Oops, forgot to include something: I've noticed this tendency in my dealings with local America-bashers. They are so busy convincing themselves that they're right that they are obsessed with getting me to come in and listen to a few speeches. They know that listening to some idiot run down our country takes away all their doubts, so they figure that if I just sit and listen to it for a while I'll have an epiphany and become an America-hating idiot, too. Yes, once I hear someone praise the UN for twenty minutes, I'll just forget that they kill babies in China and stood around picking their noses while 800,000 people were hacked to death in Rwanda! It even extends to their written stuff: The local appeasenik newsletter had a feature article this past summer about how you could get "the real news" from places like Mother Jones, the Human Rights Watch website, The Nation, etc. These are people whose worldview is so fragile and so unconnected to reality that they get conservative vibes from CNN!
Need a laugh? Here's a quote from an editorial letter written by a local appeasenik idiot that appeared in the Journal-Standard today, emphasis is mine:
Some would argue that television is the most dangerous weapon of "mass instruction" ever acquired and used by our rulers against its citizens. With a few exceptions, such as "Frontline" or Bill Moyers' unbiased documentaries, television beams on average 18 hours a day to just about every home in our country, a barrage of propaganda and hysteria-laden messages. Someone once said that if you repeat a big enough lie often enough, it will be believed.
BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!! That's like calling Barry Goldwater "a right of center moderate!" "Please, people of Freeport, every news outlet except actual communists gives me a case of cognitive dissonance, and therefore they are lying to you! And even though I'm telling you that a vast government conspiracy controls everything you see on your TV so they can make you send your sons to die for nothing, believe me, it's Fox, CNN and ABC that are the true hysterical wackos!!" Man, what a bunch of idiots.