"Conservatives don't get honorary degrees"

Tony Kushner got one.

He wrote about ethnic cleansing and tried to lie his way into the position that Israel should never have been created.

Someone on the board at CUNY disagreed with giving him an honorary degree. Gosh, Brandeis gave him one in 2006, they're that intelligent, how come CUNY isn't intelligent enough to give him one?

As Prager says, "You can't be too far left."

I was a student at UCLA in the second half of the Seventies. That being the decade after the Sixties, one would think that the acceptability of leftwing thought would have been at its zenith, but no, students incapable of analyzing the intellectual iconoclasm of "question authority" graduated, finished growing up, and became college professors. They settled in nicely to reform the world by passing on their extreme leftism. Their students, the next generation of Americans, graduated around the turn of the century.

I knew this bunch, I was one of them, I lived among them, and despite the desperate measures UCLA took to keep students from meeting, discussing, hashing out, learning from one another, or making friends, I had many many political discussions with many of the roughly forty people who hung around the computer club in the Seventies. Most of them were liberal. I was liberal. We agreed that liberalism was good. We agreed that we were better people because we were liberals. We knew that our opinions were higher and more noble than any other opinions, because they came from around the world as well as from our own liberal roots that we had acquired in high school and even in junior high, though this varied from student to student.

We knew that "share the wealth" was good. We knew that capitalists were greedy bastards who kept other people from sharing in the immense bounties of this country. We knew, too, that this country had within it the resources to make everyone rich if they didn't fight the opportunity. Sure, there were lazy bastards who were just fine with being poor. But these lazy bastards tended to have children, and their children would grow up poor, deprived, malnourished, lacking opportunities, and educated to be like the rest of the Great Unwashed America.

That's right. Everyone else was a great unwashed one. We were the privileged knowledgeable few. That's because we were leftists and leftists always knew better.

This is liberalism. This is the self-aggrandising of all liberal and leftwing opinion. Left is good, conservative is evil. Nazis were right wingers, therefore right wingers are Nazis. Communism was good. Equality of all is what this country was founded on and this is a value we need to enforce today, even if it means legal strictures and the force of law. Inequality means persecution, oppression, and exploitation, all of which are straight from the devil. Therefore conservatives are demons and their ideas are demonic. Repress and suppress them, throw rocks at them, kill them.

My point is, or would have been if I had the energy to finish what I was driving at, that my university was so damned leftist there was no room for dissent or disagreement, and no need for discussion. And that's why today no conservative gets those honorary degrees or speaking engagements on anything like par with the leftist professors, guest authors, opinion wonks, and journalists from any college or university in this country.

"Noam Chomsky thinks Bush is much worse than Bin Laden."

What else do you need?

Chomsky, as a representative of the far left, and unfortunately one whom the press listen to as if he were authoritative on the subject of politics rather than on his field of expertise--linguistics!--is a nut. And he says stupid things like this, and has done all his life. How can you listen to someone from the far left any more than you listen to someone from the far right? It's because you've kidded yourself for years into believing that Leftist thought is normative and right wing thought is just evil. Nothing but evil, and needs to be attacked and degraded whenever possible, such that all right wingers become monsters, demons whom listening to is an act of evil.

This keeps the leftwing mind solidly closed. It's exactly like greeting a Jehovah's Witness at your door.

Idiot talker on Matt Lauer show.

On pathetic guest wants to whine over whether it's okay to cheer when the good guys kill the bad guys. "Is this justice or is it vengeance?" she howls, obviously unable to make any moral discernment. Apparently this product of the public schools, or perhaps of Crossroads School in western Los Angeles, is completely unacquainted with the concept of "justice". For decades (at least since the Sixties), her mentors have supplied her with the notion that all justice is just vengeance, apparently because no justice is allowed ever to be something that is dispensed in order to bring an element of "just (i.e. fair, righteous) consequences" to any action.

