If Michaele and Tareq Salahi faked their way into President Obama’s first state dinner at the White House, they join Richard and Mayumi Heene (Balloon Boy’s parents) and Nadya Suleman (Octomom) as massive examples of the vulnerability of our shared reality to manipulation by “reality terrorists.”

“Reality terrorists” are those who seek to explode real news, real-life events, real politicians, real law enforcement officials and real feelings of admiration or panic or disgust and turn them into fabricated, staged entertainment events to pump up their egos or their wallets by becoming TV stars.
 
This is more than a game or a gaffe.  This is a kind of psychological terrorism that assaults our collective ability to trust that dramatic events unfolding around us are serious ones that should indeed command our attention and elicit our genuine concern.  If a state dinner is no more than a dry run for The Real Housewives of D.C.—in which Michaele Salahi hopes to star—then the White House is no better than the set of a sitcom and deserves no special respect or awe.  

If a boy drifting away in a helium balloon, followed by the Colorado Army National Guard, is no more than a family’s pathetic ruse to net a third appearance on Wife Swap, then the Guard is no better than a troop of circus clowns running after a beach ball.  If a sick woman and her reprehensible fertility “doctor” are allowed to turn childbirth and children into a freak show and get paid for it, then our real efforts to cure infertility and love our sons and daughters is just so much filler between commercial interruptions.
 
Make no mistake about it, the convergence of television and the Internet can end up providing devastating weapons to a new breed of homegrown terrorists who value only their own causes (fame and fortune) and hijack our media, our empathy and our cultural/political symbols and icons, turning them upside down and inside out, leaving them as meaningless carcasses for camera crews to step over—like so many crushed Coke cups on the floor of a movie cinema.
 
One inherent problem with this kind of piracy is that it works even better than Somalis grabbing tankers.  The White House Party Crashers, Balloon Boy and Octomom did hit the fame jackpot and may all end up profiting in one way or another, despite their truly despicable acts.  Reality terrorists know that we will fall all over ourselves as a society to watch titillating events, in preference to complex, important ones.  It’s our psychological Achilles’ heel.  We’ll take drama over substance, every time—and pay up for it.
 
Notice the amount of newspaper ink wasted on Tiger Woods lately, when we’re sending 30,000 more American troops to Afghanistan.  Did he have sex with another woman?  Was he drinking when he crashed his car?  Did he have a spat with his wife?  Who cares?  Well . . . America does.
 
In a world that worships the lens of a camera and cares not for fact over fiction, in which the President of the United States is happy to joke with any late night TV host who’ll have him and grace the cover of any men’s magazine that can disseminate his image, is it any surprise that an Iranian dictator who might just blow up an entire nation one day is perceived as a petty prankster puffing out his chest?  A silly clown?
 
We’re confused now about what is real and what is fake, and we’re going to pay very, very dearly for it.

Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatry correspondent for FOX News Channel and a New York Times bestselling author. His book, “Living the Truth: Transform Your Life through the Power of Insight and Honesty” has launched a new self-help movement including www.livingthetruth.com. Dr. Ablow can be emailed at info@keithablow.com.

I read an interesting article today reporting the findings from a poll that seriously contradict what the White House and the AMA have been suggesting about the way medical professionals feel about the proposed bill to overhaul the health care system. And while I can’t say I’m surprised at the overwhelming negative response to the plan – the statistics speak volumes.

An IBD/TIPP poll found the following:

– 45% of doctors polled said they would consider leaving their practice or retiring early if the proposed health care bill was to pass

– 65% or 2 out of 3 practicing physicians polled say they oppose the plan

– 72% of doctors polled disagree with the administration’s claim that the government can cover 47 million more Americans with better quality care and at a lower cost

Click here to read the full article

I think there’s some truth to this study – and here’s why…

Right now, doctors are caught between a rock and a hard place and we have very few alternatives – many doctors have already started moving to other parts of the country where there is less government regulation on how they run their practice. What we are finding – and will continue to find with this health care bill looming – is that doctors have already started dropping their private practices and taking hospital jobs. Many are changing specialties or plan on not offering certain procedures because of strict government regulation once we move toward a universalized health care system – and for those doctors to perform procedure using local hospital facilities, well, that costs money, too. We’ve been facing a primary care doctor shortage for years now, and the numbers continue to drop. All of these things have a negative impact on the quality of care patients receive.

