[NavySEAL F-16]

And, here I'd been thinking that both FOX and Drudge were going to the Dark Side! LOL

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

here I'd been thinking that both FOX and Drudge were going to the Dark Side!

Since this analysis is based on data from the 1990s it cannot shed light on that question.

In fact, liberalism in general is a war on historical perspective; the very last thing a liberal wants is to be judged on the results when his proposed nostrum was tried the last time.

The liberal always insists that what he is proposing is new, never tried before. Just as today's paper is new. There is an ineluctable superficiality in the emphasis on novelty which is central to journalism (and to liberalism, for those who think there is a difference between the two). Liberalism is novelty for novelty's sake, in politics. Novelty for novelty's sake can of course only seem to make sense in a world where the status quo seems evil.

If the foundational assumption is that the status quo is evil simply because it is the status quo, then it really doesn't matter whether John Kerry attacks Bush for acting too strongly or too weakly, too late or too soon. It does not matter if the attacks on Bush are a contradictory mishmash, or that any of the criticisms have a factual basis. It only matters that Bush is criticized.

What, then, of the case where liberals actually control the government? Doesn't that mean that they are the status quo and that journalism must attack them? By no means. If liberals ever did control the status quo there would be no freedom in America. Conservatives conserve the traditions of their own culture and nation, and liberals attack it. The American tradition is "to preserve the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity;" American conservatism is the odd form of "conservatism" which conserves the freedom of the people to do things differently than they have been done in the past. The freedom which implies capitalism, which implies that the progress which makes an American secretary's standard of living comparable to that of Queen Victoria in her day (1819-1901).

Thus the anti conservatism that inheres in journalism always implies a lust for governmental power and a tendency to see evil in freedom. In or out of power in the government, liberals always define the "evil status quo" as "whatever can be blamed on the private sector."

Recall the permanent campaign of the x42 administration; it was not so much an administration as an assault on the private sector and on traditions of civility such as respecting the privacy of former WH appointees. With the thinest veneer of legality - if that. Law, after all, is codification of status quo . . .