On the public-access TV show I host, 'Right Angle', the topic this past week was immigration. A Cornell campus radical expressed the view that not only should our borders be completely open, but that we shouldn't screen immigrants for criminal history or even . . . for being known Al-Qaeda members.
Now, if the radical making these sophomoric suggestions isn't quite a sophomore - he's in fact a grad student - perhaps some slack can be cut him as he continues to live, largely divorced from reality, within the liberal cocoon of the ivy-league tower.
The same defense cannot be offered to explain away the equally churlish remarks that Dave Rossie serves up week after week. Rossie is associate editor of the Gannett newspaper, the Binghamton [NY] Press & Sun Bulletin. In addition to his editing duties, Rossie writes a syndicated weekly column that, in its juvenile tone, reads like something worthy of an over-the-top 10th grader.
Take Rossie's column this week, "The White House needs to be disinfected".
To get a flavor for Rossie's 'wisdom', check out these nuggets:
- [Tom DeLay] is busy contemplating the possibility that the next time he and his buddy Jack Abramoff get together it won't be at St. Andrews Royal and Ancient, but a prison exercise yard.
- The intensely moral Tom DeLay, and those two adulterous frauds, Henry Hyde and Dan Burton, who pushed the House to impeach Clinton, have been silent as the Sphinx on Bush's abuse of his office and the Constitution.
- The damning evidence continues to pile up, not just around the Liar in Chief but every member of this appallingly corrupt administration. They have long gone past being a national embarrassment to the point where they pose a threat to the rest of the world.
- You've got a vice president and a defense secretary who think they can bomb their way to a new world order channeling through a puppet who thinks Armageddon is just around the corner.
Rossie believes that mere impeachment of the president is insufficient: "the issue has gone beyond the point where it can be resolved by a simple impeachment."
Rossie's proposed solution? To invite other leading countries of the world to boycott the US:
"What if the other great nations of the world — England, Germany, France, Italy, China, India, Japan , Canada, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Norway — most of which are governed by rational or at least semi-rational leaders, were to present us with an ultimatum: Stop throwing your weight around and putting us at risk of World War III and the nuclear holocaust that would accompany it, or we will show you sanctions such as you've never seen before. If you want to be an international pariah, do it on your own time and in your own backyard and leave the rest of the neighborhood alone."
So here we have an editor of a paper that is part of one of the most influential national newspaper chains calling for a boycott of the US that might well plunge us into a depression that would make the gasoline-price flap look like a day at the beach. And remember, this same fellow, when he puts his editor's cap back on after churning out this kind of stuff, decides every day what his newspapers readers will and won't see.