Tighten those screws, Ostrich!

                          

I was thinking I might head over to Sears to buy one of those 28 piece Craftsman screwdriver sets.  You know, the kind that has a tool to fit just about every kind of screw there is.

My idea was to donate it to the editors of the Brunswick Ostrich, which appears to have screws coming loose in considerable numbers.  Then I realized they probably wouldn’t know which end is which on the average screwdriver, and they’d probably just hurt themselves.  Besides, on reflection, their problem may be loose nuts rather than loose screws.

You may recall me taking the Ostrich to task some weeks ago for their despicable editorial in this item.  I thought at the time that they had elevated their journalistic integrity to a new low.

Fast forward to yesterday’s edition, in which they featured a column by Bob Herbert of the New York Times.  My proclivities are well known; still, even I found this column to be one of the most inflammatory and delusional I’ve read in some time. 

Especially since the editors chose to take perhaps the single most antagonistic passage from the column and highlight it.  It reads:

The toxic clouds that are the inevitable result of the fear and the bitter conflicts so relentlessly stoked by the Republican Party — think blacks against whites, gays versus straights, and a whole range of folks against immigrants — tend to obscure the tremendous damage that the party’s policies have inflicted on the country.

It must be fun each morning to scan the wire services looking for rants by “nationally known columnists” that only cost $5-10 to run, and that perfectly capture the thoroughly unobjective agenda of the Ostrich.  And that allow the local editors to distance themselves from the sentiments there expressed by saying “we didn’t write it; we just picked it up off the wire services.”

I have at least a passing acquaintance with the editors of the Ostrich, and they profess to be open, objective, compassionate students of the public debate.  Running this item by Herbert shows just the opposite: they are bomb throwing, radical partisans who will demonize anyone who doesn’t ‘subscribe’ to their big government utopian vision.  And they are perfectly happy if the author has no foundation, other than personal animus, for his positions, since they ‘are not responsible’ for the author’s views.

It seems prophetic that I discussed sucking down some dumbass at the behest of MPBN earlier this week.  I suggest that regular devotees of the Ostrich are several cases ahead of me in the quaffing derby.

The desire of the Ostrich editors to fuel heated and uncivil discourse seems confirmed by their running of this Herbert diatribe.

I happened to read a column today by Mark Steyn, the witty Canadian.  He asserted that the Obama Health Care program is not about health, it’s about government.  You can find the column here.

Here’s the best line:

Once the state swells to a certain size, the people available to fill the ever expanding number of government jobs will be statists — sometimes hard-core Marxist statists, sometimes social-engineering multiculti statists, sometimes fluffily “compassionate” statists, but always statists.

I agree completely.  We can debate where the Ostrich editors fit in this spectrum; I’ve got my view.

But no matter where they fit, they are incapable of using the basic tools of life, whether they be reason, or screwdrivers.

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