Say What You Really Mean

The press sure is different in Canada

TheStar.com - A case of the mean reds: "This administration lies about its lies. White House spokesman Scott McClellan was asked last week if Cheney was always truthful with the American people. 'Yes,' McClelland lied. 'The vice-president, like the president, is a straight-forward, plainspoken person.'

During the rule of the mean Reds, homophobia has come out of the closet. Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) equates minority sexual orientation with bestiality; Florida Governor Jeb Bush has speculated that an earthquake triggering the demise of San Francisco would 'probably (be) good news for the country. Did I just say that out loud?'

Same for rank incompetence. Michael Brown, the deposed director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), told a post-Katrina Hurricane congressional panel last month that he didn't see the need for ice shipments to the hurricane-stricken region to keep elderly people alive and dead bodies from rotting in the sun.

'I think it's wrong for the federal government to be in the ice business, providing ice so I can keep my beer and Diet Coke cool,' Brown told the inquiry. Which calls to mind Dwight Eisenhower's frustration with a party stalwart: 'In his case, there seems to be no final answer to the question, `How stupid can you get?''

Exponents of clean government and family values to a man and woman, Reds continually fall short of their proclaimed standards — meant, apparently, to apply to others and not themselves. Forced to step down as House speaker when his adultery was revealed, Newt Gingrich ('You cannot get to universal (health) coverage without a police state') begat his short-lived replacement Bob Livingston (more adultery), who begat current speaker Dennis Hastert, a water-carrier for price-gouging HMOs and assault-weapons makers.

In the Senate, meanwhile, former majority leader Trent Lott, obliged to step down after appearing to endorse 1950s-era segregation, begat Bill Frist, whose "blind trust" was recently exposed as a sham when it was revealed that in April he arranged for it to dump shares in the family firm, the erstwhile Medicare-bilking hospital chain HCA Inc., ahead of a profit warning that caused HCA stock to plunge. Frist is now under formal SEC investigation for potential insider trading in a stock he claimed two years ago not to have owned in the first place.

Meanwhile, the Reds' hallelujah chorus, men and women with sores on their knuckles from the commute to work each day, are models of startling hypocrisy.

Bill ("Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!") O'Reilly made a hefty payment earlier this year to settle allegations of sexually harassing the producer of his syndicated radio show. Bestselling morality author Bill (Virtuecrat) Bennett, a Reagan cabinet officer and the first "drug czar" under George H.W. Bush, once included games of chance among the nation's indicators of moral decrepitude before being exposed as a Vegas habitué, and more recently suggested that the crime rate would fall if only more pregnant black women would abort their fetuses. The recovering "hillbilly heroin" (OxyContin) addict Rush Limbaugh's TV show was yanked soon after he held up a photo of a then 13-year-old Chelsea Clinton and asked, "Did you know there's a White House dog?"

Long gone are the days when a gentle intellect like Mort Sahl was a friendly goad to JFK and LBJ. Today, we have Ann Coulter expressing her wish that the planes on 9/11 had struck The New York Times building rather than the World Trade Center."

Wow. From start to finish he pulls no punches. Definitely not the MSM as we know it. How refreshing.