The Reticulator

LA Times headline: “Obama’s strong-willed national security team”

If Barak Obama will include people of differing viewpoints in his administration, that could be a refreshing change from the type of personal loyalty demanded by George W. Bush. Good for him if he is more like a Ronald Reagan than a GWB in that respect.

But why that term “strong-willed” to describe people of conflicting views? Isn’t that just a little Leni Riefenstahlish?

Page One headlines from Wednesday’s WSJ:

• “Fear Recedes in the Debt Markets”
• “The Numbers Only Feed Fear of Deflation”
• “Dollar Appears Safe for Now As Fears of Inflation Recede”

So much fear. One wonders how our intrepid WSJ reporters can come up with so much objective information about the states of mind of the millions of people involved in the markets. Polling? Intensive surveys? Do they get psychologists and psychologists to analyze people?

But here’s one where they slipped up:

• “Dow’s 3-day Gain is First Since August.”

I predict the writer who came up with that is not going to be in Murdoch’s organization for long. There is not a word in it about fear or any other inner emotional state.

It’s 1:33 a.m. and I now have the results for the presidential election. I credit Ezra Levant with supplying me not only with the news, but some commentary on what happens next:

But enough about the past: what now?

I saw an unintentionally hilarious pundit on CNN who said that, in foreign affairs, the rest of the world will now lose a key criticism of America — that it’s racist — and thus will deal with America more favourably. I think this is what psychologists call projection.

Liberal political pundits regard America as racist, but the rest of the world obviously does not, for every shade of race streams towards America as fast as they can, trying to immigrate both legally and illegally. America is one of the most tolerant countries in the world. Foreign dictators may hate America, but grassroots foreigners want to move to America.

But that’s not the hilarious part. The hilarious part was that the pundit thinks that those who challenge America — and the rest of the West — today will substitute “good feelings” for their national interest, when it comes to foreign relations.

Perhaps Vladimir Putin, the ex-KGB boss, will find that, like the Grinch, his heart grew two sizes when Obama was elected. He’ll no longer have ambitions for Georgia and the rest of the former Soviet Union.

Perhaps Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will discover that he’s actually part Jewish, on his mother’s side, and abandon his nuclear-fueled hatred for Israel.

Maybe Hugo Chavez will recognize President Obama as a sort of fellow aboriginal, and turn from a strategic enemy to ally.

This is how the world works according to the MSM — the same folks who tutted at Sarah Palin’s naivete.

So even though Ezra Levant helped me prove that the MSM are not necessary when it comes to disseminating news, we’d be hard pressed to find a replacement for such an easy source of laughs if they were gone.

We all knew that the Wall Street Journal was not going to be improved by the Rupert Murdoch takeover, but did anyone foresee that it would come to this? Yesterday’s lead headline: “Fed Steps Up Assault on Slump.”

What kind of headline is that? It uses emotionally loaded terms, but imparts no information. You have to read further to learn that what happened is that the Fed cut interest rates. Whether that rate cut constitutes an “assault” on anything might be for poets and rhetoriticians to decide. But I’ll bet the Federal Reserve Board didn’t get together in a board room and do like this:

“We have a motion and a second to assault the slump. All in favor? All opposed? OK, motion carried. Let the minutes show that we voted 5-2 to assault the slump.”

Maybe somewhere, someday, a news editor will tell reporters and writers that there is no law requiring them to fill up space in a news article with non-sequiturish quotes that do nothing to explain or illustrate. At best, they are just a way for the writer to slime the article with his/her editorial biases. At worst, they just waste the reader’s time.

The AP article linked here is an example of what I’m talking about. It’s actually an informative article. But why the man-on-the-street quotes? They’re inserted almost randomly. The article could be improved by just omitting them.

Here’s the crap that could just as well be removed, or could be randommized and inserted anywhere else and make just as much (or as little) sense.

“I trust McCain more, and I do feel that he has more experience in government than Obama. I don’t think Obama has been around long enough,” said Angela Decker, 44, of La Porte, Ind.

But Karen Judd, 58, of Middleton, Wis., said, “Obama certainly has sufficient qualifications.” She said any positive feelings about McCain evaporated with “the outright lying” in TV ads and his choice of running mate Sarah Palin, who “doesn’t have the correct skills.”

Said John Ormesher, 67, of Dandridge, Tenn.: “I’ve got respect for them but that’s the extent of it. I don’t have a whole lot of affinity toward either one of them. They’re both part of the same political mess.”