In South Dakota, such matters are at the discretion of the officials in mini-Kremlin at Pierre. There is no way for the people to know if their interests and the interests of accountability and justice are being served. No one knows how the AG handled or responded, other than to say it is under investigation. Investigating alleged gropes is tough, we know. There might not be any DNA involved.

Then when the Mark Foley matter heated up, a father is said to have been excited into inquiring more aggressively about his grope allegation. This resulted in letters sent to the accused senator and exchanged between senate officers. A blogger got a hold of one of these letters, did a National Enquirer-type hyping of the fact that something bad was about to break in Pierre, and then published a paragraph from Sen. Moore's letter, which spoke to the need for the allegations to be handled through procedures that guarantee fairness and due process for both sides.

Perhaps, the gossip vine did motivate newspaper journalists into more aggressively digging into the story. Whatever. But now the names of both the accusers and the accused have been revealed and the game is getting rough. The bloggers are complaining that names are revealed and people are being subjected to public humiliation. Brilliant bloggers.

There is a rule in law and, therefore, in journalism that crimes and other things do not happen anonymously. Perpetrators are not anonymous. Victims are not anonymous. Names make news. They make news because they identify the specific and actual. The accused are presumed to have the right to face and respond to their accusers. But, oh my, in South Dakota, the media is being irresponsible and nasty when it spoils the malicious gossip game by citing actual people and actual accusations and tells a real story. Where the hell did the bloggers think their precious story was going to go? To a Mother Goose anthology?

While citizens now have some specific names around which they can weave their malicious conjectures, they also have evidence of how competent and efficient and honest their government is. But we can rest assured that the quality of government will not get mentioned while the bloggers and other gossips congratulate themselves on breaking the story, counting the hits their sites get, and offering their precious opinions, while letting the facts the languish.

It is tempting to point out that we have some high-priority issues in the state like a regressive tax system, closed and repressive government, an alarming number of people without health insurance, an inadequately funded education system, a pubic besieged by sham issues. But given the level of thinking demonstrated by most political blogs in the state, it might be better for us all if they confined themselves to the contemplation of groping allegations and the mean and nasty accusations they will surely assert.

People with some real interest in building the state will have to learn to get their information elsewhere. Actually, they already have.