In a letter to the
Cincinnati Enquirer, Ms. Sue Leitner of Anderson Township (last
letter) asks a question that demands an answer:
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's wife and daughter took $500,000 out of his campaign funds, and you put that story deep inside the main news pages ("DeLay's kin given more than $500,000," April 6)? Come on! If that were a Democrat, it would be Page One. This is the first story I have seen about DeLay in weeks. This ongoing scandal is much more significant than anything the Democrats delivered in the last decade. Please give it the prominence it deserves.
For the non-locals, Anderson Township (eastern side of Cincinnati) is heavily Republican (though
good people are working hard to change that), so if this is happening there, then I have high hopes. The letter writer is correct - this happens to a Democratic leader, it's front-page for several weeks.
(more thoughts after the flip)
Driving in this morning, I got to thinking - why do we get so upset about things that happen to ONE person (see
Schiavo, Terri) but remain utterly indifferent about a continuous stream of lies, distortions, and half-truths about issues that impact ALL of us - like Iraq, Social Security, the economy, the environment, the continuous erosion of the wall of separation between church and state, Medicare/health care, the decline in earning and spending power, Halliburton, etc., etc.?
Is it because it's easier to focus on one thing ("Clinton got a blowjob!!") than to comprehend every single thing? Or is it an example of "one death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic" or a similar concept? We get filled with moral outrage over one item (Clinton, Schiavo) as our way of not thinking about every other thing that is happening.
It's easy, as some are wont to do, to blame the "recent upsurge in teens having oral sex" on the ClenisTM; it's also easy to forget that this indiscretion, wrong as it was (believe me, I've got my problems with Bill Clinton, not the least of which is how easily he triangulated and sold out the progressive agenda on too many occasions), was essentially a private affair, and the recuperation from it needed to be a private affair - he wronged his wife, and it is only his wife who could truly forgive him). The affair was only discovered when an out-of-control "Independent" Counsel, funded with OUR TAX DOLLARS, took it upon himself to be the Grand Inquisitor of the Opposition, and relied on a parade of sham witnesses, ne'er-do-wells, and political enemies who sought to destroy someone (in conjunction with think tanks and biased media outlets funded largely through the largesse of near-fascist billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife) to turn a private matter public, thus allowing tons of impressionable children (who were seeing far worse through other outlets as well) to view endless recitations of "oral sex...oral sex...oral sex..."
Besides, if the behavior of Presidents and political leaders has that much of an impact on our youth, in five years there will be a spate of 15-year-olds who start wars built on lies, threaten violence on anyone who disagrees with them, and line the pockets of their wealthy classmates with lunch money taken from the poor kids.
WF
