Voices from Fantasyland

As I do every week, I picked up a copy of the Austin Chronicle yesterday and sat down for a scary journey through the paranoid fantasies and hate-filled ravings of the ultra left. For those of you not from Austin and not familiar with the Chronicle, it's a very popular holdover from the 60s, an underground newspaper gone legit and become one of the cornerstones of the liberal mainstream in a city dominated by 60s relics and neoliberal cause monkeys. It has a huge circulation and probably does as much to legitimize leftwing lunacy as any publication in the US.

Anyone who cares about this country ought to read the Chronicle or a publication like it to get a handle on just how crazy and mired in utter fantasy the far left really is. Every week the Chronicle offers up at least a couple of articles that contain opinions which you wouldn't believe that an educated person could become deluded enough hold much less trumpet proudly in print.

In the past I've had some fun pointing out specific glaring untruths and delusional rants in the Chronicle, but while there were some real howlers in this issue the thing which struck me was one point which I encountered in two articles and in a cartoon of all places. The theme echoing through those grimy pages was astonishment and joy at the fact that some parts of the anti-Bush message were getting out despite the clear right-wing bias of the mainstream media. When I first saw this opinion in a cartoon I thought it might be some sort of clever irony. When I saw it expressed in two articles as well, I knew that the chronicle staff had taken a light-rail trainride through loony land.

Apparently this opinion is held by a lot of people on the far, far left. They seem to believe that the newspapers and television networks are dominated by conservatives who want to keep the "truth" away from the people and are part of some giant conspiratorial coverup and in league with the Bush administration to stop John Kerry from becoming president. The only way you could hold this opinion would be either by never reading a newspaper or watching television news, or by having your own belief set so far to the left that traditional democrats and moderate left wingers are almost indistinguishable from neocons in your eyes. In recent weeks the major news networks have become so outspokenly hostile to Bush and so openly left wing that anyone who could watch them and think they had a right wing bias could only be clinically insane.

That this attitude - really this insanity - exists in the far left is very significant, because these are people who support John Kerry because of who John Kerry is, not just mainstream liberals who have an unreasoning hatred of Bush and support Kerry because he's running against Bush. These people are the engine driving the most aggressive activism on the left, and they drag the unsuspecting moderate liberals along with them for the ride. These are the sowers of madness, the folks who think Michael Moore sold out to Hollywood and that people are crossing the border into Canada to take advantage of their socialized health care, not just their articicially low drug prices.

So, these are the people to fear, and they have a voice and that voice has an outlet in print. Everyone should read the Austin Chronicle, because it's an education in just how far wrong liberalism can go. If people this crazy and out of touch with reality honestly think of John Kerry as one of them, then anyone who retains a touch of sanity should think very hard about picking Kerry as their representative in the White House.

Dave