News Munchies
These Commentators Are Right
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The New York Times nonfiction best sellers list includes The No Spin Zone, popular Fox News host Bill O'Reilly's trademark witty, skeptical social criticism, and Death of the West, Pat Buchanan's dark vision of Evening in America.
Buchanan's far-righteousness contrasts dramatically with Peggy Noonan's When Character Was King, a syrupy biography of "the last great man," President Ronald Reagan, who personified "classic" conservatism.
Noonan's obvious adoration of Reagan isn't remotely as heartfelt as Barbara Olson's hatred of President Bill and Senator Hillary Clinton, aptly demonstrated in The Final Days, which she completed just before being killed in the plane terrorists crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11. Her "book reaming the Clintons is as mellow as Mike Tyson with a toothache," says Phil Kloer in a Cox News Service story.
When the media turn on you, they turn mightily, according to Bernard Goldberg, a Democrat and former correspondent for CBS News, whose Bias tops the Times list. He gave up his job of 28 years because of the backlash from commenting on how the liberal PC worldview promulgated at the networks influences coverage and marginalizes those who voice differing viewpoints.
An afterword by novelist James Ellroy factors in Bill O'Reilly's appeal: "He's running on equal parts patriotism and skepticism," Ellroy says. "The book pinpoints the fatuous nature of liberal-conservative discourse … [It] shows us how much our society is ruled by blindly followed and reflexive political classification."
Buchanan offers this unhopeful conundrum: The only way to save America is by procreation, by women having more children. But it will be an unhappy rescue, he says, for the U.S. is "a cultural wasteland and a moral sewer." The country is "not worth living in."
Pat Buchanan would think Genghis Kahn was a liberal.