Posted on 01/02/2003 10:25:06 PM PST by TLBSHOW
While liberals whine about conservative media
So-called liberals lost an election. Now they’re whining about conservative successes in the media. On New Year's Day The New York Times ran a frontpage story that described liberal plans to recruit talk show hosts to compete with Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Michael Reagan, to buy a cable network and to fund a liberal think tank comparable to the Heritage Foundation. Liberals still don't get it. There’s no big liberal audience for liberal talk show hosts because they control taxpayer funded NPR and all the metropolitan newspapers; or for liberal cable, because they control the networks and PBS with ten times the audience; or for liberal think tanks, because universities are the liberal think tanks. (And of course there’s Brookings, the Progressive Policy Institute and dozens of other liberal 501(c)3s on top of the trillion dollar university system that the Times naturally overlooked).
In last Sunday's Los Angeles Times (do you ever wonder why the coasts vote for the left?) Neil Gabler, professor at the Annenberg School of Journalism at USC pretended to be unable to detect liberal bias in the media, including leftwing papers like the one he was writing in. Perhaps that's because he also failed to notice that the Annenberg School is run by a former Clinton Administration official and -- like journalism schools across the country -- its faculty is one hundred percent leftwing. People who call themselves liberals and democrats yet participate and run a system that ruthlessly excludes any view that is not on the left are probably incapable of making sensible comments about the political world we live in anyway.
Which brings us today’s Los Angles Times frontpage editorial supporting aid to the longest surviving dictator in the world (but a progressive one). The Times story attacks the US economic sanctions against Cuba because ordinary Cubans are suffering. Don't even ask whether the Times ever ran a story anywhere let alone on the front page attacking the economic sanctions against South Africa because ordinary South Africans were suffering (and they were). The headline for this “news story” itself makes the editorial point: “Many Question Embargo as Cubans Suffer.” The author of the piece, Carol J. Williams demonstrates early that she is an ignoramus of Pulitzer proportions it comes to this pathetic island prison. “Life in Cuba, once one of Latin America’s most prosperous countries has deteriorated over the past decade, putting the tropical island on a level with the region’s most hopeless and destitute nations.” In fact, one can pinpoint the deterioration of the economy of Cuba with precision accuracy as having begun 40 years ago, January 1, 1959, the day a victorious Communist named Fidel Castro entered Havana. Cuba’s descent from the second most prosperous nation in Latin America to the third or fourth poorest was an accomplished fact 30 years ago not ten. Williams follows up this noxious lie with an equally mendacious proposition: “Abandoned by Soviet mentors and isolated by more than 40 years of U.S. embargo, Cubans wanting to put food on the table now must navigate shortages, ....” In reality, Cuba is not at all isolated, since every country in the world trades with Cuba but the United States, including all of Latin America. The problem is that a sadistic dictator has ruined Cuba’s economy and Cuba has nothing to trade but its women (which it does with socialist enthusiasm).
Cuba's poverty is caused by the crackpot Marxist doctrines imposed by its sociopathic ruler and promoted by half the liberal arts professors on American faculties. As if this were not enough, the Los Angeles Times account blames capitalism for Castro’s present exploitation of his subject people: "In what amounts to a case of cutthroat capitalism to cover communism’s economic failures, the regime of President Fidel Castro -- who came to power on New Year's Day 44 years ago -- is cashing in on the US sanctions imposed after the 1959 revolution, in the hope that deprivation would prompt Cubans to revolt.” This is an illiterate sentence (don’t try to understand it) but what it is attempting to insinuate is that the Cuban gangster’s policy of encouraging tourism and prostitution at the expense of ordinary Cubans is somehow America’s fault. Oh, and don’t be fooled by the reference to Communism’s economic failures—for the progressives at the Times that wasn’t “real” socialism anyway. Real socialism is what they’re trying to salvage by promoting an aid program for Castro. (After all even Soviet dictators criticized Stalin after the fact.) Consider this self-indicting sentence: “Most damaging, however, is the ban on extending credit to allow Cuba to buy more food from the bountiful US farm belt." Oh-ho, so what is really going on here is that the pro-Communist left is promoting a bailout for Castro’s monster regime in the form of US loans. Nice. And these shills for a bankrupt socialist police state call themselves “progressives.”
I still think the best way to end Castro is to end the embargo though. Free trade has the same effect on communism that sunlight has on vampires.
An analogy and a metaphor.
Why anyone would allow their child to study humanities at any university--much less foot the bill for it--is beyond me.
Spare me. Conservatives need not be anti-intellectual. I studied the humanities at an Ivy League university. What did that mean? I took several courses in the Western canon covering the Bible, Greek and Roman mythology and drama, Homer, Virgil, Church thinkers such as Aquinas and Augustine, great works of western literature from Dante to Dostoevsky. I studied ethics, masterworks of Western Art, classical music, Constitutional interpretation from an avowed conservative professor, economic history of the US taught by a very pro-capitalist professor and so forth.
I graduated and got a job in my field. I think my family got what we paid for.
“Most damaging, however, is the ban on extending credit to allow Cuba to buy more food from the bountiful US farm belt."
Did it ever occur to the genius who wrote that sentence why the US farm belt is "bountiful" but the Cuban farm belt is impoverished and destitute?
I really, really wonder why these idiot reporters, like the one from the LA Times quoted here, don't ever bother to ask themselves is, if communism/socialism/whatever-anti-capitalist-doctrine is so great, why does an embargo by a single capitalist country hurt so much? I mean, why do they need us at all if their system is so wonderful? Why to they have to come crawling to the decadent capitalist pigs to get trade relief at all? Surely their socialist brethren, who themselves just have to be doing very well economically, can help them out, yes?
I say to hell with them. They made their choice to go with this murderous thug, now they're stuck with him. Let them throw him out if things are so bad down there. Or, let Chavez and Mugabe save them.
Well, it probably did, and their answer probably runs along the lines of something like, "the U.S. farm belt is so bountiful because the greedy farmers got rich off the backs of the poor Cuban people", or some such Marxist demagoguery.
I graduated from a midwestern college in '90, and I don't remember experiencing much of the socialist indoctrination that I'm hearing about recently.
I graduated from Texas A&M in '96, an institution known known in academic circles as a home of conservative troglodytes. Out of all my courses, I only remember one conservative. Most were pretty extreme leftists who proclaimed themselves in the political center, as leftists always do.
Quite recently... LOL. Graduated in 2001. I have trouble believing things have gone so far downhill in 18 months.
Princeton, class of 2001. I made a point of choosing classes that I thought would cover the great works I wanted to study. I also made a point of studying with professors I knew to be good and actually interested in teaching. Of course, as critics point out, the Princeton course catalogue does contain some doozies such as "Race, class and engendering power" or other such tripe, but you don't have to take these classes. For every one of these, there's a "Bible in Western Cultural Tradition" class. Choose wisely, and you can get a good education.
Sure, some professors at some universities function as liberal thinktanks. But Horowitz likes to paint the world in black and white and take things to extremes. It's the same as when he was a radical leftist activist. He can do nothing halfway. Witness his ads in student papers and his glee at these papers being attacked.
Here's a piece I wrote on Horowitz while I was a student: http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/Content/2001/04/02/edits/497.shtml
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