By Ben Dreith

The sense of importance of the politically active is an unfortunate side effect of the freedom of speech that this country allows of its citizens.

I’m sure all of you can, at some point in your life, remember a time when some pomp, ignorant American blew adulterated gusts of pure political fallacy out of their mouth. Nothing bothers me more than when I hear terms whose meanings are abstract and hazily understood, defined by experts, gushing out of the orifices of the righteous snobs as if they were as common as “car” or “tree”. Socialism? Really? Are we going to pin the Democratic Party and Obama’s administration as socialists?

These are arms of a government with the most ingrained, flowing free market in the world. Not even Lenin’s initial government was truly socialist, or even the later Soviet governments. We might as well call Obama a Satanist, because both of these titles, even if these were his secret inner affiliations, would little affect the actual structure of the U.S. government.

These “fun facts” are made universal truths by uneducated political dilettantes running around trying to make themselves feel better about their minimal importance in the political system.

This I can handle to some extent. You can always ignore these people; you can always run home in a nervous rush to check their facts and hope that not too many people heard or believed the blatantly, grotesquely twisted statements. I’m sure many of you heard the line of loud mouths (often aided by megaphones) shouting all sorts of disturbing things.

These instances are one thing, you can easily ignore your drunk neighbor shouting about how the president or whoever is the devil. What really bother me are the slanted media stories so prevalent today. I feel certain that we, as a nation, value and even trust the news media, yet many today know that certain stations lean in certain way and misconstrue the truth.

I’m not saying that the news blatantly lies, but certain media outlets definitely have an agenda. In all honesty, it’s best to watch BBC or some other foreign news station; I feel as though you get the most objective view about our own problems.

Sometimes it takes a third party to make us understand the happenings, especially when the media are players in the game as well.

Dreith is a DU freshman majoring in philosophy.