Weekend Wrap-up Sept. 23, 2006

Time for those high school and college reunions
Know what day this is? It's the day to have high school and college reunions. Yep, today is the alumnal equinox, in which the alumni of various schools gather together to share their memories of their old school days. Ah, those old halcyon days. No, I didn't go to Halcyon High, I went to Trimble Tech, which, back in those days, resembled the set of "Welcome Back Kotter". Yep, Tech resembled a real-life Buchanan High. :-) I betcha Tech even inspired the idea for WBK.

And by the way, the 'equinox' part of alumnal equinox means that you get to be equally noxious to your former fellow classmates, especially if they gave you a hard time back in the day - and especially if they were like Carvelli (the bad guy in WBK, in case you didn't know. I mean, look at Carvelli. Doesn't he look like someone who's out to start something?). The last time I went to a high school reunion, I couldn't believe how old the others have gotten. I know I hadn't aged a day, while they - MAN! They looked like their parents! But not me - nope. I still look like I did back then. Yep. That's right. I do. And I'll keep telling myself that.

Happy Alumnal Equinox!

Huge-o Cha-cha-Chavez calls Bush the devil
Here was the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, on the world's stage speaking to the United Nations, and what did he end up doing? Calling President Bush the devil. Which he did 8 times. He even talked of smelling sulfur. Granted, Chavez is free to call Bush what he wants, but his speech did nothing to change anyone's minds who might have been persuaded to see his side of things had he done a better speech. Instead, he resorted to name-calling. What I call that is pathetic. Did he write this on the plane during the flight over here, and not let anyone else look at it to see if it sounded good? Heck, he could have run that by me and I would have told him! Hey, Carvelli - er, I mean - Hey, Chavez: go back to Venezuela and try again, and don't come back until you do it right!

Another indicator that there is no liberal bias in the media
Back in September in Montreal, Kimveer Gill open fired and killed one student and injured 19 more before killing himself. That's what we heard in the news. What you most likely didn't hear is what I didn't hear until a couple of weeks later, and not from a mainstream media outlet, but a website called lifesite.net. Gill had the text below written in his website until it was taken down. It was a list of his dislikes:

Animal Cruelty
American Government
Anyone Who Supports The American Government
Religion
God
Capatalists (sic)
F***ing Religious People Who Think They Know Everything.....And Then They Stick It In Your Face Cuz' They Think They Know Everything (They Don't Understand That They're Just A Bunch Of Little Sheep)
Catholics
Church Going A**holes Bible Thumpping Know-It-Alls
All Priests
Republicans
Homophobes

(source: Lifesite story)

I don't believe that there is some sort of deliberate attempt by the mainstream press to slant the news to a liberal point of view. However, I do believe that they tend to hang around too many people of their profession who think along the same lines as they do - which happens to be of a left-leaning frame of mind. This phenomenon is called "groupthink". That is, they report their news with a left-wing slant without meaning to, and if you try to show the slant to them, they won't see it. However, imagine if Gill had instead said the following in regards to his dislikes:

Atheists
Communists
F**ing Queers
Democrats
Unions
F***ing illegal Mexicans
Bin Laden and Muslims

Do you think that the mainstream media would have failed to mention that in their news stories? I sincerely doubt it. A hate-filled, bloodthirsty conservative is going to be in the news right down to the things he has written. However, a hate-filled bloodthirsty liberal is news only because he killed one person and injured 19 others before killing himself. But have you heard anything about this story since it broke out? Had the killer been a conservative, we STILL would be seeing it on the news as of today, and psychiatrists would be trying to figure out the mind of this young man.

Instead, the hate-filled liberal story is dropped from sight because a hate-filled liberal is inconsistent with the views that most of the members of media have of themselves as liberals, which is to be open-minded and tolerant. But rather than drop this story, they should have examined what drives one of "their kind" to go on a murderous rampage. In other words, is he only the beginning of such murderous rampages of liberals?

"Death of a President"
For example, will the film "Death of a President" inspire some sick liberal into actually trying to carry out an assassination attempt? One reporter thinks that it might be possible. But this is not the only example of liberals imagining violence against the people that possess the opposite political view. Alec Baldwin had said this about Henry Hyde: "If we were living in another country, what we, all of us together, would go down to Washington and stone Henry Hyde to death, stone him to death, stone him to death! Then we would go to their house and we'd kill the family, kill the children." (WorldNetDaily). Does that sound funny, as Baldwin had said that it was meant to be taken, or does it sound disturbingly violent?

I don't like the idea of left-wingers viewing violence against someone else - particularly those of their political opposites - as being funny. If the roles were reversed and Hyde had said that he was going to do those things to Alec Baldwin and his family, I don't think that it would be taken in humor. What particularly disturbs me is making a film about assassinating a sitting president. What an idiotic thing to do. It's no secret that many left wingers not only strongly dislike Bush, they actually hate him. Hate is an ugly, corrosive emotion to be cultivating in your soul, and no one is immune to its damaging effects - and I don't care how intelligent and open-minded that they claim to be.

And to make films about assassinating Bush and to joke about stoning Hyde and his family paints a very disturbing view of liberals and their thinking patterns. Thanks to the Internet, we have a means of exposing such disturbing behavior so that we can recognize it and combat it. So folks, I ask that you always support a free and open Internet, so that anyone of any political stripe will never try to shut it down or control the messages that are put out there. The Internet is often the only means that we hear a lot of the things that we otherwise wouldn't hear. The best way to make the left-wingers see the errors of their groupthinking ways is to constantly shove their views in their face so that they know that we are paying attention to what they say. Let's remind them of their responsibilities as our providers of the news, so that they'll never forget it.

And speaking of Carvelli...
The actor who played Carvelli - Charles Fleischer - later went on to be the voice of (you're not going to believe this) Roger Rabbit. Yep, he went from hood to rabbit.

Have a great week, folks!