The Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Wild Ride Through Fantasy.

Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows the love/hate relationship I have with the magazine 'Vanity Fair.' This month's issue has the usual diatribes against conservatives. As you know, a more liberal slant on the war and Bush cannot be found anywhere else but in Vanity Fair. So I get to read the other side who assumes that all Vanity Fair readers are liberal Democrats and I am sure most of them are.

This month they feature an excerpt from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s new book "Crimes Against Nature." Robert is an environmental lawyer, but this excerpt focuses mainly on showing us 2 things. One, how Bush LIED to us and how talk radio and rightwing media is brain washing the American people. Robert says:

"I believe, however, that the Democrats lost the presidential contest not because of a philosophical chasm between red and blue states but due to an information deficit caused by a breakdown in our national media."

He goes on to say:

"This threat to the flow of information, vital to democracy's survival, has been compounded in recent years by the growing power of the right-wing media that twist the news and deliberately deceive the public to advance their radical agenda."

Robert then goes on in the rest of the article to deliberately deceive VF readers to advance HIS radical agenda.

Funny how that works.

According to Robert, Fox News, Rush, Hannity, and even MSNBC are pretty much brain washing us all. He complains that 90% of talk radio is conservative while only 10% is "progressive." (We wouldn't want use the L-word, now would we?)

Radio, like other things, is a business. If people like what they hear they listen and advertisers pay. If people don't listen then the talk show goes away. It's that simple. People started listening to Rush for the same reason I did. It was nice to finally hear someone articulate what we conservatives believed and felt. I don't know about you, but I felt pretty alone before Rush came along. What Rush and others did was give voice to our beliefs and our frustrations and he even did it in an amusing way.

What Robert and others don't seem to understand is that Rush or other conservative voices didn't CHANGE our minds, they just agreed with us. That is why we liked listening. But as with so many liberals, Robert seems to think that Americans are pretty stupid and easily led.

He quotes statistic after statistic about what the American people "believed" about the war. For instance, Robert says that President Bush "failed to protect vulnerable terrorist targets at home-chemical plants, nuclear facilities, air-cargo carriers, and ports."

Really? Did I miss some attacks? Isn't it pretty obvious that Bush DID protect us? Newsflash to Robert. We haven't been attacked again since 9-11.

And one of the main reasons we haven't imo is because we rounded up the would be terrorists at Guantanamo. But Robert says that Bush "disgraced our nation and empowered tyrants with unpunished excesses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib."

Really? It looks to me like we have "tryrants" well in hand. I don't feel threatened by anyone, do you? But then, we are just stupid Americans as his statistics show. We believe this propaganda of the rightwing because we obviously can't think for ourselves.

Isn't this just so typical of liberals? They are the smart ones and everyone else is stupid. If you read the Pat Sajak piece I linked earlier you read a conversation he had with a liberal colleague that illustrates exactly that:

" I complained to another Liberal friend about some of the Left’s tone concerning the 2004 elections. I thought it insulting to hear those “red state” voters caricatured as red-necked rubes. My friend asked, “Well, don’t you think that people who live in large urban areas, who travel and read and speak other languages are better able to make informed choices?” It turns out it is superiority, not familiarity, which breeds contempt."

It's all about the superiority folks.

Robert seems to think there is "a vast rightwing conspiracy" that gives out false information. But in reality, we conservatives were just sick of being looked at as ignorant by the major networks and newspapers and were so relieved to have our views on the table that we FLOCKED to rightwing radio and TV.

Robert gives an example of us "winning" by the resignation of Pat Mitchell as president of PBS after "rightwing critics" got upset that she was allowing a cartoon episode with a lesbian couple. (she recanted and canceled the episode) Come on! How dare we get angry that a popular CARTOON watched by our children is trying to send an ADULT message to children that very well may go against our values and is totally inappropriate for the age group.

I mean really.

Who is really trying to spread propaganda here? You tell me.

Among the pundits Robert accuses of being in this VRWC is Peggy Noonan and Dick Morris for example. He cited John Stossel and Michael Savage as well. Could each of these people be more different? Even Brian Williams is included because he dared to give kudos to Rush Limbaugh recently.

The liberals probably do believe this VRWC. What they can't and won't face is that it is simply the marketplace of ideas and our ideas are winning now. Not because we lie or give out disinformation, but because our ideas are different from theirs and many seem to agree.

And that scares the hell out of them.