"Your children have already seen images of people celebrating the death of someone," says Lauer, to which I add: "Yup, and probably been spared a lifetime of nightmares because of it." When Prager said it was good for children to see good triumph over evil and it was good to see that "good men kill bad men" I remembered my childhood and how those ideas were reinforced by every good-guy/bad-guy show we ever watched. You'll note that even though MacGyver never once used a gun, he still managed to kill bad guys pretty often, almost every episode in fact.

Remember, it's the Left who gave us children who cry at the thought of Global Warming, and before them these children cried at the thought of A-bombs blowing them up in their sleep.

"Republicans praise Obama; do you think it would have been the other way around?"

We already have an example, wherein many democrats had already offered some praise for George Bush's actions, but then were apparently instructed in how they ought to hhave twisted the event to the negative and criticized Bush for doing what he did.

I refer specifically to what Bush was doing on the morning of 9-11, reading a book to a kindergarten class. His aide leaned down and whispered the news of the destruction of the twin towers in New York City. Bush only paused for a moment, nodeed to the aide, and went calmly forward and finished the book.

At first the democrats having anything to do with the situation actually commended him for his calmness, praising him for not leaping to a panic, jumping out of his chair, frightening the kids, causing terror all around, and so forth. But within a few days, the song they were singing had acquired quite a few sour notes. Bush SHOULD have stopped reading and rushed off to Air Force One to hurry back to the White House.

This is a plainly idiotic approach to take. What was Bush supposed to do from the White House? He had everything he always takes with him, right there with him. So does Obama. I would be appalled if Obama were stupid enough to jump out of his chair and knock children flying as he rushed off to do NOTHING USEFUL.

But that's always the way with the Left. Ignore the issues, ignore the debate, just attack the person. Shame on you people. Well, at least you're consistently shameful.

Guest David Aaronovitch, author of "Voodoo Histories"

I had to look this up first because I wanted to know who the author was, since I missed his name in the intro.

He's rather interesting, and it would be very nice to silence all the people shrieking "conspiracy! conspiracy!" Yes, Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Yes, he sure was a big fat nothing, and for this one big nothing to change history by killing John Kennedy is a bit appalling a thought, but it was the case. This half-wit, failure of a man wanted to impress the KGB so he could get a job with them and become important. That's all there was to it, period.

I do believe in a couple of conspiracies. I don't know whether Vince Foster committed suicide or not, but I do believe the evidence was tampered with and that that his office had evidence removed from it and probably destroyed. His briefcase was on tape being emptied, searched, and even turned upside down on two? occasions before the thirty-two separate pieces of the putative "suicide note" (with one piece missing, very conveniently the one containing his signature) fluttered out of it, which I believe is utterly impossible. The handwriting experts declared that note to be a rather sad forgery. What do I think really happened? I have no idea, but wherever he died, he left no blood or brain spatter in Ft. Marcy Park, and his hand had no powder residue on it.

A fuller version from the documents.

The other conspiracy theory is much more significant. It involves the nuclear accident at Chernobyl. The Soviet government and Armand Hammer and Hammer's little puppetboi doctor, Robert Gale, all conspired to vastly diminish the body count to one or two percent of the actual number. I have it on good authority from the real head of the oncology team, that the dead must have numbered in the four digits as was originally reported by ham radio operators on the scene the first night after the release happened. "Considering that I was doing transplants on truck drivers who had spent just an hour in the area and then driven straight back out again," he said, "the ham reports had to have been much closer to the actual number of dead than the offical number" which claims only 32 dead.

Our press has never questioned the official Soviet statemtent, never delved into the mystery, but our press was then (and still is) full of overgrown hippies who honestly LIKED the Soviet Union and never once suspected its officials of wishing to hide something like a huge body count.

My disclaimer: I am not generally a conspiracy adherent. Rather, I believe in little conspiracies, a couple of people destroying evidence shouldn't stretch your imagination too far. The Foster conspiracy wouldn't have involved more than three or four people, all of them political buddies with much to lose. Apparently someone wanted to protect the Clintons from too careful a scrutiny, of the few people involved, most of the involvement would have been over politics. The left wingers would have been highly motivated to keep silence.

