Well, after expending so much time defending the ideals put forth in President Bush’s speech, I find it a bit disheartening, though predictable, to see that some are trying to portray that the Administration may be engaged in damage control. For my part, I don’t think that the President was “shifting” his policy with this speech. Rather, it seems clear that he has essentially been proclaiming an “empire for liberty” for quite some time, even if unknowingly.
Bush advisers said the speech was the rhetorical institutionalization of the Bush doctrine and reflected the president’s deepest convictions about the purposes behind his foreign policies. But they said it was carefully written not to tie him to an inflexible or unrealistic application of his goal of ending tyranny.
“It has its own policy implications, but it is not to say we’re not doing this already,” said White House counselor Daniel J. Bartlett. “It is important to crystallize the debate to say this is what it is all about, to say what are our ideals, what are the values we cherish.”
“It is not a discontinuity. It is not a right turn,” said a senior administration official, who spoke with reporters from newspapers but demanded anonymity because he wanted the focus to remain on the president’s words and not his. “I think it is a bit of an acceleration, a raising of the priority, making explicit in a very public way to give impetus to this effort.” He added that it was a “message we have been sending” for some time.
I agree with the “senior administration official,” though I do think that some nervous folks in the Administration couldn’t handle criticism from the right and are trying to placate those, such as Peggy Noonan and William Buckley, who raised an eyebrow at the speech. I think it was the criticism by these pundits, rather than any from abroad, that shocked the Administration and precipitated this ill-advised spin control, if that is actually what is going on.
It is also interesting to discover that some of those whom I earlier cited as supporters of the President’s vision actually may have had a hand in helping craft the speech.
The planning of Bush’s second inaugural address began a few days after the Nov. 2 election with the president telling advisers he wanted a speech about “freedom” and “liberty.” That led to the broadly ambitious speech that has ignited a vigorous debate. The process included consultation with a number of outside experts, Kristol among them.
One meeting, arranged by Peter Wehner, director of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives, included military historian Victor Davis Hanson, columnist Charles Krauthammer and Yale professor John Lewis Gaddis, according to one Republican close to the White House. White House senior adviser Karl Rove attended, according to one source, but mostly listened to what became a lively exchange over U.S. policy and the fight for liberty.
Gaddis caught the attention of White House officials with an article in the latest edition of Foreign Affairs magazine that seems to belie the popular perception that this White House does not consult its critics.
Gaddis’s article is, at times, strongly critical of Bush’s first-term foreign policy calculations, especially what he calls the twin failures to anticipate international resistance to Bush’s ideas and Iraqi resistance to peace after the fall of Baghdad. But the article also raises the possibility that Bush’s grand vision of spreading democracy could prove successful, and perhaps historic, if the right choices are made in the years ahead.
The former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky also helped shape the speech with his book about the hopes of democratic dissidents jailed by despots around the world. Bush recommended the book, “The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror,” to several aides and invited Sharansky, now an Israeli politician, to the White House in mid-November to discuss it, according to one official.
I guess that explains why people such as Hanson and Kristol voiced their support. It doesn’t change my thinking on it, though. Yes, I have an idealistic streak, but it is informed by my sense of history and a belief that, by taking the long view, we can accomplish that outlined in the speech. Some have pointed out that similar ideals were explained by President Reagan. It doesn’t have to be done via military action, and it doesn’t have to be accomplished in 10 years. Rather, it is a policy worth following because in the age of terrorism, it is best for the United States to “clear the swamps.” The byproduct will be freedom in much of the rest of the world. This freedom will be generated by the internal pressure applied by the oppressed and suppressed who will take their cue from the example set by the U.S. In some instances the U.S. will take more direct action, in others less. In all cases, it is our example that will lead the way. Never mind what the intellectuals or politicians say, pay attention to what the people say. They don’t carry the cynicism of so many of the “elite.” They aren’t afraid to hope.
[Open full post]The temporary part-time job delivering Christmas packages in Tiverton that I took to cross the financial finish line in December greatly helped me to gain a sense of my new hometown. (We bought a house here in July.) The most significant impression that the town makes is the dividing line that runs roughly in the area of Route 24. Tiverton south of the highway is one town; Tiverton north of the highway has an entirely different feel. I live north of the highway, where talk of the town’s “village style” jars a bit against quotidian experience.
