The American Spectator

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The Way It Wasn't

7.21.09 @ 6:01AM

MR. WONDERFUL
Re: Reid Collins's And That's the Way It Is:

Finally, someone writes something that is not part of the "let's hold hands and sing kumbaya about dear Walter's passing." I watched Fox News yesterday, and could not believe the idolatry for this early news-twister. I know that Roger Ailes is quite aware of what a disaster was created for TV network news by Walter Wonderful. In the '50s and early '60s, national newscasts (only 15 minutes originally!) were clearly swimming in the liberal stream, but they were not as biased as they became under the tutelage of Walter Cronkite. Cronkite managed to report the US/South Vietnam victory in the Tet Offensive as a loss. One wonders if he was stupid, pro-victory for the communists, or simply bored with the war. And, of course, it wasn't hard to perceive his hatred for Dick Nixon, as he chastised him for stuff he winked at during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. I disliked Nixon myself, but I did not hold him to higher standards than those for his loser predecessors.

Yes, Walter was the most trusted man in America. He sounded so reasonable with his mannered voice and "that's the way it is" delivery. Americans hadn't yet caught up to the raging bias and outright deceit that underlay his work. His heirs were not so lucky. Everyone knew that the sadsack Dan Rather was in the tank for the loony left, and, of course, the Charlie Gibsons and what's her name from the Today Show haven't been able to pull off the con. So few either watch the network news anymore, or believe it when they do watch it. Walter's appropriate epitaph: I turned the network news into Pravda.

Some people did get early on what Walter Wonderful was really all about. A media character in one of Allen Drury's political novels was one Frankly Unctuous, and a better satire on Cronkite has never been written. Drury had been around the national press forever, and he knew an unpatriotic con man when he saw one.

Some of us were actually around and watching Cronkite when he was doing damage to his profession and country. I would like to think that in broadcastland one voice, please, just one voice, would step up to the microphone and remember the real, vicious Cronkite before the memory hole closes and all that is left is the myth created by the leftwing hagiographers.
-- Stephen Zierak
Kansas City, Missouri

CONGRESS CAN'T MILK COWS
Re: Philip Klein's Dead Cows and Other Biden Health Care Whoppers:

As a Texas Cattle Rancher, I doubt that Joe Biden has ever seen many cows close up, much less dead. He is more familiar with making castigations about the ethnicity of certain store owners. However, I know a whole lot about dead cows and have lived through more than a few droughts -- the most famous from my childhood was the famed 50's drought in Texas in which many a rancher lost his shirt, the family ranch, and had to start over. Back then, those old ranchers had fortitude and determination in which to do so, and this was still the land of opportunity, but if the Obama plans for all of us go through, none of us will still be ranch holders in the end.

We hear talk that my father once associated with snake oil salesmen of the 1930's. This is the norm for Washington, we know from personal experience. There is a chasm between the thinking of those who govern and the rest of how the entire nation thinks, lives, works. It is easily explained, of course, by the lack of real life experiences, working as a common man, owning a small business, or just common ordinary experiences.

We have more than our share of old cows. Faithful, good producers each year of wonderful calves and we care for each one of them. But there always comes a time when we decide the cost of keeping extra care that old cow is not a pay off and ranchers live on the income from calf sales. With all the new legislation, regulations, and uber control, family ranches will be a thing of the past. Large collectives that are owned by political groups, corporations that know tax laws because they funded the fools in Washington to write the laws in their behalf, will be all that is left.

What Washington doesn't know or care about is how deeply folks in the heartland are fed up. They do not realize or care that folks have had enough. Well, like a riled rattlesnake that is coiled and prepared to make you sit up and notice, we let them know that they had better slow down, read their own legislation and get a grip. The folks who built this land are about to take action in the voting booth.

A dead cow could do a better job in D.C.
-- B. Gunn
East Texas Rancher

PLAYING THE VICTIM CARD
RE: Peter Ferrara's 2010:

Wow. You captured why America have been transformed from a ''glass is half-full'' culture to one that is stuck in the "glass is half empty" mentality -- it's safe being a victim! Living in a Red, no tax, right to work State, we need ideas on how we export our economic model.
-- Mike McMillan

Why is it that vastly successful business executives uniformly chuck every particle of rational economic experience when advocating -- or worse, running -- public-sector enterprises? Ted Turner is a spectacular example, closely followed by Bloomberg in New York. California's Schwarzenegger, a millionaire real estate investor, replaced Gray Davis only to turn every cost-benefit tenet on its head. Are Bloomberg and Schwarzenegger et al. merely buying votes, or is this syndrome more a psychological debility, a "transference phenomenon" whereby failure in one area compensates another? Business success, in other words, "lacks all conviction" (Yeats); like inverse po' boys who take what they can get, wealthy haves literally throw away have-nots' prospects of prosperity at every opportunity. Riches loom best when all about are poor. Like the Gates Foundation, which concerns itself solely with give-aways rather than substantive efforts to break "cycles of poverty," current philanthropy is a mere feel-good proposition designed to perpetuate rather than end clients' misery. There lies the key: Wealthy political incumbents treat the public purse as eleemosynary alms-giving, gratuitous charity, an unearned something-for-nothing proposition. Call it liberalism (sic), socialism or whatever, their public business is marketing the dole. Insular, short-sighted, self-destructive such policies may be, but from a Thorsten Veblen-like perspective, how better to set oneself off from socio-economic inferiors than by preempting competition? Here business and politics go hand-in-hand... yet nothing could be more destructive of an entrepreneurial, free-market economy. Absent initiative, innovation, competition on all fronts, alms-givers have the field all to themselves. Tending to Luddite nihilism, they seek to occupy oases in a socio-economic Arabia Deserta. Grand Muftis of Mecca and Medina understand.
-- JPB

SKIMMING OFF THE TOP
Re: Ralph R. Reiland's A Nation of One-Eyed Sycophants?: As I endure the health care "reform" parrots squawking "Inaction is not an option," I wonder if the they have heard the old medical maxim "First, do no harm." Then again, "health care reform donkeys braying" may be a more apt metaphor. Either way, I doubt it.
-- Reid Bogie
Waterbury, Connecticut

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