Unexpected

The Northwest Florida Daily News is my local puppy trainer. It is/was part of the now bankrupt Freedom Communications media empire started in Orange County, California to be sure that as many people as possible got a dose of libertarian opinion. The Cato Institute has supplied a lot of editorials to the paper over the years.

Today I read two of their opinion writers and was somewhat taken aback by the hard dose of reality they wrote about.

First there was Del Stone who wrote about Fox News in: Be wary of the ‘fair and balanced’ shtick. Mr. Stone tells of seeing a newscast from Fox News while he was waiting to get his car serviced. He was not a happy camper with what he saw.

Mr. Stone did not believe the news was presented in a “fair and balanced” manner, and went on to point out that there had to be a separation between the news and opinion, noting that columns in the Daily News are clearly labeled as such with the author’s name prominently displayed, and that the news should be an unbiased presentation of the facts.

He didn’t say what he had seen, but it was obviously something egregious about a news event with which he was familiar, for him to write this column. Whatever it was, he apparently did some searching on-line about the event, and even mentions “the liberal Media Matters” as pointing out multiple examples of biased news reporting. Note that Mr. Stone is upset with the “news reporting”, not the opinion programs of Fox News, and he makes that clear.

Then on his blog at the paper’s web site, I found Pat Rice saying that Cheney could give Obama lessons on Afghan “dithering”. Mr. Rice is upset that Cheney was complaining about “dithering”, when the Bush administration did nothing but dither on their watch.

I suspect that Mr. Rice is upset that Osama bin Laden wasn’t captured, tried, and executed by the Hedgemony, as the lynch mob had been promised. They weren’t appeased by Sadam’s hanging, they wanted bin Laden’s head on a pike, and Bush Co. didn’t deliver.

I suspect that they both are dealing with the real possibility that their jobs won’t exist after restructuring, so they really have nothing to lose, and a good deal of anger to work off.