Be that as it may, rattling around in a delivery truck, I developed a tremendous appreciation for the town as a whole. The writer’s assessment: it would be a fantastic setting for a novel, or perhaps a series of novels. Much of the town is just beautiful. The process of development has left little surprises, like the driveway off one of the main streets that rambles back only a couple hundred yards to a shack that might as well be miles removed from civilization. And several neighborhoods are a young family’s dream.
Unfortunately, personal experience suggests that dreaming is now all that young families can do. Even my circa 1950 neighborhood, full of blue-collar workers and their young children, is claiming prices that, at best, require change-in-the-sofa mortgage payments. Tiny houses with just enough land to call a proper yard cost well over a quarter-million dollars.
All this is preamble to my admission that I’m entirely unable to choose a side on the matter of business development:
Monday’s hearing invited the public’s views on a zoning proposal designed to encourage smaller-scale retail proposals that would fit into Tiverton’s village style. The hundred or so who attended the meeting largely agreed that the zoning proposal was still not restrictive enough.
Some Tiverton officials and council members have sought retail development to raise new town revenue and avoid increasing taxes. But raising revenue at the expense of the town’s village character seems to be unpopular in Tiverton. …
Tiverton faces the dilemma confronting most lovely old towns. The cost of town services is always rising, and a major way to meet that cost without raising taxes or cutting services is to add to the tax base by attracting more taxable business.
Just about the time that real estate prices in my rented hometown of Portsmouth hit twice the number that I had believed was the highest they could possibly go, I began to wonder how much town governments and those households with the time and money to invest in influencing its policies would really care if less wealthy families, some of them fixtures in the towns, were driven out. I even made a video blog (vlog) expressing my acceptance of the natural ebb and flow of a region’s society.
Still, its citizens all being equal, a town ought to do its best to meet the needs of all of them, which means enabling them to stay if they wish to do so. Higher taxes will, without doubt, mean that some of them will have to become citizens of somewhere else.
Not having yet had the opportunity to delve into Tiverton’s finances, this is only a guess, but surely there is fat to trim in the “services” category. And surely my townsman Richard Rounds’s sentiment that the business “giant leaves mighty ‘footprints’ that get filled in with slop” ought to be balanced with the sentiment that the fading “little guys” leave a hole when they fall away.
Or are we the slop?
In a post titled “The Road to Fiefdom,” Paul Musgrave (referring to this article at City Journal) has broadened some specific observations regarding NY City politics into the national scope. As such, I’d venture that his remarks can be just as aptly applied to our own little Blue State.
The article focuses largely on the influence within Blue metro regions of public-sector employees, and the unions to which they belong. Strikingly, this power is no longer concentrated within the unions; many former public employees have now become elected offficials . . .
The growing, or at least persistent, power of municipal governments has the effect of turning naturally Blue cities even more azure. Most private-sector employees in New York City backed Mike Bloomberg; most public employees voted for Democrat Mark Green. Bloomberg’s anti-tax, anti-spending campaign was a direct threat to the jobs of many city workers, who feared having to find new ways of earning their living. Because their jobs are on the line in every election, government workers are especially mobilized in politics: Although they account for only a third of the workforce in New York, Malanga notes, public sector employees represented 37 percent of the electorate in 2001.
Not only local politics but national politics are affected by this shift in composition. Because government workers are reliably Democratic, and because Democrats need to maintain their metro base even as they woo suburban voters with promises of middle-class subsidies, the municipal and government workers’ unions are big players in the national Democratic movement. This is a predictable, if unconscious, response to the unions’ power at the local level. The natural result of overregulation and business-hostile bureaucracy is economic weakening within cities as firms flee to the suburbs and friendlier areas. The unions have turned their cities and school systems into private fiefs. Now, to preserve their power and their members’ paychecks, then, public sector unions have to try to extend their reach beyond municipal boundaries.
For generations, the Democratic party was the party of private-sector unions. Now that the trades union movement in the States has been broken, the donkey has a new rider. If Republicans want to ensure better government and preserve their political predominance, weakening these public sector unions has to be high on our agenda. (via Instapundit)
It is safe to say that these observations seem especially pertinent to Rhode Island.
