END-OF-YEAR GROUSING

There follows a response to a long-time friend who teaches media in high school in Missouri who objected to the UCLA/Missouri Study because on page 14 the Study notes that the media is "to the left of Congress." This friend is captivated by far-left ideas and thinks in images, so he compared Bush to Stalin and Congress to the Nazis. Sort of typical of the quality of critical thinking on the Far Left, I’d say.

Yes, I know it's setting up a straw man and knocking him down, but anyhow, there follows my somewhat dyspeptic reply.


"Let’s see now.

You compared Bush to Stalin, who killed an estimated 50 million people.

Now you compare Congress to the Nazis, who killed about 25 million.

Are you off your meds?

You manage to ignore the massive evidence that the media is biased and prejudiced by saying Congress, elected by the people, is wrong and the media, elected by no one, is correct!? You remind me of what Berthold Brecht said when the East German Govt during the 1954 riots proclaimed that its people are not worthy of Communism. Brecht replied: "Well, maybe the government should select a new people!"

And Brecht was an ardent Communist, who finally saw at the end of his long leftis life that the left is a complete fraud!

By the way, that dirge about the world going to hell is called "The Chicken Little Syndrome." I went around saying the sky was falling for years, even when I was working for Mondale at his National HQ in ‘84. I was hanging around with Christopher Hitchens then and he was so far left he was falling off the planet. So was Fouad Ajami, another buddy at the time.

Now they both support the war in Iraq.

I watch PBS Evening New with Jim Lehrer and listen to NPR Talk of the Nation et al., and watch Fox, CNN and MSNBC. I peruse the NYT and WaPo and LA Times almost daily and read dozens of blogs on the left and right. About 800 people read my blogs last week according to my site meter. I worked in the TV and print media business for years.

Speaking of Chicken Little, there is an Op-Ed columnist for the NYTimes named Paul Krugman who is a professor of economics at Princeton who has been saying for five years that the US is heading for a terrible recession and that the US economy is getting worse and worse. He always cites anecdotal evidence and he yammers and drones about how bad things are and how they are getting worse.

All the while during the last 5 years, the US economy has been chugging along getting better and better. That is, you know that if you read the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and the Economist. They have statistics, The NYT has doctrine.

If you read the NYT, we are still in a recession, or all the prosperity in the US that makes it the world’s most prosperous country, is just an illusion, and the sky is going to fall any time now.

Jay Leno last night mentioned that 71% of the Iraqi people think they are now better off than they were before. Then he said, “I guess they’re not reading the New York Times!” and Jay’s audience howled with laughter.

The NYT, which I read just to see how foolish the left’s agenda is and how much reality the NYT can ignore both in the US and in Iraq, demonstrates that the Far Left represents a tiny fraction of the American people, basically "the helping professions," academics, the media, and a few cranks here and there. And there are several states packed with grifters like California and the rest of the Left Coast.

I even read the phony study you mentioned about Fox viewers. Do you have the link? Do you actually believe the crap you read about Bush and Congress? Or do you read much at all?

The UCLA/Missouri study took three years; I’ll bet MSNBC or CNN or CBS threw together the phony Fox study in a couple of weeks with skewed questions and cooked numbers. Most polls are artfully contrived to get the answers they want.

The ultra-left Ahabs are simply losing their marbles about being marginalized more and more by the sane majority. They believe the biased reporting the leftist media tell about Iraq, including the Guardian and Reuters and AP. They don’t even know the US economy is the best in the world. They alternate between calling Bush Stalin [in a blog I saw yesterday] and Hitler. Many can’t express themselves well, so a lot of them spout obscenities and scatological nonsense non-stop.

Basically, they’ve never met a payroll, never really graduated from college, never really traveled outside their own narcissistic bubble, which paradoxically they project their belief that Bush lives in.

I’ve been to forty-odd countries and the US is the best, better than France and England, where I lived for two years and six months respectively. Let alone Lebanon and Saudi and Vietnam. Speaking different languages and actually having lived overseas gives one a perspective like that of guys like Hitchens and Ajami who come to realize that the USA is by far the best place in the world. Including Canada, where I used to visit often for Drexel and Amoco. Where you can smoke dope and wait six months for a Doctor’s appointment.

Bush is trying to protect the country from anarchistic madmen and if he wiretaps American citizens who are talking to Al Qaeda, good for him!

Read my latest blog on Kos and also the one where the Washington Post actually admits that Murtha and Pelosi and Dean are seriously damaging the Democrats with their nutty let’s cut-and-run right now or as soon as possible.

Or read something besides the weird crap on the far left that keeps the Ahabs chasing the Great White Whale!