As for the Chernobyl incident, I will say first that I am not a nuclear power opponent; far from it. In fact I pretty much agree with Prager when he says "I would volunteer to store nuclear waste in my back yard." I do believe the Soviet government was unbelievably shoddy in their health and safety practices (we have seen how they will dump toxic waste into rivers, for example) because they didn't care a bit about the safety of their citizens, nor or their workers, any more than they cared about the deaths of six to twelve million Ukrainians during the thirties. The safety measures on that power plant were inadequate and the plant was not kept in good repair. When people died, who cared? Certainly not America. Not enough to expose their shoddiness, anyway, but just enough to halt the construction of more nuclear plants in our own country and across the Third World as well. Very smart.

I'm hearing Aaronovitch list a couple of real conspiracies. Michael Medved believes there are NO conspiracies. Maybe he defines "conspiracy" differently than I do.

Prager: "You don't get lied to by the media, you get filtered news."

Well, yes, that's probably their favorite way to lie to you, by not telling you a big chunk of the news. Want an example? The Clinton Administration decided they could juggle the numbers of unemployed. They quit counting anyone who was still looking for a job after 18 months, later 2 years. The administration shifted its unemployment count from the inner cities, where unemployment was very high, to the suburbs, where it was relatively quite low. They phased in the new numbers over several months so that the unemployment rate would appear to decline. And lazy newspeople just went along with it. So sure, it's the media going along with democrats and presenting only the favorable side of most issues.

But Prager then added, "When the media quote a statistic like 'four million Americans are out of work,' I believe that statistic."

Well, maybe you should reconsider that, then, Prager. They told us, as you mentioned, that thirty thousand women a year DIE of anorexia, when the true number is "perhaps as many as five" given by the Department of Health. Not five thousand, just ... five. Or the other statistic they love to quote, that "women are still earning only seventy cents for every dollar that men earn." Which is only true when read with very narrow definitions. In all other senses, women are doing better than men. Deliberate misconception.

Further, the Old Stream Media will tell you all sorts of b.s., from "Bill Clinton has created 12 million jobs" (one of his campaign themes for 1996) to "Over a hundred murders in the football stadium in the aftermath of Katrina." Sometimes it's just neglect and laziness, but those are still false numbers and if you trust them, you're being fooled.

I'm sure any sentient American who has been reading the papers for more than six months can come up with dozens more examples.

Why wasn't the war against Ho Chi Minh noble?

Because North Vietnam was communist. Anything anti-communist was bad here in Sixties America.

I haven't heard Prager use the term "anti anti-communist" in a couple of years. It's a very useful term, he should start using it again.

But as I started to say, anything anti-communist was bad here in Sixties America; the hippies redefined our language and took over the goods and bads and evils in our culture, so that eventually even a simple phrase was sufficient to eviscerate the argument, the position, the arguer, all in one two-word phrase. "You're so middle class" would shoot down everything the person had said, was then saying, and ever would say in the entire remainder of his existence. "Don't be so judgemental" would shut them up forever, at least in the presence of the judging anti-judger, who forever owned all arguments and all righteousness.

The judges of righteousness also dismissed capitalism forever as "evil" and "selfish". Discrimination, including discriminating against evil, was bad, though it was certainly okay to discriminate against conservatives and Republicans and against white men (and soon after, against white boys).

They used the same rhetoric to eliminate majority positions all across Western civilization. It became embarrassing to believe in God (Flying Spaghetti Monster or sky fairies) though it was okay to believe in Buddha, Vishnu, Khali, engrams, Allah, chakras, your horoscope, and all sorts of other stupidities. Patriotism was mocked, making money became filthy, opposing high taxes was "racism" (if you don't remember that, you shouldn't vote)--because they assumed in a most racist manner that the beneficiaries of the redistribution of wealth were all black.