It’s been noted, in the past, that this sometimes turns "kinda ragey." Well. I was willing to give the Collegian opinion column the benefit of the doubt, but, well, they really do suck.
“Fairness” should become the official motto for the Democratic Party. In the official party platform found on their Web site, the words “fair” and “fairness” appear 35 times, compared to the words “free” and “freedom,” which appear only 28 times.
Did Tim Hadachek actually read the Democrats’ platform, or did he just press CTRL+F until Safari gave him a "Safari has finished searching this document" popup window? Which do you think it was?
Hadachek implies by negation, of course, that the Republican Party is the party that represents Freedom. I’d be inclined to believe this if I pathologically forget that Republicans have repeatedly tried to assault our civil liberties, treating the Bill of Rights like a naggy voicemail message from your mom. If you ask me, it’s more like the Bill of Lefts. Ha ha, I tried to coin a new phrase and it came off dorky. I suck.
Take for example the party’s position on the energy industry. Like a baseball team benching their best home-run hitter in favor of the untested rookie, Democrats want to hinder the largest contributors to our economy — the oil companies — forcing them to invest in unproven and inefficient alternative sources.
Fuck innovation. Hadachek wants us to stick with oil FOREVER. It’s the least we could do; energy companies like Enron have been so kind to us. And it’s not like we’ll ever run out of oil.
This is like the fair-trade policy mentioned in the Democratic platform and by candidates like Sen. Barack Obama, as found on his Web site. The Fair Trade Federation lists its main tenet as “setting a minimum floor price for producers around the world.”
In practice, this creates an artificial market in which small foreign farmers receive extra money for producing crops like coffee, that they aren’t very good at growing.
Fuck small foreign farmers! We’d rather be ripped off by large American organizations! We’d rather let Dick Cheney’s cronies at Halliburton pocket taxpayer cash in the name of the War On Terror! McCain/Palin 08!
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., favors a return of the “Fairness Doctrine,” which, until 1987, forced radio broadcasters to provide balanced viewpoints on controversial issues.
Today, as conservative talk-show hosts dominate the airwaves, Democrats say it isn’t “fair” that there aren’t more liberal points of view. But liberal hosts have the same opportunities as conservative ones; it’s only their small audiences that keep advertisers from supporting their programs.
Hadachek makes no gesture toward addressing the substance of the complaints against conservative talking heads in the media: that they use fearmongering and rely on pandering to the prejudices of uneducated people in order to get ratings, in lieu of promoting intelligent debate, and that this is actually damaging to the listeners but they listen to it the same way people gorge on junk food. Hadachek’s logic is that as long as they’re popular, they must be right (see what I did there). That’s because political discourse is a commodity and nothing more.
An entire society based around fairness has been tried in the past — it’s more commonly known as communism. Communism was like one big T-ball game; everybody was guaranteed a spot on the team, but no one ever improved, because the ball was just sitting there on a stick.
There it is: to neocons, fairness = communism. Hadachek blatantly ignores the more obvious connotation: justice. The concept probably didn’t enter his mind!
This cartoon ran with the editorial:
It’s supposed to represent Democrats. I think it kinda looks more like Hadachek: a braying, uninsightful jackass.
[Source: K-State Collegian]
