Harvey Rifkin’s “rants” do anything but rant. Well informed, he writes intelligently with substance, balance, humor and wit. (Wit is not always good humored. The reverse of humor is snideness.) Rifkin offers enjoyable reading whether or not I always fully agree. I admire and appreciate his input. Roger Simon is also fun to read, witty, intelligent, expressing no heavy bias. He displays well-qualified opinions, uses words with due care for their actual meanings. Dennis Lund writes well, not without wit though with rightward tilt, off balance, another “ideology soldier” more interested in showing his posture than the broad field of fact in focus. Mona Charen’s nice but tilts from tilted to objective reporting and back.
One callow fellow regularly included on this page (possibly for safe release of hot air,) let’s call him, Rupert Deadspeak, “Rube”, for short. Rube’s in a bad way. Gets only halfway to town because he has no left leg. He may be right-handed and mechanically able to write, but with no left hand, left eye or left brain, he has a hard time navigating conceptual thought. With a whole mouth, thank goodness, he won’t starve or suffocate from pent up saying. He hops along bent to the right so far he sees nothing on his left. When he goes outside, always turning right as he does, getting home takes planning. Too bad, the left half of his maps go missing. (Rube is more impressed with ‘bird colonels’ and heads of local business than I am, bless ‘em.)
It’s a good thing Rube isn’t rich as Rapert Murkoch, or he’d live in his own head completely losing touch with feet. The upper-crust’s Far-Wrongers have lived so long from the neck up only, they think heads are all, needing no bodies but to carry big heads as directed. Everything of worth comes down from top, right? Concern for a whole body, that’s Socialism, right? Just because bodies can’t do without heads doesn’t mean red blood should go only up to them while bodies get less circulation farther down, legs getting de-oxygenated, blue blood, or none. Right? Too many Right-Wing folks had the blindfold of “Rugged Individualism” clapped so tight over their faces, they couldn’t see they were parts of more than a loose network of shifty individuals.
Private and individual values are good! Public and social values are equally good and necessary. The next idiotic rube who calls me a socialist is going to get named the fascist he acts like. He may not be a Brown Shirt or a Black Shirt, but he is a Red Shirt! — a fascist dupe without jackboots or stiff-arm salute. Yet!
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