Of course the media chooses the successful candidates. That's how it works. The media's decision of whether or not to cover a story and HOW to cover it is always the crucial matter in moulding public opinion, and the people who own and run the media know that.

That's why Dennis Kucinich got as little national coverage as he did, and its why he got shut out of the last few Democratic debates. He was very dangerous to the status quo.

It's why the Cleveland corporate-owned media are now trying to get him voted out of the House of Representatives.

Now the media, if they chose to, could easily have made it possible for the entire American public to be acutely aware of Kucinich's policies and the platform he was offering. They could tell Americans the truth about how bad their health system is in regards to much of the rest of the developed world. They could tell them that socialism is not a bad word. They could do a lot of stuff.

But they're not going to.

That's because the few rich people who own the major media outlets in the USA all have a vested interest in maintaining things just the way they are in the USA....that way they and their friends in the health insurance industry and the military-industrial complex can keep making big profits, correct? And that's what it's all about.

So the name of the game is to keep people ignorant, keep them in the dark, and keep them distracted with all kinds of superficial stuff like the color of a man's skin or the gender issue or the fact that a man was once a "war hero" (as if any of those have ANYTHING to do with being a good president!).

You know what a "war hero" is? It's someone who was a soldier, and he ended up in a really bad spot...and he behaved as soldiers usually do under those circumstances, which is to say, he did the very best he could in a totally awful situation...and he survived.

So now he's a "war hero". Go figure. No one ever asks to be a war hero, but it can happen to anyone if they're in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's nothing that should be used afterward to promote a political campaign, because it has nothing really to do with being in political office and handling those kind of responsibilities properly.

But people fall for that sort of emotionally charged stuff, so the media and the political parties naturally use it for all it's worth. They did the same thing in ancient Greece and Rome. Little has changed in that respect, except that in those days the political leaders often led an army personally when it went into battle...so being a "war hero" carried a good deal more weight then, I'd say. Still...it in no way guaranteed that a man would be a good bureaucrat or peacetime leader! ;-) He who can win pitched battles on the field of war is not necessarily he who can run a civil government wisely or well. Those job qualifications are very different.

Lincoln was not a soldier. He was a lawyer. Still, he managed to lead the North effectively in the Civil War, didn't he? Grant WAS a war hero...and he was also a dreadfully incompetent president. Being a war hero has nothing to do with being a good president.