Jonah, isn’t it fascinating how liberals always equate “a diminishing free press” with the silencing of an ultraliberal? Robert Scheer’s crude hackery is perhaps best remembered by his book “With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush, and Nuclear War,” complete with a cartoon cover showing missiles where the schlongs belong. (No sitting down with that kind of weapon.) For a while, we used to amuse ourselves by clipping out the dumbest sections of Scheer columns, but it grew tedious. “Dukakis is a centrist” perhaps wasn’t so much a dumb sentence as much as a good indicator of where Scheer placed himself on the ideological spectrum. So try this oldie out for size:
“Newtie has gone too far. When you take food out of the mouths of babes and claim it is in their best interests, as Gingrich did in defending his Draconian budget cuts, you cross the line from mere heartlessness to dangerous demagoguery. It is one thing to play the mean-spirited reactionary, gutting one social program after another while pandering to the greed of the more affluent voter. That is a morally wrong but logically consistent position. Taking $500 from a child on welfare and giving it to one whose parents earn more than $200,000 a year is a loathsome but defensible position to advocates of a social Darwinism that holds that only the strong deserve to live.” – Scheer’s Times column, May 16, 1995.
You can see why Barbra Streisand would want to read this and feel good about herself on a weekly basis. This is probably the beaut of the bunch, though, won our Quote of the Year a few years back: “The mood of the Republican congressional leadership is so ideologically obtuse as to doom even this modest first step down the path of responsibility. They would rather kill people than raise taxes.” – Scheer’s Times column, April 22, 1997.