Liberal Rhetoric, smashed...

...by this excellent column by John McCandlish Phillips, a former reporter for the New York Times http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/03/AR2005050301277.html in today's Washington Post. Entitled When Journalist Cry Jihad, it exposes these liberal Op-ed loonies for the hysterics that they are:

I have been looking at myself...in a ghastly arcade mirror lately -- courtesy of this newspaper and the New York Times. Readers have been assured, among other dreadful things, that we are living in "a theocracy" and that this theocratic federal state has reached the dire level of -- hold your breath -- a "jihad."
In more than 50 years of direct engagement in and observation of the major news media I have never encountered anything remotely like the fear and loathing lavished on us by opinion mongers in these world-class newspapers in the past 40 days

He very politely takes the vile Frank Rich to task:

Three days later Frank Rich...sweepingly informed us that, under the effects of "the God racket" as now pursued in Washington, "government, culture, science, medicine and the rule of law are all under threat from an emboldened religious minority out to remake America according to its dogma." He went on to tell Times readers that GOP zealots in Congress and the White House have edged our country over into "a full-scale jihad." If Rich were to have the misfortune to live for one week in a genuine jihad, and the unlikely fortune to survive it, he would temper his categorization of the perceived President Bush-driven jihad by a minimum of 77 percent. If any "emboldened minority" is aiming to "remake America according to its dogma," it seems to many evangelicals and Catholics that it is the vanguard wanting, say, the compact of marriage to be stretched in its historic definition to include men cohabiting with men and women with women.

Now he takes aim (again, too politely for me) at Paul Krugman:

In "What's Going On" [March 29], Krugman darkly implied that some committed religious believers in our nation bear a menacing resemblance to Islamic extremists, by which he did not mean a few crazed crackpots but a quite broad swath of red-staters. In "An Academic Question" [April 5], Krugman, conceding the wide majority of secular liberals over conservatives on the faculties of our major universities, had the supreme chutzpah to tell us why: The former, unfettered by presuppositions of faith, are free to commit genuine investigative work and to reach valid scholarly conclusions, while the latter are disabled in that critical respect by their unprovable prior assumptions. So they are disqualified as a class from the university enterprise by their unfortunate susceptibility to the God hypothesis.

Read the whole article, it is surprising to read such an effective trashing of the state of the op-ed pages on an op-ed page itself. He takes many others to task, including Maureen Dowd, Eugene Robinson (see here http://jerseynut.blogspot.com/2005/04/democratic-media-flaunts-their.html for my take on this article) Richard Cohen, and many more of their close-minded coherts. He usually tempers his critiques of content with nice word on the columnists themselves (although methinks I do smell some sarcasm there); the JerseyNut is not as forgiving...nevertheless, a first rate job by Mr. Phillips!