[Open full post]It is, and has been, encouraging that the Providence Journal editorial page is willing to argue on the side of rational response to Saddam Hussein:
The AP saw no reason to seek further comment on that news [that 120 Iraqi scientists who had been working in weapons programs were being paid by the U.S. government to work in other fields], but we think it speaks volumes. Some people want those volumes to just go away, but the fact remains that whatever happened to the WMDs — they were in Iraq at some point, and then disappeared — Saddam Hussein was dangerous, and the U.S., Iraq and the world are safer now that he is gone. …
… while Saddam may have scrapped his WMDs, he kept his WMD scientists, and worked to break U.N. sanctions — rather than just ending them by proving he had indeed destroyed his WMD arsenal. Instead, he scammed billions from the United Nations. He did not spend it on food or medicine for Iraqis. Nor did he spend it exclusively on palaces.
So what were those 120 scientists doing before they fell into U.S. custody? Scholarly research? At least now we needn’t worry about learning the answer the hard way.
It’s easy to forget that even after September 11 people were arguing for the cessation of sanctions. There’s still reason to fear that weapons slipped out of the country before the war, and the frightening quality of WMDs is that “stockpiles” and “large-scale production” aren’t necessary to do inconceivable damage. Considering the Ba’athists’ efforts to facilitate renewed WMD production once the country’s activities didn’t need to be routed through the corrupt caverns of the United Nations, an alternate historical timeline may well have seen a more-massive terrorist attack within our borders by now — whether evidence of Iraq’s involvement would satisfy the true disbelievers or not.
[Open full post]Perhaps my age is getting to be such that it is becoming unseemly to trawl among students’ letters to their collegiate newspapers for material. Still, by watching a babe taking its first steps, one may come to a fuller understanding of the precariousness of two-legged movement. Similarly, by considering students’ expression of their professors’ views, one may further appreciate the attributes beneath the careful construction of their ideology.
Such is the case with Anthony Maselli’s recent letter to the University of Rhode Island’s The Good 5¢ Cigar, “Safety not guaranteed to all students.” After narrowing his context to the “liberal environment” of a university within “the most wealthy and secure, free nation on Earth,” Maselli finds reason to suspect the presence of darkness:
I was leaving class in Quinn Hall at the end of last semester, and I noticed a sticker on someone’s office window. It stated that the office is a “Safe Zone” for gay, lesbian and bisexual individuals. If this sticker were posted in some kind of corporate or public building, I might have appreciated this welcoming sentiment. But, being a self-proclaimed non-discriminatory university campus, I found the message to be unsettling. It forced me to ask myself this question: If this office is a “Safe Zone,” what part of this university is an unsafe zone? I wondered if there was a sticker on the inside of the door that reads, “You are now entering the unsafe zone.” Certainly there is not, but isn’t that what the message suggests?
Forgiving the letter’s writer for proclaiming himself to be a non-discriminatory university, consider how he has discerned evil not by its manifestation, but by what he believes to be its opposite. In the most free nation on Earth, in one of the most overwhelmingly liberal environments that nation’s culture has to offer, a room professed to be a haven within a haven within a haven is evidence that maybe “some of us should think twice before we walk out our front door in the morning.”
One imagines the office’s owner, presumably a professor, congratulating him- or herself for this show of faux bravery. The great majority of people in America — let alone on a campus — wish homosexuals no harm. But of course we understand, as the professor surely intends to convey, that the “safety zone” goes much further than mere security and tolerance.
Thus we see how devotees of a certain worldview pursue its ends not with evidence and debate, but with negative proofs and euphemism. Keep an eye out for this dynamic in more-sophisticated explanations of what tolerance demands.
For anyone interested, I’ve posted some thoughts on the President’s Innaugural Address at The Ocean State Blogger.
[Open full post]According to State Education Commissioner Peter McWalters, much of the debate on charter schools centers around the issues of power and control. Specifically, this battle revolves around which entity, public schools or charter schools, has more of a “right” to money from a finite pool of education dollars. As reported by the Providence Journal, charter school supporters are trying “to figure out how to counter the us-versus-them mentality” and held a conference at the Providence Chamber of Commerce yesterday to do just that.
Yesterday, the general consensus was that charter schools have gotten a bad rap. Their opponents — teachers’ unions and school superintendents — say that charters siphon money away from the public schools and that they lure the best students from the local districts.
But, according to charter league president Robert Pilkington, 59 percent of charter school students are minorities and more than half qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, which means they are poor. Moreover, 18 percent of these students are children with special needs. . .
