"Why is America so scared? We're like a frightened teenager with a gun, closing our eyes and shooting blindly in every direction."

Teenager? You give the multitudes too much credit. I habitually describe the phenomenon using three year-olds as my descriptor.

I really don't understand any of it. How can we actually be in existential fear of a few government-connoted 'terrorists'?

Further, though, I dare anyone to give me a single example of a political figure in Washington who sees their job as entailing the obligation "to suffer on behalf of my people". Inside the Beltway, the only objective is to enrich oneself as much as possible in both cash and power while ensuring re-election.

You bring tears to my eyes. Well said.

Bernbart just because you get proven wrong time and time again, doesn't mean you can disparage the quality reporting of McClatchy. Sorry if they don't print what you want to read, that's your problem. Go read the propaganda at the NYT of Washpo, it's more to your suiting.

-- Conservativeslayer

Yea the Sacramento Bee and he Freso news paper are much better that the NYT. lol

My experience with McClatchy is their CA newspapers. What is ironic in Glenn praising McClatchy is in CA most of the McClatchy newspapers serve very conservative areas: i.e.Sacramento, Modesto, Fresno and the present the news with a report the news with a conservative slant for those audiences.

I may be wrong, but didn't McClatchy take over the San Jose Mercury.

This fear led to what Solzhenitsyn estimated as the death of sixty-six million people, from the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, to 1959 – three years after Stalin’s death. Since the book was published, the estimate has been revised to up to one hundred million deaths.

I often muse about this, that such a horrific number of people slain receives relatively little attention here. I do not know why that is, but it makes me shudder (really) that we are so disinterested in mass murder on this scale, lest it have some sort of political value for us. It really does shake me.

bernbart: Yea the Sacramento Bee and he Freso news paper are much better that the NYT. lol

You bring so much insight to the conversation here. lol

I know that you generally cover domestic politics, Glenn, but I'd appreciate your insight on the Uighur situation in China.

I think I understand what's going, and the attitude of the Han Chinese (the ones posting on message boards anyway) towards the Uighur strikes me as similar to the attitude of white racists towards black people in the U.S. in the 1980's. Specifically, that the Uighurs are frightening and different, and that Uighur poverty persists despite Affirmative Action by the Chinese government because the Uighurs are fundamentally lazy and irresponsible.

I'm curious if this is your perspective as well, or if there is more to this story than a simple colonizer/colonist narrative.

Thanks!

Are you saying, Glenn, that you think the NYT was simply misled, too trusting, in the lead up to the Iraq war? And now? And into the foreseeable future? You might want to take a look at the scandal that's unfolding in Britain where it's been discovered that the 'News of the World' one of Murdoch's rags, has been hacking into the mobile phones of all kinds of people, searching for scandals and useful information, including it seems a Mr. Prescott, former Deputy Prime Minister of England. They have also paid out millions to some of the victims to make them go away when their activities were uncovered. I think you have a much bigger problem than mere idiocy here. I read a while ago in a book written by a former journalist and spin doctor that the CIA has people working in all major mainstream media. That would include the NYT. What makes this scandal in England so interesting is that one of the people involved in hacking into mobile phones is already at David Cameron (the Tory leader's) side, working as his spin doctor as he works towards becoming Prime Minister of England. Can he be trusted to give up his spying activities? Of course he can't. In all likelihood he's in the pay of MI5 or MI6, as are others in the media over there.

What the people who vote don't know can't hurt them. This is how these goons operate. I think what happened during Watergate really shook the CIA up and taught them a hard lesson about the power of the media. They've been infiltrating these organizations ever since. The danger is not that the NYT assumes propaganda is true but that they themselves are part of the propaganda and are paid to be part of it. How else could the elites sell the story of 9/11 which is ridiculous and impossible on its face? How else could they create the spectre of a global Muslim threat, which places like Guantanamo are supposed to be protecting the world from? The only thing the NYT actually assumes is the gullibility of the public.

I'm still waiting for you to show me evidence that al Quida or Osama claimed responsibility for 9/11.

I on the other hand have already supplied you with evidence that such is not the case. And it came from the horses mouth. i.e The FBI.

So, where is your evidence to refute mine?

SJ Merc is owned by MediaNews Group, as is my hometown paper Oakland Tribune. The Trib used to be a great paper before it was subsumed into this collective, but the SJ Merc still has a fairly good reputation. The two papers are as different as night and day, though the Trib looks an awful lot like the smaller papers in the area, such as Alameda's Argus.

Anywho. As I said, you're only half right. The other half, is dead wrong, and your critique of Glenn is similarly half-brained. There is nothing in Glenn's analysis that necessitates McClatchy being some kind of end-all of journalistic ethics. Papers are driven by market and political imperatives--how they choose to view those imperatives makes the difference between decent reporting, which is rare, and pant-crapping reporting, which is all too common.