It was Obama that was willing to shut down payments to military and seniors if the house did not give him everything he demanded. How could the fail to make that point?
lbryce:Sounds like a question only a Democrat would ask.St_Thomas_AquinasOr a WSJ Collaborator.They're as bad as the NYT, now.
It was Obama that was willing to shut down payments to military and seniors if the house did not give him everything he demanded. How could the fail to make that point?
The question to ask Gerald Seib is, “Did President Reagan shut down the government? And if so, exactly how did he shut down the government back in the 1980s, and in what sense did Congress shut down the government this time?The answer is, of course, that people who are Democrats in fact (whether card-carrying or not) will blame the Republican party to any dispute with a Democrat party. The same is not true in reverse; Republicans will admit that “it takes two to make an argument,” and that a government shutdown is always the result of a confrontation between two opposing parties, each having control of a branch of government.
To the extent that “Reagan shut down the government” in the 1980s, and “the Republicans shut down the government” in 2013, the person or institution who is telling the story is taking the Democrat side of the argument for granted in both - generally in all - cases.
Yes, the WSJ is “as bad as the NYT” - but then, it always was, everywhere except the Editorial Page. And I assume that this piece, tho in fact an opinion piece, was not published on the editorial page. Because the “liberalism” endemic to all wire service journalism, including that of the WSJ, lead the editors outside the conservative redoubt of the official editorial page to create their own “shadow editorial page” from time to time. And that has historically had the moniker, “Politics and Policy” IIRC - whereas the editorial page itself is headed, “Review and Outlook.” And rest assured, I have seen this byline before in “Politics and Policy” more than once - but I do not recall seeing that byline on the op-ed to the “Review and Outlook” editorial page. And it does not appear there today - I looked. The writer is the WSJ Washington Bureau Chief - not a writer for the editorial page.
As to why our reporting is all left wing, I puzzled over that for decades before happening on a book,the mere title of which gave me a blinding flash of the obvious - the telegraph surely must have changed journalism, and was therefore a candidate for causing journalism to swerve firmly into leftism. A bit of reading about the AP:
- Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails:
- The Untold Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War
by Tom Wheelerbrought home the fact that the AP was aggressively monopolistic from its inception.
My own analysis is that all journalism has the tendency play "the critic” vs. “the man who is actually in the arena,” and that must always push reporters towards leftism. And wire services - the AP is the biggie, even if there are others - constitute a continuous virtual meeting of journalists. The one Adam Smith quote that “liberals” like is,People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (Book I, Ch 10)But if in the above quote you replace “people of the same trade,” with “journalists,” and if you recognize that they “meet together” via the wire services, you conclude that the wire services empower journalists to follow their own natural predilection without check by other journalists. And to the extent that journalists lust after stories which put journalists and journalism in a favorable light, it is only natural that their tendency is toward advocacy for the proposition that you and I need the protection of journalists from “the man who is actually in the arena” - from, that is, the producers of all the goods and services upon which we depend. Which is, IMHO, the defining characteristic of leftism (which in America has since the 1920s termed itself “liberalism”).Thus, my tagline:“Liberalism” is a conspiracy against the public by wire-service journalism.Why the Associated Press is Pernicious to the Public Interest