[img]1|left|||no_popup[/img]If you have walked down the wedding aisle more than once or twice, as some of us optimistic adventurers have, you may have engaged in an occasional war of barbs with your spouse of the moment.
At stake: Which one of you deserves more to be aborted, retroactively.
I was married once to a woman who let me do the name-calling when we had an argument.
Like a sponge, she stood there mum, stoically absorbing all of my fury and insults. On the downside, this also was the wife who, three months pregnant, vanished into the darkness of a spring night 39 years ago and seldom has been seen since. At least she has worked avidly to convince our son that I was the one fled to Mars and forgot to buy a return ticket.
If we had been more political back then, I would have been a fire-breathing Democrat and she would have been a passive Republican — a pattern that continues down to today.
I was thinking of this fetching but fading flower of fertile but fruitless femininity this morning when I was, typically, choking my way through the latest edition of the Los Angeles Times.
Sometimes the only difference between the Times and Mad magazine seems to be that the Times comes to our front porch every day of the week. The distinction in contents constantly is narrowing.
Take, for example, four of today’s contributors — two political reporters, Mark Barabak and Jim Tankersley, the struggling television critic Robert Lloyd and a Far Left author, Anne Lamott.
As loyal liberals, they all brought two suitcases jammed with anger and other negative emotions to soothe their routinely jangled nerves before sitting down to compose their obligatory diatribes.
When it comes to the left-wing Times and Republicans — whom they regard as the enemy party, more dangerous than the Taliban — the newspaper reminds me of the schoolyard bully who struts the grounds, abstractly punching the upper arms of boys who are smaller or thinner.
It is a failing of the contemporary Republican Party that when Democrats begin name-calling each day on radio, television, in newspapers and on the internet, the GOP targets shrug and go on, usually without responding.
This is a scheme jammed with rewards for Democrats who look like double winners — first, because they seized the initiative, and second, because they seemingly intimidated their targets into silence.
If Republicans swung back, the game contest would appear fairer.
As recently as last Monday, Richard Boudreaux, the Times’ bureau chief in Jerusalem, in an opinion-laced news story, criticized the Israeli government for responding to the newest outrageous blood libel against Jews, made the week before in a Swedish newspaper. Why dignify the accusation with a response? the naive Mr. Boudreaux inquired.
Had he been a Jew, he would not have written the piece. He would have learned better while growing up. Historically, down to the Holocaust, Jews have been criticized — rightly at times —for not answering odious libels, often to their fatal detriment.
The Times We Live in — and with
And so this morning, we have four smarmy, undisciplined journalists or writer-types slinging unwarranted hash at persons they disagree with. Why? Because they can and because it is routine Times policy.
You can make book that the targeted conservatives will not reply. The slimy charges will lie on the floor smouldering, as innocent and as tragic as a burnt-down house, smelling like the truth to that large section of America that is not as in engaged as, perhaps, you and I are.
The Times presented 9 stories plus a family-approved editorial saluting the passing of Sen. Ted Kennedy, all with tongues of the awestruck reporters standing at half-mast in tribute.
Start with the Barabak-Tankersley team, charged with rounding up Republican reaction. The boys were shocked that the faintest criticism would be introduced against a liberal icon. They warmed up by taking a baseball bat to thwart “the cacophony of talk radio and the conservative blogosphere.” The boys couldn’t resist threading their onion-like opinions throughout the19 paragraphs, declaring their horror that any criticism should be raised against an alcoholic just because he killed a young girl, blew off punishment and ruined the judicial career of a previously respected jurist, Robert H. Bork in 1987 when he was up for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Tilt, Tilt — Game Over
Turning to the unbalanced television critic Mr. Lloyd, who aches to graduate to a more prestigious assignment, he hoped to make his bosses notice by heaping praise on the doggedly anti-Republican cable channels, MSNBC and CNN, and viciously spanking Fox, the only network in the country to present news with objectivity.
One sentence from the acerbic, cliche-loving Mr. Lloyd may illustrate why the Times continues to shed readers:
“And Fox News, which had to measure respect for the dead against its habitual rightward spin, made its feelings known by treating it, for the most part, as just another of the day’s news events (though the lead story, to be sure).”
Fittingly, at the caboose portion of these assessments, resposes the regrettable, and of course suitably angry, Ms. Lamott, a 55-year-old radical songstress of the farthest left.
This morning the “progressive” novelist whipped her always-fashionable self into a fury over Swish Obama’s failure, so far, to get healthcare reform passed. She is mad, Ms. Lamott argues,because that was the main reason she and all but two or three others voted for him last November.
That would have been a fair contention.
But, dear reader, the Democrat Party is not known for the discipline of its members. Ms. Lamott went on as if she just kept falling off a bar stool and could not help herself.
To give you a fuller picture of the loony Ms. Lamott — which the embarrassed Times routinely fails to do with outside contributors — she once wrote:
“I pray for George Bush because he’s part of the human family. But he’s a dangerous relation, like a Klansman.”
Now there is a dame I’d love to invite to our next salon.
Not that the nutty Ms. Lamott is obsessed. But she also peered through tears and wrote:
“It's harvest time. So instead of thinking about the looming election, look through seed catalogs. Because not even George W. Bush can kill the daffodils.”
Annie girl is such a princess of the Far Left. Criticizing Mr. Obama for stumbling at healthcare reform would have made a tidy essay, she needs to be reminded again. Like all addicts, though, Annie girl eschews prudence.
She has the lexicon and the tap dancing of the Far Left down perfectly. Given her propensity for puerile pettifoggery and personal pettiness, it is disappointing but not surprising that Annie girl, like the boys above, cannot resist flailing against the people she hates most on earth, Republicans.
She aims her little girl machine gun at various low-profile Republicans who are only household names in their own homes.
Like a loyal member of the board of directors of Whores for Obama, Ms. Lamott reserves her smelliest fumes for spraying — drum roll — the hottest woman in politics, Sarah Palin.
Left-wingers, who wish she was on their side, can’t leave Ms. Palin alone.
Gratuitous criticism of Ms. Palin, under any Democrat byline, evidently demonstrates how cool they are.
Annie girl, mazel tov. Take my coat before you get a chill.
