Red State post

I lived for a few years down in Pensacola, FL. We had a columnist who, every few months, would write a column explaining what "The Left" was up to and how those lefties felt abou the various issues of the day. Having had subscriptions to The Nation and Z, and having Internet access to various lefty authors (Back in the ancient days of the late 1990s) I would read her columns and wonder "WHO is this woman TALKING about?!?!" She never referred to the statements or viewpoints of anybody that I was famliar with, that was for sure! I got a similar feeling reading the following:

Were this merely the activity of identifiable partisans on the far-left wing, this would arguably be a healthy part of the debate that ought to go on in any self-governing country. However, in the United States, there exists a substantial cadre of far-left partisans who cloak their advocacy as "journalism." Such people are sufficiently numerous in the companies that provide the public's news that they severely restrict the ability of voters to receive information about military affairs that has not been processed and filtered by far-left partisans wearing reporter masks. This condition is extremely dangerous in a self-governing country, for the public cannot make informed decisions if it is not so much informed as manipulated by political partisans.

The process of correcting the political imbalance in the institutions of mass communication has begun, but it is not so far along that the public could not today be stampeded into adopting far-left policies by the partisans who still control much of what the public is told about events.

Those who oppose the far left bear a special burden in these times, to make sure that they are accurately informed about these events, and that they share this knowledge with friends, family, and co-workers who are still dependent on "news" provided by "reality patriots" who seek America's defeat.

No, I have no idea what the author means by "reality patriots." It seems to be a term the author has used so many times he feels no need to further explain it. So wow! The "far-left partisans" are running the newsrooms of America, huh? Reminds me of the story of a young Russian Jew meeting an elderly Russian Jew on the train and remarking that the elderly person is reading a Tsarist paper that accuses the Jews of plotting and planning all sorts of diabolical, anti-Tsarist, anti-Russian activities. The young one asks the old one why he's reading a paper that makes such terrible accusations against their people. The elderly one replied "Oh, this paper is marvelous! It tells me that we Jews are in charge of everything and that society is but putty in our hands. We are in charge of all the ministries and bureaus. It makes me feel very powerful! I love to feel like a member of such a powerful, effective conspiracy!"

I got pretty much the same feeling reading the above complaints about "political imbalance in the institutions of mass communication." It's like "Wow, we lefties REALLY have that much influence?" Seems to me that people of my persuasion (I consider myself a member of the "center-left", well to the left of the mainstream media, but there are many buddies of mine that are more leftist than I am.) Thinking back over the past five years, the blogs didn't really have any appreciableimpact on the public until the beginning of 2003, when Democrats running for President "discovered" the Internet and the blogs. Real influence on the other media, via the radio (Air America is pretty much it), the TV (Jon Stewart's Daily Show and Keith Olbermann) and newspapers (The Knight-Ridder chain is an unusually fair & responsbile group of newspapers) and that was pretty much it until perhaps six months ago, when still more media outlets began chiming in.

Noting the pathetically feeble response by Democrats to the Censure Resolution proposed by Senator Feingold doesn't give me much hope that the Democrats are among the "far-left partisans" the author cites.

The comments by the right-wingers after the article are interesting. They're completely unable to answer the proofs supplied by liberal commenters that, yes, the Iraq War WAS primarily justified by the phantom WMDs, Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech very STRONGLY suggested an Iraq-al Qaeda link (No, Bush didn't explicitly and precisely draw the connection, but the very strong sugestion is there) and no, as both the article and as one of the commenters completely overlook, the Vietnam War could not have been won short of the utter genocide of the people of Vietnam. Something like a quarter to a third of the people of Vietnam would have had to have been slaughtered in order for there to have been "peace."

So Americans left Vietnam and people in the millions died at the hands of the Cambodian Khmer Rouge. OK, so what was the alternative? The idea of "stay the course" was simply not an option and no one in the 30+ years since then has come up with any reasonable answer to that question of how to achieve "victory" short of simply slaughtering huge numbers of Vietnamese.