Sunday, December 7, 2008

Not unlike a liberal

Unhappy with the current political winds, George Will decides to travel back in time and pretend it is the mid-80s, writing a column attacking liberal support for the fairness doctrine. The fairness doctrine was an instrument of old-school liberalism, one of those maybe-sounds-good-at-the-time but totally ineffective subversions of the free market. Essentially, it said that television, radio, etc. had to offer equal time to both sides of an issue. Were the fairness doctrine to be enforced, Fox News and Rush Limbaugh would have been shut down years ago. Also, note that the fairness doctrine was repealed over twenty years ago.

But that doesn't stop George Will from writing a column railing against those crazy liberals. But, George, who are these liberals who want to re-institute the fairness doctrine? Well, from reading the column, you won't find any names. Nor will you find any names if you read any other news source, because no one wants to re-institute the fairness doctrine. No Congressmen, no liberal pundits, no serious human has called for this. Will might as well have written an article railing against liberals who want to put us on the metric system.

Message to George: these crazy 60s era liberals of which you write are long-extinct, just as their conservative counterparts, Goldwater-types who think that executive power should be restrained, deficits should be kept to minimum, etc. Stop living in the past. Indeed, this failure to understand a current definition of liberal is one reason why Republicans lose the votes of my generation. The messages coming from the the McCain campaign in the final days (Obama's a socialist!) are wholly meaningless to anyone born after 1975. I was 10 when Reagan left office, so the longer conservatives continue to plug their ears singing la-la-la-la and wishing that it is 1984, the longer they will lose.