So I want to do a little research of my own. I want to hear what YOU think – especially if you’re a doctor or in the medical field. How do you feel about the proposed bill and do you think that it will cause doctors to leave the medical field?

Make your voice heard! I’ll be reading some of your comments on FOX & Friends tomorrow morning at 6:30 a.m. E.T., where we’ll be discussing this report in more depth.

President Obama lost something invaluable last week when he weighed in on the arrest of his friend, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., saying the Cambridge police acted stupidly. He lost the presumption that he is colorblind and embraces all races and both genders equally.

This colorblindness was, perhaps, the fondest hope of the American public when we elected President Obama to our highest office.  As the son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya we hoped his election marked the ascent of a leader possessed of so much empathy, so much intelligence and such a desire to understand all perspectives and experiences that he could resonate with anyone’s needs and disenfranchise no one.

That hope has withered for many, and it will be difficult to resurrect.  The fact that President Obama remained in a church headed by a pastor (Reverend Wright) who denounced white people, together with the fact that the First Lady says she felt no pride in our country until very recently, together with the fact that President Obama nominated a woman to the Supreme Court who slurred white judges as inferior, together with the President’s recent unwarranted slur of a white police sergeant as stupid seems to reveal deep-seated anger in him and constitutes a psychological pattern of insensitivity to the feelings of Caucasians.  He is a President who now (and hopefully only temporarily) seems the least colorblind of my lifetime, a terrible irony and tragedy I certainly didn’t imagine transpiring when he announced his candidacy.

The emotions some white people are sharing with me seem to parallel the feelings that African Americans may have struggled with in the past.  They tell me that they fear President Obama resents them, but won’t say so plainly, that he considers them “less than” others, maybe even demonic (like Reverend Wright does), but won’t admit it.  This gives them, and it gives me, a sliver of insight into how painful it must have been for disenfranchised minorities for decades in this country.  But the price of that slim window on the feelings of others has been high, indeed.  For the millions of white Americans who now better understand what it feels like to doubt that the President of the United States is their President, too, our heightened empathy comes with deep sadness and not a little anxiety.

President Obama doesn’t seem to understand the full depth of what has transpired.  It can’t be glossed over with the words he shared after the Crowley fiasco: 

“This has been ratcheting up, and I obviously helped to contribute ratcheting it up.  I want to make clear that in my choice of words, I think I unfortunately gave an impression that I was maligning the Cambridge Police Department and Sgt. Crowley specifically.  And I could’ve calibrated those words differently.”

He then invited Crowley over to the White House for a beer with Professor Gates.

What we needed, as white Americans, for all Americans, was a moment less about political caution and false camaraderie and more about self-revelation.  I kept thinking, as I listened to President Obama, of how short his statement fell from the words of another great African American politician, Jesse Jackson.  During the 1984 Presidential campaign, when Jackson sought the Democratic nomination, he referred to New York City as Hymietown, a slur against Jews.  I remember him taking the podium at the Democratic Convention and apologizing.  It was 25 years ago, and I was just 22-years-old, so forgive me if I have forgotten some of the words.  Most of them are seared into my memory—these two-and-a-half decades later:

“If I have offended anyone, or renewed old fears, I am deeply sorry.  Charge it to my head and not my heart.  I am an imperfect servant.  God is not yet finished with me.”

That was plenty good enough for me.  I didn’t believe Jackson could fake a statement like that.  And I never questioned the man’s heart again. 

President Obama, we need that kind of eloquence and honesty right now.  We need you to do that kind of soul-searching and let us in on the result.

Marijuana potency increased last year to the highest level in more than 30 years, posing greater health risks to people who may view the drug as harmless, according to a report released Thursday by the White House.

The latest analysis from the University of Mississippi’s Potency Monitoring Project tracked the average amount of THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, in samples seized by law enforcement agencies from 1975 through 2007. It found that the average amount of THC reached 9.6 percent in 2007, compared with 8.75 percent the previous year.

The 9.6 percent level represents more than a doubling of marijuana potency since 1983, when it averaged just under 4 percent.