Whole Foods Joins the Dark Side

Say it ain’t so, ABC! Could a chain as impeccably politically correct as Whole Foods really have succumbed to the blandishments of the forces of evil? My impressions of the clientele, not to mention the cars in the parking lot, are in substantial agreement with those of Babalu. Will they now be replaced by the likes of Oliver North and G. Gordon Liddy in their Hummers?

Well, if the “progressive” left wants to once again wear its allergy to any opinions not in accord with its ideological dogmas on its sleeve, that is certainly its perfect right. However, they might discover a denizen of the blogosphere here and there who finds their persistent attempts to bully anyone who disagrees with them tiresome. After all, it’s in poor form for the pot to call the kettle black.

As for the boycott, I can assure you I will be spending many more of my grocery dollars at Whole Foods from now on.

Hard Times in Russia

In her nightmarish account of life in Stalin’s Gulag, Eugenia Ginzburg, in a dark cell in solitary confinement herself at the time, describes a young prison warden’s reaction to the screams of a tortured Italian prisoner:

But it continued – a penetrating, scarcely human cry which seemed to come from the victim’s very entrails, to be viscous and tangible as it reverbedrated in the narrow space. Compared with it, the cries of a woman in labor were sweet music… So I only whispered: “What’s the matter with her? It’s terrible to hear.” He shrugged and said: “They haven’t got the guts, these foreigners, they just can’t take it. She’s only just come in, and yet she makes all that fuss. The Russians are different, they don’t kick up a row. Look at you for instance, you’ve got five days (in solitary) and you’re still not crying…”

It’s a good thing Russians can take it. Whether in politics, economics, or war, history has not been kind to them, unless, perhaps, one can construe the sacrifice of 25 million lives to, as Churchill put it, “tear the guts” out of Hitler’s armies and achieve victory in World War II “fortunate.” Now, as France, Germany, and Japan seem to be seeing light at the end of the tunnel, Russia appears to be mired in the recession as deeply as ever. However, one of her citizens has come up with a new twist on an old way of doing business that the rest of the world might do well to take notice of.

The Media Assassination of Richard Nixon: 35 Years Later

It has now been more than a week since the 35th anniversary of the resignation of Richard Nixon on August 9, 1974. Other than comments by an occasional blogger (for example, here, here and here) one finds little to commemorate the event on the Internet. The media silence over their “heroic” role in Watergate is particularly surprising. It’s as if they were afraid public opinion might finally catch up with them.

In fact, there was nothing heroic about the Watergate Affair. Its real significance shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s noticed the incredible venom and obsessive persistence of the legacy media’s attacks on Sarah Palin since the day she became McCain’s running mate. Imagine the attacks on Palin ratcheted up about an order of magnitude, continuing for a year and a half, with no blogosphere or talk radio to push back. That was Watergate. It amounted to the media assassination of a freely elected and effective President.

Oh, I know all about all of Nixon’s crimes and misdemeanors in excruciating detail. You had to know about them if you were alive during the affair, because the media hammered Nixon day after day. So obsessed were they that they hardly bothered to inform the American people about anything else. Their vendetta against Nixon was the be all and end all for them. He had dared to challenge them, and they were bitterly determined to get him. They kept up their attacks day after day, month after month, to the bemusement and consternation of foreign leaders, who couldn’t imagine what all the fuss was about. They weren’t stupid. They knew what Nixon had done. They also knew that any number American Presidents had done as much and worse with impunity. The idea that the media took Nixon down out of a noble sense of responsibility to the American people is one of the more absurd myths of the 20th century. They assassinated Nixon because they hated him.

It wouldn’t be easy for anyone living today to get a true sense of the reality of the Watergate Affair. Most of the book length accounts have been written by journalists, whose attempts to write history are almost uniformly useless, except, perhaps, to psychologists, because of their persistent tendency to interpret the world in terms of noble good guys and evil bad guys. One would have to go back to the source material. Archives of the Washington Post or the New York Times for the six months leading up the resignation would be a good place to start.

In the end, Nixon was forced to resign because his own party deserted him. They had tired of the struggle, and were even beginning to swallow the media propaganda themselves. Remember, there were no significant public voices to counter the media slant. If Watergate had happened today, I suspect they would never have dared to abandon their chief. Such an act would likely have been rightly condemned as a craven act of betrayal and treachery by the powerful voices that have risen to challenge the legacy media in the decades since Watergate. The changed nature of the media landscape is a development we should all be truly thankful for, and fight to protect.

It is a good thing that the aftereffects of Watergate were relatively benign. The outcome of the media’s blind rage and fury, culminating in the deposing of a democratically elected leader, could have been much worse. The destabilizing effects of their irresponsible abuse of the great power they controlled might have torn apart a country with a weaker tradition of responsible government and the rule of law. It is unlikely that the similarly irresponsible attempts to impeach Clinton would ever have happened without the precedent of Watergate. We must hope that the affair’s baneful effects won’t come back to haunt us at some future date.