The DNR's Radical Friends

So in the spirit of today's Op-Ed in the Daily News Record, let's look at some of the writer's "Radical Friends." First there is Stanley Kurtz writing in the National Review - Senior Fellow at the think tank known as Ethics and Public Policy Review... noted conservative commentator and colleague of Senior Fellow, Rick Santorum, humiliated former Junior Senator from Pennsylvania who famously warned in 2003 that the repeal of laws banning sodomy would lead to "man on dog" sex.

Then there is the late Reed Irvine - founder of Accuracy in Media and father of current Chairman Don Irvine. The elder Irvine called for sedition charges to be brought against the SDS, the Black Panthers, and the Progressive Labor Party thus certifying his Right Wing credentials. He called for a nuclear strike against Iraq during Desert Storm, he rails against environmental causes with great stridency (his primary funding sources are the big chemical and oil companies), and famously advocated for government policing of major-network newscasts for "accuracy and fairness."

For facts and information the editor refers us to that fount of knowledge and self-edited bastion of scholarship, Wikipedia.

Other sources of information include the famously "fair and balanced" Fox News, the noted conservative rag The National Review, and the admittedly conservative Washington Times (although the Times reporting an AP story, gives our editor some wiggle space here.)

These are bona fide right wing sources, every bit as legitimate as the mainstream media or equally bona fide left wing sources. My point is simply that this "opinion" is so dramatically slanted towards the extreme Right that it loses it's credibility! It's simply PROPAGANDA for the Right Wing. There is no rational argument given for any issue that is relevant to the Presidential campaign only vague references to "judgement." In fact the editor's only point is to demean and slander an American Presidential candidate on hearsay alone, in the newspaper, using the community's bully pulpit. In the vain attempt to find out who Obama really is, all we get is standard Right Wing replays of tired and well-worn gossip, a little fear-mongering, some subliminal race baiting, and an underlying well spring of white pride.

A rational informative opinion piece does not include such hot button, innuendo-laden terms and phrases such as: "terrorist" - "tossing bombs and killing cops" - "infantile coniption known as the 60's" - "bomb thrower" - "America hating leftist" - "crazed lunatic" - "incendiary anti-American and (more importantly my emphasis) anti-white sermons" - "left-leaning poet" - "card carrying Red" - "slavishly pro-Soviet communist party" - compared to, "Joseph Stalin and his apostles of death who murdered millions" - "advocated violent overthrow of the country" - "cosmically radical lunatics" - and again, "terrorists, race hustlers, and communists" - and once again "apologist for Stalin."

Just WHO is the paranoid radical here? How desperate is our Right Wing editor? How far into the mud will he finally dig? If he loves America so much, why is he making villains and enemies of the 75% of Americans who AREN'T Right Wing Radicals?

Here's the op-ed I'd love to see in the interest of "fair and balanced," "John McCain and his Radical Friends." I dare ya!