Friends of the Media

This is one of those times I don’t really have time to Blog, but doing it anyway. Took another short fishing vacation, and now have to pay for it big time at work this week since the work doesn’t seem to do itself while I fish.

I’ve been forced to mostly just listen to what I could pick up from the mainline media on the failure of France and Netherlands to ratify the new EC “Constitution”. From what I hear, it is more a “list of rules” than a “Constitution”, but no matter. It sounds like the far left and the far right joined together on this one and decided to say “no”. The left seems to take that course because there was too much competitiveness and not enough socialism in the document, and the right because some people still want to have a country rather than “A United States of Europe”.

What is of interest to me is how the anti-American bias of the press has been in such flower on this one. They love Chirac, because he stood against the USA in the UN on Iraq. They ALSO seem to love the idea of a “United Europe”, since they see it as a “balance” to evil USA. I suppose loathing for your own country is fairly normal for a liberal, but it always strikes my funny bone. I’ve stood in conference rooms at IBM and listened to some liberal get positively incensed on how “The Republicans are letting Corporate America run wild”. When I ask the question “But isn’t IBM a corporation, and don’t you work for it”?, they look at me as if I was from another star system.

It took me about 35 years to fully realize the liberal principle of “consistency is not an issue”. As a liberal, you can hate corporations and work for one, and you can hate America and call yourself a Patriot. It is the idea of consistency that a liberal finds to be beyond understanding.

Further evidence of this phenomenon is watching a discussion of say Airbus beating out Boeing for a contract. As long as the company is European, it is actually GOOD to see them beat out a big American Corporation and take away jobs. We don’t mind EUROPE doing that, we only mind China or Mexico doing that.

The same goes for Canada. It turns out that Canada is our #1 trading partner from which we import 255 billion dollars of goods. We import 196 billion from China (2004). This means that CANADA is “taking more jobs” than China, yet it is nearly impossible to get a media story on the “evils” of that. No, they LIKE the idea of Canada taking jobs, because Canada is more socialist than the US, and the idea of US $ supporting a more socialist system (even if it costs US jobs) is just fine with them.

It is true that the balance of trade with Canada is better, only a $65 Billion deficit vs a $162 Billion deficit with China, but the trade deficit is not the same issue as the loss of jobs … lefties LOVE to talk about “all the stuff imported from China”, but their lack of concern about “all the stuff imported from Canada”, our #1 partner, is extremely telling