What separates charter schools from their traditional peers is that they operate outside most of the bureaucracy that governs district schools. They are also characterized by having small classes, innovative thinking and greater parental involvement.
Ron Wolk, the founder of Education Week, says the public school system is so entrenched that it can’t be fixed by tinkering around the edges. What the nation needs is a parallel school system that challenges the bureaucracy. Charter schools, he said, could be a big part of that solution.
Perhaps if more public school teachers and administrators had worried about the kids they were teaching and less about their benefits and power, there wouldn’t have been a challenge from charter schools in the first place. They are now reaping what they have sown.
Caveat: I recognize the fine work and effort of the majority of teachers. It is not their teaching ability nor their commitment I disagree with, it is their unwillingness to apply the open-mindedness taught in the classroom to themselves as they consider non-traditional, extra-public education methods.
[Open full post]Email conversation with Sheila Lennon has persuaded me that my statement that “the news department of the Providence Journal is practically campaigning for a change in the law” should, instead, have read “the news department of the Providence Journal has practically advocated for same-sex marriage.” Lennon may not find that language any more accurate, from her point of view, but it better conveys what I’ve found to be the truth as I’ve followed the Projo’s coverage for Dust in the Light.
I can only insist that I intended no distortion and was merely attempting convey the palpable bias without tripping up the question with argumentation.
ADDENDUM:
After some self-debate, I’ve gone ahead and made the change. However, I haven’t noted it in that post because it doesn’t strike me as enough of a shift to merit the distraction from the important part of the interview: Mr. Jacoby’s answers.
Sitting around a pub’s chest-high table with new acquaintances, a blue-state conservative will look for signs of ideological sympathy. In New England, should the Boston Globe arise in conversation, the canny conservative need only drop one name, before sipping his beer to disguise the true import: Jeff Jacoby. The Globe‘s bio gives an inkling as to how reactions to the gambit might differ:
Jeff Jacoby became an op-ed columnist for The Boston Globe in February 1994. Seeking a conservative voice to balance its famously liberal roster of commentators, the Globe hired him away from the Boston Herald, where he had been chief editorial writer since 1987.
Given Jacoby’s unique standing in New England as well as his online renown, Anchor Rising is grateful that he agreed to spend some of his time discussing terrorists in the Left’s view, Jewish voters, the claims of biological fathers, same-sex marriage, the arts, the Internet, and (of course) the experience of being conservative in New England with us.
Anchor Rising. What sort of reception and feedback do you get as a prominent conservative in such an infamously liberal state and region?
Jeff Jacoby. It varies. From some readers, the reaction is shock and awe. There was a lot of this especially during my first few years at the Globe, when the letters to the editor poured in from Globe readers appalled that their paper was making room for opinions that were so, ugh, conservative. There are still plenty of responses along those lines, but I also hear from a lot of readers who are glad that there is at least one corner of the Globe where they can read something compatible with their own view of the world. Readers elsewhere in the country, coming across one of my columns for the first time, often ask if I’m about to lose my job for wandering off the Northeast liberal plantation. There was a lot of that especially during the 2004 campaign.
AR. Do you find that the adversity helps you hone your ideas and develop material?
JJ. Yes, in this sense: I know that what I write is going to be vetted a lot more closely by liberal dissenters than a liberal columnist’s work is likely to be. I’d better be able to back up what I’m writing, because it is almost certainly going to be challenged. But apart from that narrow sense, I wouldn’t say that I thrive on being in the philosophical minority at the Boston Globe, or in Massachusetts, or in the mainstream media. I’ve been a conservative since I was in junior high school — it’s the way my brain works, and I don’t think that would change if I were writing deep in the heart of Red America.
AR. I first became familiar with your work on David Horowitz’s FrontPageMag.com. How has your audience — even your career — changed since the Internet, and especially since blogs, broke into the public consciousness?
JJ. Less than you’d think. I am the world’s worst self-promoter and have made virtually no use of the Internet at all to build my audience share. I wish I had a nickel for every person who has told me I should have a Web site (or asked me why I don’t). There is a JeffJacoby.com, but so far it is simply a sign-up form for anyone who’d like to get my columns by email. I haven’t created a blog or joined an existing one, and I marvel at columnists who actually have time, energy, and ideas left over for blogging after their “real” writing is done.
