The Magical Mystery Tour (Takes A Wrong Turn)

"Look in the mirror right now—all of you children of the ’60s, and your children, too. The veterans of peace and love and Kent State losses and civil rights victories and your children who’ve heard the romanticized tales of what it was like.

Look in the mirror, because what you’ll see is a reverse image. A reverse image that you can’t stand. This summer, the summer of 2010, you’ll hear the drumming , but it’s the other side that’s inspired. There is no more Uncle Walter to declare Vietnam a lost cause. No Daniel Ellsburg with his Pentagon Papers. No more Ben Bradlee with his Watergate stories. Their legacies have shriveled like your retirement savings and the peace tattoo on your wrinkled skin.

The reverse image that you can’t stand is this: thousands of citizen fact-checkers on the Internet correcting the Dan Rathers of your old world. Countless bloggers to ferret out the lies of Mike Nifong, and free the innocent from politically correct charges.

A new TV news network called Fox, that nightly surpasses the ratings of your CNN, Headline News, MSNBC and CNBC combined. You’re trying desperately to swat a thousand bees, to plug your fingers in a thousand leaks, but the hive is disturbed and the dam has burst."

-- Anchorman, finally admitting what so many NewAgers refuse to - the hippies, at this moment of their greatest triumph, most certainly did "get fooled again" (by a black man!) - and now they're also feeling like it, over at The Daily Caller.



Hat Tip: Althouse

I Can See Through You

"In this country, it seems that you can always get an argument going about "race" as long as it is guaranteed to be phony,...Almost every day brings news of full-dress media-oriented spats about Don Imus, Bob Grant, or the recent nonstory about how some golf show had managed to mention Tiger Woods and the word "lynch" in the same news cycle. The preceding week had involved some trivial but intense parsing of an exchange between Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But just let the real thing occur, with a full-blooded and full-throated bellow of old-fashioned authentic racism, and youcan see the entire press refusing to cover it for fear of having to confront the real and unvarnished thing."

- Christopher Hitchens, gloriously pointing out the obvious, in Slate

"In South Carolina the Confederate flag is flying right out there in the open and Pitchfork Ben is on display for all to see. But in most other places, the hostility to blacks remains on the down-low. No one wants to deal with it."

Bob Herbert, addressing the same issue, in the New York Times

Over the King Holiday, I'd been thinking about all the recent "race" bullshit a lot, and it strikes me as being just that - so much bullshit:

Don Imus (who I, and many others, like) didn't do anything wrong - and got paid well for it - and then, after losing his job under false pretenses, got his job (and his money) back.

The Duke Lacrosse Team got railroaded by Mike Nifong - and the black community - but nobody's holding the black community (or their white supporters other than Nifong) accountable.

And several recent firings over bogus race charges, mostly addressing Tiger Woods' sensibilities - even after Tiger said he wasn't bothered or affected in any way by the so-called "offenses" - are just wrong and totally over-the-top.

What's interesting about all this is the passionately twisted, liberal thrust of them all:

Someone is trying to prove something here, but, like The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, the accusers seem incapable of stopping themselves from hitting the wrong guys. Where they imagine racism - or just make it up - somebody (white) must pay. Where real racism exists, the victims can't find a friend.

Why is that?