'The Liberal Media Have Met The Enemy and He Is Us'

At Big Journalism, Kurt Schlichter spots yet another MSM journalist trashing her customers:

Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution knows the score too.  Are the American people upset because of massive deficit spending that bankrupts our children to pay off government bureaucrats and Democratic constituencies?  Of course not.  In her column “Discontent is Backlash to the Browning of America,” she puts her finger on the real concern motivating voters this fall:

This is a tempestuous and irrational time, an era of economic gloom, eroding living standards and deep fears about the future. But economic uncertainty alone cannot account for this summer’s strange currents. The runaway inflation and  deep recession of the late ‘70s/early ‘80s didn’t produce a similar season of civic craziness.

Our long, hot summer needed another ingredient to induce a fever-like madness in the national psyche: demographic change. Over the last year and a half, many Americans have begun to see a deeper message in President Obama’s inauguration — the end of the white majority. For some,  especially those who are middle-aged and older, it’s a jarring and unwelcome message.

Yeah, I was just saying the same thing to my hot American-Cuban wife – thinking about how them for’ners has got me all riled up, by cracky.  Yeah, Cynthia, focusing my rage on long-term demographic trends sure takes my mind off the prison-shower treatment liberal policies have given my retirement accounts.

But Cynthia wants to make sure that you know that just because she is calling you a racist doesn’t mean that she thinks you’re a racist, though you most certainly are a racist:

Before you assume that I’m stereotyping all of the president’s critics as racists, let me be clear: I’m not.  Many voters have legitimate criticisms of the Obama’s policies. I’ m talking about something more subtle and yet more profound: a fear of minority status. (Actually, by the year 2050, demographers expect that whites will be a “plurality,” the largest easily- identified ethnic group.)

Most human beings are more comfortable surrounded by others who look and sound as they do. It’s innate. That’s why most of us attend churches, join clubs and look for friends who reinforce our sense of identity, usually along lines of color and class. Successful black and brown professionals have had to learn to be comfortable in a sea of white faces, but most white Americans have not experienced the reverse. And many are not eager to have that experience.

To sum up the new liberal response, my big issue this summer is whether in 2050, at age 86, I’ll be able “to learn to be comfortable in a sea of [non]-white faces.”  Huge tax increase coming in four months? Not important.  Health care reform that forces me to subsidize people who refuse to pay for their own? Not on my radar.  Alienation of our allies around the world and waffling about the threat of Iranian nukes?  Not an issue.

No, in the liberal fantasy world, the big concern of the majority of Americans is supposed to be that minorities might get “uppity” – never mind that a good portion of that majority is minorities.  So, as usual, the bad news is that most Americans are awful, awful people unworthy of the liberal media mavens who seek only to save our misguided souls.  But the good news is that our liberal betters understand that we just can’t help ourselves.

Believe it or not, it could actually be worse. Victor Davis Hanson catches “probably the most anti-Semitic essay I have ever read in a mainstream publication” — perhaps surprisingly, given the now recurring theme of the MSM attacking their readers, it’s an article in an American newsweekly aimed not at its domestic audience, but at Israel:

I know it’s commonplace to read in the latest issue of Time or Newsweek that Obama is a god, that Islamophobic Americans are collectively prejudiced against Muslims, that the response after 9/11 was overblown and unnecessary (over 30 subsequent terrorist plots have been foiled, and, for some reason, renditions, tribunals, Guantanamo, Predators, intercepts, etc., have all been embraced by the Obama administration), but the recent Time piece on Israel by a Karl Vick is probably the most anti-Semitic essay I have ever read in a mainstream publication.

Among Vick’s interviewees is Heli Itach, a modern-day Shylock who brags about the money to be made selling condos in Jerusalem (“‘Even when the Qassams fell, we continued to sell!’ says Heli Itach, slapping a palm on the office desk”). The accompanying photo shows carefree Israelis on the beach.

In fact, Vick argues, the Jews are so obsessed with making money that they don’t much care what happens in the future: “The truth is, Israelis are no longer preoccupied with the matter. They’re otherwise engaged; they’re making money; they’re enjoying the rays of late summer. A watching world may still define their country by the blood feud with the Arabs whose families used to live on this land and whether that conflict can be negotiated away, but Israelis say they have moved on.”

Read the whole thing.

Incidentally, according to Wikipedia, the phrase paraphrased in Schlichter’s headline and quoted above comes from Walt Kelly, the liberal creator of the “Pogo” cartoon, which ran from 1948 until shortly before Kelly’s death in 1973. It was not originally a military phrase, but it does have that ring to it, which isn’t a coincidence:

Probably the most famous Pogo quotation is “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Perhaps more than any other words written by Kelly, it perfectly sums up his attitude towards the foibles of mankind and the nature of the human condition.

The quote was a parody of a message sent in 1813 from U.S. Navy Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry to Army General William Henry Harrison after the Battle of Lake Erie, stating “We have met the enemy, and they are ours.” It first appeared in a lengthier form in A Word to the Fore, the foreword of the book The Pogo Papers, first published in 1953. Since the strips reprinted in Papers included the first appearances of Mole and Simple J. Malarkey, beginning Kelly’s attacks on McCarthyism, Kelly used the foreword to defend his actions:

“Traces of nobility, gentleness and courage persist in all people, do what we will to stamp out the trend. So, too, do those characteristics which are ugly. It is just unfortunate that in the clumsy hands of a cartoonist all traits become ridiculous, leading to a certain amount of self-conscious expostulation and the desire to join battle.There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tinny blast on tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us.

Forward!”

—Walt Kelly, June 1953

The finalized version of the quotation appeared in a 1970 anti-pollution poster for Earth Day, and was repeated a year later in the strip reprinted here. The slogan also served as the title for the last Pogo collection released before Kelly’s death in 1973, and of an environmentally-themed animated short on which Kelly had started work, but which ill health prevented him from finishing.

In other words, Kelly was attempting to make environmentalism yet another example of  “the moral equivalent of war,” a now century-old mindset on the left that shows no sign of abating.

Just ask modern-day Time magazine.

Related: Here’s a quote that squares the circle:

“The American public…just like your teenage kids, aren’t acting in a way that they should act. The American public has to really understand in their core how important this issue is.” — Energy Secretary Steven Chu on the public’s lack of concern over greenhouse gasses.

Because there’s nothing voters love more than being called children by the representatives of people they choose to send to political office.