All that said, the Internet has unquestionably expanded my readership; I hear from far more readers, and from much farther afield, than was the case when my Globe column began in 1994. I get email from around the world, and radio talk shows often come calling after seeing a column linked on RealClearPolitics.com or posted on Townhall.com or JewishWorldReview.com, for example. I don’t know that the nature of the readers themselves has changed, though. I’d guess that I’m read by a lot more conservatives than I used to be — and also by a lot more people who get all their information from screens, not newsprint.
AR. It has been much noted that “the Catholic vote” swung from 50/47 for Gore/Bush to 52/47 for Bush/Kerry; I suspect the shift will continue in Republicans’ favor. Meanwhile, Bush votes among Jews increased from 19% to 24%. What do you foresee happening there?
JJ. I wrote on this topic a few weeks before the election. I think that American Jewish voters are slowly growing out of their nearly umbilical loyalty to the Democratic Party. The youngest cohort of American Jews are the most likely to consider themselves Republican; the oldest are the likeliest to still think the 11th Commandment is “Thou Shalt Vote for the Party of FDR.” 2004 was actually the third election in a row in which the Jewish Republican vote improved, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the 24% recorded by exit polls actually understated the shift. Obviously a lot depends on the candidates in any given election year. But to the extent that the well-being and security of Israel remains a cutting issue with Jewish voters (it is a key issue with many non-Jewish voters too, of course), more and more of them will be attracted by the pro-Israel stance of the GOP.
AR. Reading your column about Yasser Arafat’s death and reactions thereto, I recalled a chilling letter to the editor that the Providence Journal published a little over a month after 9/11/01. As an assumption in his argument for ending sanctions in Iraq, the writer declared that “no leader… would deny his own people the necessities of life.” Why is it, at bottom, that such people cannot understand the nature of our enemies?
JJ. Because to do so would be to abandon their utopian belief that people are basically good. The left cannot accept that some people willingly choose to do evil — they feel more comfortable explaining the terrorism or wanton slaughter or gas chambers or gulag as a response to unfairness or poverty or a lack of reasonableness on our part. Our worst enemies cannot be appeased with concessions. We can either defeat them or be defeated by them. But that is something the useful idiots, as Lenin called them, never seem to grasp.
AR. Michelle Malkin recently wrote on her blog that she couldn’t bear to watch the video of 3-1/2 year old Evan Parker Scott being handed over to his biological mother after believing that his adoptive parents were, in your words, “his rock.” In your column on the topic, you noted the questionable character of Evan’s biological father as well as his delay in establishing paternity. But the hand-over would be heartbreaking, it seems to me, no matter his biological father’s qualities. Is there an essential principle that you think ought to be followed in all such cases? What action do you think ought to be taken in similar circumstances in which an upstanding biological parent has a legitimate claim?
JJ. The decision should not turn on the claim of a biological parent, upstanding or not. It should be based on the child’s best interest. Evan Scott should not have been taken from the stable home he had lived in all his life — a home anchored by a married mom and dad who clearly loved and cared for him. Period. A biological mother who placed her newborn for adoption should not be permitted to change her mind 3-1/2 years later. And the law should be changed so that no man has a “legitimate claim” to his biological child unless he married the child’s mother. (Nor should he be responsible for the financial support of that child.) Evan Scott’s biological father was nothing more than a sperm donor. It defies common sense and decency that he should now have liberal visitation rights with Evan, while the little boy’s true mom and dad — Dawn and Gene Scott — never get to see him again.
AR. You’ve written a number of straightforward and obfuscation-dispelling columns about same-sex marriage. To my experience that’s a particularly rare action for a member of the New England media. In Rhode Island, for example, the news department of the Providence Journal has practically advocated for same-sex marriage, and even conservative talk radio hosts claim an inability to see anything wrong with it. Why do you think something so clear to you and me barely seems to register as a real argument among New England opinion makers?
JJ. Same-sex marriage, like the mainstreaming — even celebrating — of homosexuality generally, is one of those ideas that you have to believe in to be in the media or opinion elite, especially in a blue state. Just as you have to believe that the United States is a rogue nation led by a crazed cowboy, just as you have to believe that there is no more fundamental qualification for a federal judge than unblinking support for easy abortion, so you have to believe that the understanding of marriage that has prevailed for 5,000 years is a manifestation of ignernt redneck bigotry. Maybe it’s a question of DNA. Or maybe it really is true that we come from utterly different origins: Conservatives are from Mars, liberals are from San Francisco.
