Welcome to the gulag

A voter asks Barack Obama a question on a rope line and tells the candidate he doesn't like the answer he's hearing. John McCain picks up on his answer, and the voter -- now known universally as Joe the Plumber -- gets his 15 minutes of fame.

But wait. Now the vicious left with Obama's allies in the media are in overdrive to destroy the guy. Publishing his home address on the internet, poring over his business records, doing everything in their power to ruin him, his business and his life. Just because he asked a question of a political candidate. The KGB would be proud.

A businessman in a Washington, D.C. suburb dares to display his support for the McCain-Palin ticket and is instantly accused of disrespecting African-Americans because he is opposing Obama. He takes the sign down. Opposition will not be tolerated in the new America.

These are scary times, my friends. As usual, the voices of tolerance are the most intolerant, and they're emboldened because they know they're coming into power. These are the people who have imposed politically correct speech codes on campuses nationwide and periodically make a pass at restricting our constitutionally-guaranteed right of free speech, usually in the guise of hate crime laws. But they don't hesitate to viciously go after anyone they disagree with, posting anything online they can think of (just ask the Palin family) and circulating it as widely as they can. Then their friends in the used-to-be-respectable media pick it up as if it were gospel.

The internet gives distance and anonymity to many of these cowardly character assassins. In South Korea, these kind of postings have become such a problem that a number of recent high-profile suicides are attributed to it. Be prepared. Many of these people will stop at nothing to silence those who disagree with them.

 

Fear works

Here are my current thoughts on the "financial meltdown."

Where's FDR?

Where's Reagan when you need him, talking about that bright shining city on a hill?

Where's FDR, telling the American people they have nothing to fear but fear itself?

Where's JFK, asking us what we can do for our own country?

Where's Teddy Roosevelt, commanding the nation and the world at his bully pulpit?

Instead, as we face what we're being told is perhaps the worst financial crisis in U.S. history, we have a parade of gloomy Gusses, from President Bush through John McCain to the various front men (and women) in the U.S. Congress. Not even Barack Obama has risen to rhetorical heights of any kind.

Come on, people, you are our leaders -- or want to be. So lead. Inspire us, motivate us, make us feel good again about being Americans. Instead of tagging on at the end of your remarks, as Bush did the other night, that we're great, we're Americans, blah, blah, blah, come out swinging. Bush didn't even end his address with "God bless America."

The 24/7 media fans the flames to higher and higher intensity, throwing around words like "crisis" and "Great Depression" like so many leaves in the wind. Just as every whispering breeze is now another Hurricane Katrina, now every bounced check is a "financial meltdown." We are certainly faced with a very serious economic situation right now, but I, for one, would like to see a little more reasoned discussion and a little less rush to daylight.

Where is America's leader at this time of crisis? Stand up, Mr. President (or Mr. Wanna-Be President), and tell it to us straight: "Look, ladies and gentlemen, we're in a helluva financial mess, and now we have to clean it up. There'll be plenty of time later to point the finger, but let's get going. Americans have met plenty of challenges like this head-on, and we've always won. We'll win again. You can count on it -- because we're Americans. That's why people flock to this country from all over the world 'cause in America you're the master of your own fate. So now we need to work out a plan that we can all live with -- not too much government, but more than some of you will like. But a lot less than many of you want, too. Keep your faith in your bank, and pay your bills. We WILL prevail. God bless you and your families, and remain confident that God will continue to bless the United States of America."

I'm not sure if any of our major candidates could deliver that speech with a straight face. Too bad. I wonder what President Palin would say.

So this is what I'm listening to

Lindsey Buckingham's Gift of Screws is a must listen in the days ahead, but I need to wade through some of my new vinyl and CDs first. I just ordered some movie soundtracks including the 3-CD re-recording of Miklos Rozsa's El Cid score.

Saw Paul Weller last Saturday night, Rodney Crowell next month with a small acoustic group, J.D. Souther the day before the election.

Weller was Winwood with guitars up front instead of keyboard. But he played keys, too. Wild. He came back for three encores. The last time to send us home, he sat down with his lead guitarist, they were both on acoustics, and the bass player came out and played cello. And they did was a four-minute acoustic version of All You Need Is Love, which we all sang lustily there -- and out into the night.

