A Philosophy Lesson

I switched newspapers this week.

You may not think it's a major life-changing decision, but I do. Since the first week that I lived here in the 'Burg, I read the Baltimore Sun everyday (my initial reasons are explained here). Mostly it came down to the fact that in my head, I was looking toward Baltimore (or a similar larger-sized market) as where I would be going next after I made a name for myself in radio here, so it made sense that I wanted to familiarize myself with the area. If the store had run out of the Sun, then I would get the Washington Post, which you actually have to make a serious time investment to read, especially if you get the Sunday edition. The front section will usually run about 32 pages, and the majority of it is "analysis" of news stories, rather than the actual news itself. Let's face it, Saturday is traditionally a slow news day, and you have to fill 32 pages somehow. I also liked the Baltimore and Washington papers because the closer you get to the Beltway, the more fanatically liberal the writers of letters to the editor are, and therefore ripe for being picked on by me, whether just in conversation, or sometimes in this column.

However, after a while, I really couldn't justify my daily purchase of the Baltimore Sun. The original reason seemed to fall flat, even though I have achieved success in this market to the point that I feel I can move up to bigger and better things someday soon. Still, I live in Pennsylvania, I pay Pennsylvania taxes, I can vote in Pennsylvania elections (and just like most Pennsylvanians, I have no clue which way I'm going to go in the election for governor). Even though the majority of my listening area and possibly the majority of my listeners live in Maryland, I live and broadcast from Pennsylvania, and so I have switched allegiances to the Harrisburg Patriot-News. What, did you think I was going to read the Chambersburg Public Opinion? On Sundays, maybe, so I can get coupons, but my stance on comics stands; I need more than one page, and not only are there two pages of comics in the Patriot, but they're IN COLOR! And I actually get to read about stuff going on at Susquehanna, my alma mater. So there you have it, out with Maryland red, in with the Blue and White. Goodbye College Park, hello State College. Not that I'm junking my Orangemen, mind you; even though they are now 1-3, I will refer you back to my column of last week and confirm that I am still sticking with my team. Besides, didn't Penn State lose in OT this weekend too?

However, I will miss certain things from the Sun. Most notably, I will miss the op-ed page. I will miss KAL and Mike Lane's constant portrayal of President Bush as the worst president in history (KAL frequently draws him as a cowboy; Mike Lane has Bush as a little kid). I will miss Jules Witcover's occasional good points on politics, and more frequent cheerleading for Al Gore and anyone else who he thinks is able to take down Bush in '04. And I will miss Molly Ivins, for proving herself over and over as the perfect example of today's liberal Democrat. I'll explain...

While most liberal Democrats are still privately fueled by their anger at Bush over the results of the 2000 presidential election, Ivins is fueled by Bush beating Anne Richards for governor of Texas in 1994. See, Miz Ivins is from Texas, and so every time she trashes Bush, she uses as a "for instance" some policy he advocated in Texas that she was against. She has pleaded for congressional Democrats to start advocating the repeal of the Bush tax cut, which I have previously mentioned here the Democrats will not do, because they know they lose the Senate if they do. She has branded the Republicans solely responsible for corporate wrongdoings, and thinks that the real way to stop more abuses from happening is to gut Clinton-era deregulations like the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Never mind that in doing so, the radio industry would fall apart, because if this act was repealed, the old ownership limits would go back into place and companies that have grown because of the relaxing of those limits would be forced to sell most of their stations for scrap, forcing thousands to lose their jobs. And that's just radio; one can only imagine the destruction it would do to the other telecommunications areas that the law covers.

However, her topper came in a recent column, the one from September 5th. She tried to pop the balloon that is the Republican "class warfare" argument; you know the one, the argument that says Democrats try to pit voters against the rich and make people believe that the rich are the cause of all problems and they should be taxed as much as possible. It's the argument that helped get Bill Clinton elected president... then we found out that Clinton's concept of "rich" was anyone who makes over $30,000 a year. Anyway, she claimed that the "right-wing ideologues" have lost touch with reality, because Republicans want to prevent future Enrons by cutting the capital gains tax. Other moves to lessen the tax burden on stock owners are dismissed by Miz Ivins with sarcasm like, "There's one for the coupon clippers". You see, Molly obviously believes that only the richest 1% of Americans own stock; owning stock is the reason they are rich, and therefore we must tax heavily the earnings of these "rich" stockholders. What she fails to grasp is that more Americans than ever before own stock, more middle and lower class Americans own stock; they will profit just as much as the rich from moves like this. Hell, even I own stock, although like most Americans, my portfolio has seen better days. She lumps in new start-up small businesses with the wealthy corporate owners who store their earnings in tax shelters, saying that letting start-ups go tax free for a couple years is a "great idea", considering "since corporations aren't paying corporate taxes now, why not give them a further break?" And she claims that the average after-tax income of middle-class Americans today is lower than it was 25 years ago, without mentioning what tax rates are today vs. yesterday. 5 will get you 10 that taxes on the middle class are higher today than in 1977; you can thank President Clinton calling you "rich" for that. And finally, she pulled out what continues to be among the dumbest tactic in the liberal playbook, referring to the Bush tax cut as only helping the "richest 1% of Americans", and calling that the real "class warfare". Last I checked, the richest 1% pay the most taxes, 40% of them at last check. And I will once again note that I (whose income was well below the "poverty line" last year) got a refund check from the government last year and that if I ran the math, it would prove that MY taxes were lower last year than in 2000.

No, Molly, it is YOU who has lost touch with reality, you and your entire end of the ideological spectrum. Your party specializes in having all or most of its national figures reading off the same set of talking points, which are mostly based on ideology and not fact. Your party caters to those who are too dumb to do fact-checking on your claims, and you retain members and attract new ones by playing to these dumb people with your visions of government solving everyone's problems and hiding the fact that it will require most of the people's incomes given in taxes to do it. In other words, as far as I can tell, the Democratic Party is the party of the clueless and ignorant, on the national level anyway.

Yup, I will miss reading you, Molly, because you are so out of touch with the rest of the country that it is just too easy to make fun of you. This is only going to make my job harder...