Is That a Bomb In Your Pants, Joe Klein, Or Are You
Just Happy to See Barack Obama?

It's been suggested the real reason leftists oppose waterboarding is that their intellectual corruption borders so closely on terrorist activity they fear that once their motives and tactics have been exposed, they themselves will be subjected to this very effective tactic for prying information out of our enemies. The recently released Journolist e-mails - capped off by member Joe Klein's embarrassing defense of the group's activity - helps us understand why so many liberal journalists share this fear.

And lest you recoil at the use of the word "terrorist" in association with the Journolist group's activity, consider this suggestion, from member Spencer Ackerman, to "take a rightwinger's [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a constant state of fear." Keeping its enemies in precisely that "constant state of fear," worried about when and where the next bloody attack is going to happen, is precisely what terrorists aim to achieve. Add to this the strong sense that those on the left seem to be, like their openly terrorist counterparts, conspiring to dramatically weaken, if not overthrow, our country, and you begin to understand the concern of many about Journolist.

To get back to Joe Klein's defense of JournoList: First, Joe, let me recommend that you listen to The Jim Rome Show now and then. As the sports talk show host says, "You can't gloss yourself." Translation: It's not legitimate to give yourself a self-aggrandizing nickname; nicknames have to be given to you by others. In other words, you can't describe your journalistic confederates as "an oxymoronic tribe of fierce individualists," especially when one of the words you're looking for is "moronic" and the other is "lemmings." The reason your liberal journalist associates are such a bunch of moronic lemmings is not that you're "thrown into each other's company" on press planes and buses; it's because none of you has ever had an original idea in your life and you seek in the company of others reassurance that the leftist claptrap you've been indoctrinated with is a valid political philosophy when historically it's never been anything but an excuse for genocide and incompetence.

To understand that, you have only to take a cursory look at the damage the current economically illiterate administration, with the help of equally clueless cheerleaders like many of your fellow Journolist members, is in the process of doing. It's not about providing health care for the masses, it's not about saving General Motors or too-big-to-fail banks, and it's not about rescuing the planet from climatological catastrophe.

It's about amassing power and exerting dictatorial control by a supposedly elite group (of which I sense you see yourself as a member) over the very American people who have built the greatest nation in history, and it's based on the notion that even after you dismantle our economic engine by replacing free-market capitalism with an economy based on a loose set of socialist principles and putting people with no real-world experience in charge of it, somehow tens of trillions of dollars worth of GDP will still miraculously be churned out annually and delivered to you for distribution to the masses.

It's not likely to work that way. Already the first signs are appearing that the hundreds of new bureaucratic components necessary to implement, for instance, the healthcare bill are not simply going to be unwieldy to administer, they're going to be impossible even to create. The bill, written and passed with politburo-worthy single-party collusion and secrecy, promises to add layers of compliance to administering a company that promises to drive all but larger corporations out of business. The true engines of economic growth, small businesses, are likely to go under because of the costs of complying with new governmental mandates.

I know, you guys with a leftward list don't subscribe to the notion of guilt by association, certainly not when you're defending your presidential candidate against being attacked for having sat in church with his family and absorbed the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's un-American black liberation theology diatribes for upwards of 20 years. But your insistence that there's nothing conspiratorial about getting together and sharing your ideas about how to suppress that genuinely important news and then successfully carrying out your strategy in order to help salvage Obama's candidacy rings hollow. Denial is not defense, although it may, as Elisabeth Kubler-Ross explained in On Death and Dying, be the first stage in the process of coming to terms with your and your journalistic confederates' imminent intellectual demise.

The Climategate conspirators used much the same approach - the suppression and falsification of evidence - and much the same response when discovered - downplay the importance of their collusion - when they were caught stacking the deck in order to effect a massive transfer of wealth from western democracies to Third World autocracies in the name of saving the planet from a non-existent threat. There is, in the final analysis, no defense for your tactics, which never seem to focus on truth but always on outcomes.

Until we're able to once again achieve something resembling the separation of press and state, until a semblance of journalistic integrity is returned to your calling, the outing of Journolist members only serves to heighten our mistrust of your profession. Your self-described incorporation of "the accumulated wisdom of this list-serve community" into your own work is, to my mind, an admission of guilt, welcome, of course, but damning without an accompanying statement of repentance and a promise to do better in the future. I don't care that you represent a political point of view; I do care that you don't understand that your collusion amounts to journalistic sabotage of the democratic process itself.