AR. Not unrelated to the previous questions: You’re on the Council of Overseers for the Huntington Theatre Company. How did that come about?
JJ. Interesting question with an interesting answer. I used to host a weekly show for New England Cable News. “Talk of New England” was nothing fancy — I would choose a topic and invite some relevant guests to come on the program and chew it over for an hour. The topic one week was government funding of the arts — which I opposed — and one of my guests was Michael Maso, the engaging managing director of the Huntington Theatre Company. As I recall, we had a spirited debate, in which I called for abolishing the National Endowment for the Arts and he made the usual litany of arguments for its existence. In the course of the show — or perhaps during a commercial break — I mentioned that I was a longtime subscriber to the Huntington, and a regular, if modest, contributor. A couple days later, Michael called to ask if I’d be interested in bringing my unconventional view into the Huntington as an Overseer. Which I was glad — still am glad — to do. (No minds have been changed on the subject of the NEA, though.)
AR. As a conservative with interests in the arts, I’ve noticed a number of figures who share our combination of conservative principles and artistic predilections. (National Review‘s Jay Nordlinger prominent among them.) Are we a silent cohort? A growing movement? What?
JJ. How about simply — normal? Music- and theater-lovers come in all philosophical shades, just as football- or soccer-lovers do. And vegetarians, poets, motorcyclists, and gardeners. There is no more reason to assume that only liberals are interested in the arts than to assume that only conservatives are interested in business. But don’t do Jay Nordlinger the disservice of lumping me together with him as someone with “artistic predilections.” His knowledge of classical music is encyclopedic; when he reviews a performance, you can take his opinion to the bank. I couldn’t write an intelligent review of a play if you held a gun to my temple. When it comes to drama, I’m simply another Chance the Gardener: I like to watch.
AR. Fine arts seem an odd area of society from which to find conservatives absent — with the arts’ long tradition and cultural significance. How can conservatives reclaim a place? Or do you think it’ll happen organically, as aesthetic trends move away from rebellious nonsense to plain ol’ high-quality work? Do these sorts of considerations affect your activities with the Huntington? Elsewhere?
JJ. I suspect that what is true in academia and the media is true in the arts: The leftwing hegemony has become so pronounced that conservatives either avoid the field altogether or, if they want to rise in it, suppress their political views. A friend of mine, a musician in a Top 5 symphony orchestra, is a devout Christian and an ardent conservative. His views are known to some of his colleagues, but he is careful not to be too blatant in his non-leftism. In recent years, a counterattack from the right has begun on campus. Whether it will succeed or not remains to be seen, but maybe conservatives and other non-leftists with an interest in the arts need to follow suit. I promise to do my part — I think I’ll start by (finally) reading Roger Kimball’s The Rape of the Masters.
AR. Any plans for a book?
JJ. I am the world’s slowest writer. Two columns a week is absolutely a full-time job for me. I am in awe of people who can toss off a couple columns in a few hours, and spend the rest of their time hosting daily talk shows, editing journals of opinion, or writing books. All of which is a roundabout way of saying: No, not yet.
What can one do but marvel that Providence Journal page B.01 columnist Bob Kerr would commit this to print:
It’s a day to be silly. We’re not just inaugurating a president; we’re inaugurating a whole new way of life in which the entire country becomes its own reality show. People watch us from other places, waiting for the next pileup, the next collision, the next national obsession with a criminal lowlife. We seldom disappoint our worldwide audience. …
We’ll be living a cartoon tomorrow. Let’s act appropriately.
I’ll try to get some friends together for an informal seminar on what books, if any, might show up on the shelves of the George W. Bush Presidential Library when it’s built sometime in 2010 over a prairie dog hole in west Texas. The Little Engine That Could? A Golfer’s Life? The Pet Goat?
What can one do but offer a shake of the head, a hearty laugh, and a suggestion that the liberal media has been living in a cartoon for as long as anyone can remember. (The laugh, by the way, is at the spectacle of the last denizens refusing to see Toontown in live-action.)
ADDENDUM:
And yes, I want credit for resisting the obvious Democrat-related quips about a “national obsession with a criminal lowlife.”
