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Wednesday, August 29, 2007

If You Feel Oppressed, That Counts Too?

I find our political Left repulsive in many ways. I'm not talking your average Democrat or even your basic liberal. I hope I am clear about how I feel about the various shades of those on the other side of the war. It is the Left--a Left that can drive the policies of the other side and certainly drives the rhetoric--that I despise.

And one thing that forever drives me nuts is the repeated claims that the Bushtatorship has arrived or is about to be declared.

This article puts it well:

Well, this explains many things. It explains why poor Cindy Sheehan is now sitting in prison; why Bush critics like CIA retiree Valerie Plame have been ostracized by the corporate media and are wasting away in anonymity; why no critic of Bush can get a hearing, why no book complaining about him can ever get published, and why our multiplexes are filled with one pro-Bush propaganda movie after another, glorifying the Iraq war and rallying the nation behind its leader.

Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, Cindy Sheehan is running for Congress; Valerie Plame is rich and famous; the young Republican "thugs" made all of one appearance seven years ago--chanting "Let us in!" when Miami-Dade County vote counters planned to move to a small inner room with no observers present; and press censorship is now so far-reaching that you can't even expose a legal, effective, and top-secret plan to trace terrorists without getting a Pulitzer Prize. "What if the publisher of a major U.S. newspaper were charged with treason or espionage?" Wolf asks breathlessly. "What if he or she got 10 years in jail?" Well, journalists have been harassed, pressed for their sources, and threatened with prison, but not by George W. Bush and his people. Back in the real world, only one prominent journalist has been jailed by the federal government in recent memory, and that was Judith Miller, imprisoned for 80-plus days for contempt by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, the great hero of the anti-Bush forces for having indicted Vice President Cheney's chief of staff.


And let me add that is a strange dictatorship where the state television and radio (PBS and NPR) are relentlessly critical of the war and the president.

Lefties who think we are oppressed by our government are just plain loony. I don't really care how they feel about it.

And yes, the Right had its share of loonies back during the Clinton administration. I paid them no mind. And the press rightly ridiculed them and marginalized them. They got no traction.

I wish our press spend the same amount of effort pointing out the idiocy of the Lefty conspiracy-theorists. I guess the press and the Left share the same view of a vast right wing conspiracy.