Rating: 
Summary: Intellectual exercises in bigotry
Review: Which is worse - pointing out the alleged prejudices of people or engaging in your own bigotry under the mask of "analysis"? That is the $64,000 question (an expression I am sure the author will find somehow offensive). The few times the book stops its incessant editorialing (reminiscent of NPR and FOX) it makes for interesting reading, particularly for those with no knowledge of the region. And guess what? Texas is not New York; it holds a host of views that appear strange to those of the intellectual, academic persuasion.Lind's writing has all the finesse of a sledge hammer as he blithely dismisses a whole region for its beliefs. The attempt to explain why only Southerners can be elected President falls short of the mark and sounds not only hollow but phony. In the ten elections since JFK, we've elected Southerners six times, Westerners four times - not one person from the Midwest or East. No amount of flim-flam explains this fact away. The inferences are also stretching...one is influenced by the environment but Anne Richards, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore and LBJ hail from the same background as George Bush, Tom Delay and Trent Lott. True, they modify their stands (or as Gore did, reverse themselves entirely) when faced with a national audience but why knock the GOP when Democrats have sought this region for their own candidate? No, what I suspect is the REAL force behind this agitprop is the recognition and reaction of the loss of power from traditional locales - New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan. These areas are depopulating, losing political clout and with that theh ability to set a more liberal ideology. The same trend can be observed in the media with "traditional" outlets on a downhill slide to more conservative upstarts. I would like to perform a vivisection on each "bad" view that the author mentioned, but will suffice to mention that Bush's support for Mideast democracy and backing of the only free state in the region serves as the perfect counterpoint to the author's support for thugery, dictatorship and dismemberment of the Israeli state.
Rating:
Summary: What is a lying propagandist?
Review: Wm. Bennett is the quintessential lying propagandist. Michael Lind demonstrates his partisan Democratic bias, undiminished by morality, with his lies and distortions in nearly every sentence of his two-paragraph characterization of the Waco tragedy. First he lies by claiming the Branch Davidians murdered agents of the ATF. Neither the jury nor the judge found thenm guilty of that! In the same sentence he claims the ATF conducted a raid to confiscate illegal firearms, when in fact the ATF had sought an arrest warrant for Koresh and a search warrant. In his next sentence, Lind claims the fire was either an "accident" or "part of a suicidal plan by Koresh." He intentionally leaves out the possibility that the incendiary-using FBI might have intentionally torched the church/residence. In the next sentence, Lind claims "Koresh's followers had begun the conflict by gunning down law enforcement officers who were serving warrants." Big-time lies here. The militarily equipped and trained ATF, after alerting the media, attacked the Branch-Davidian pet dogs first, then gunfire broke out. The Branch Davidians had the full right to try to defend themselves. Furthermore, the ATF made no effort whatsoever to serve any warrants, almost certainly not even bringing them to the attack site. Lind's next clause labels opponents of the FBI as "conspiracy theorists," demonstrating his propagandistic terminology. Lind is no fool, and the facts about Waco are quite clear and well established. Other Democratic partisans have similarly lied about and diverted attention away from the Waco-tragedy facts, Democrats like Lantos of CA and Schumer of NY. Nothing Lind says can have any credibility for me, with his outrageous lies so easily identified and exposed. The important question seems to me to be, why would magazines with a good reputation like "Harpers" and the "The New Yorker" publish articles written by such a liar?
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