New vinyl -- Steve Miller's Journey to Eden, Antonio Carlos Jobim's Stoneflower, first Illinois Speed Press album, The Ship (folk record produced by Gary Usher), Odetta sings Dylan (first album of Dylan covers), Full Circle (the second and final album made by the remaining Doors after Morrison's death), the Alan Bown (1969 - a psychedelic melodic British horn band I like), the usual old stuff.

Best new CD - Sex and Gasoline, by the afore-mentioned Mr. Crowell. Tied for first: Brian Wilson's That Lucky Old Sun (first BW album with consistently adult lyrics since Pet Sounds).

Other new CDs that I am heavily into -- Felix Cavaliere and Steve Cropper (this one is red hot), Elvis' Fun in Acapulco, Dino Valente's solo album, Dick Farney (the Brazilian Sinatra), the usual old stuff.

Pride of Georgia

No, we're not talking Ty Cobb here.

Thanks to longtime Washington writer Cynthia Grenier for pointing out that Gori, Georgia, under bombardment this week by the Russian military, is the birthplace of Joseph Stalin. For those who don't remember Papa Joe, he was the brutal Communist dictator of the Soviet Union from approximately 1924 until his mysterious death in 1953. Sad to say, he was much beloved by many "fellow travelers" in the United States and other Western nations, many of whom were unrepentant in their support of him until their own deaths.

The New York Times even won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for coverage out of Moscow sugarcoating Stalin's excesses, although both the Pulitzer people and the newspaper have finally distanced themselves from that one in the last five years. Never too late, I say.

Stalin was responsible for the deaths of anywhere between 10 million and 30 million of his own people, depending on which historian you choose to believe. I prefer to go with

20 million which is the number Robert Conquest, to my mind the most distinguished Stalin biographer, has arrived at.

It's clear that in the post-Communist Putin era Stalin's illustrious place in history has been forgotten. How quickly they forget.

Good lovin'

Here's one out of the blue: Felix Cavaliere, the voice and genius behind The (Young) Rascals, is back at age 65. He has a new album out with Steve Cropper, the 66-year-old Memphis guitarist who co-wrote "In The Midnight Hour" and other gems -- and, perhaps more importantly, played sweet guitar on all of them, too. "(Sittin' on) the Dock of the Bay" anyone?

The CD is called "Nudge It Up A Notch," and if you're a person who still plays a vinyl record every now and then, the cover alone is worth the price. But this is killer stuff -- and it revives the long-defunct Stax label. Like "Lonely Too Long" and "People Just Got To Be Free"? Cue up "If It Wasn't for Loving You" or "Impossible," and you're time-traveling back to AM radio circa 1966-67.

In honor of the late great Isaac Hayes, grab Felix's and Steve's new CD -- and a copy of "Hot Buttered Soul" if they have one.

 

The Front Page

Whenever I get a little sour on the newspaper industry, I watch one of my favorite films, "His Girl Friday," directed by Howard Hawks and starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. Not only is it the greatest newspaper movie ever made, it is absolutely one of the funniest films period, thanks to the screenplay by Charles Lederer which leans heavily on the original play, "The Front Page" by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. For anyone who has worked in a newsroom, a really competitive newsroom, it's a dream come true.

Which, in fact, is what I have been doing for more than three decades now. Working in a competitive newsroom. Both as a reporter and an editor, I've done my best to feed that competition, too. For many of those years, I've gotten up virtually every morning and looked at "my" front page to compare it with my competitor's. Early in my career the bad guy was the Northern Virginia Daily in Strasburg, Virginia; until a few months ago it was The Washington Post. How did "we" do versus "them"?

Every morning when I was a news editor at The Washington Times I looked at my paper and logged on the Internet to look at the front-page images of The Post and the New York Times just to see what each of us thought the most important stories of the day were and how much weight we gave them. Our best days were the ones when we didn't have any page one stories in common with our competitors.

Primarily the competition was over breaking news stories, but having a news feature or analysis topic first on page one was nearly as satisfying. For the number two paper in town it was also good business strategy.

These days, though, I find myself looking at -- and comparing -- websites. How does any website I'm associated with stack up against its competitors? And the competition isn't just newspapers anymore. How much weight does the Drudge Report give a story versus how The Huffington Post plays it, as opposed to the New York Times and Human Events? Now newspapers, aware they're no longer the only "news" source in town, are scrambling to keep as big a piece of that market as they can.

For me the habit of a lifetime has changed as well. I'm not sure the change has sunk in quite yet, especially since a daily print newspaper is still part of my reading diet. But these days the competitive side of me checks the Internet first.