On April Fool’s Day 2007, Mike Lawson pulled the perfect prank announcing that Red County has acquired the Liberal OC blog and changed the name to “The Blue Minority” with a tag line “Because even Liberals should get the chance to speak.” A political reporter from the Register actually bought it and called Matt Cunningham for comment. And everyone had a good laugh.
But with any bit of humor, there’s an element of truth.
And while Mike may have been poking fun at Red County, there is no place where the tag line I reference above is more spot on than the OC Register’s editorial pages. There are still no center-left columnists to grace the pages of the OC Register’s editorial pages, which former columnist Steven Green hut said “there isn’t enough room,” nor on the FreedomPolitics blog where there certainly is but liberalism ins’t allowed. There is a “from the left” link online at OC Register.com but it’s not easy to find.
What liberals and proggressives do have in the OC Register are reader rebuttals, and there’s one worth reading here.
From the piece by Laguna Hills resident Stan Roberts: “Why blame union workers who make up only 12 percent of the country’s workforce while earning an average income of about $50,000 a year? It wasn’t the unions, it was George W. Bush and GOP policies that created the Great Recession that we are still trying to recover from. In 2003, Bush’s tax cuts and increased spending resulted in a record for the biggest single-year dollar increase in national debt. He broke the record again the next year.
The stock market crash under Bush was the biggest decline by percentage and total value in history – worse than the 1929 crash that led to the Great Depression. U.S. stocks lost $8.4 trillion in value in one year. The loss of real estate equity suffered by most Americans totaled additional trillions. Bush ran the national debt to $11 trillion, and President Barack Obama has had to spend trillions more in stimulus efforts because the majority of the best economists predicted another Depression if he didn’t.
Today’s high unemployment was also created by the Bush administration. America lost 8 million jobs during his last year in office, with the job losses getting steadily worse until Obama’s inauguration. The trend completely reversed since then, and the stock market has also rebounded dramatically.”
Stan decries the Register’s editorial pages for its bias and lack of balance. As one of the more than 500,000 registered Democrats in Orange County, perhaps when the Register is sold to the highest bidder in the coming auction we might get relief from a new management team that understands a newspaper’s editorial pages should carry a broad sway of ideas from conservative to liberal viewpoints rather than those from a center-right position.
“Today’s high unemployment was also created by the Bush administration.”
While W’s many mistakes are fairly well known – the primary cause of the Great Depression II was 3 pieces of Republican sponsored (special interest pandering, as usual), Special Interest authored Legislation – supported & signed by then President Clinton.
1) Gramm/ Leach Bliley Act – deregulated ultra-Greedy NY Banks.
2) NAFTA – exported USA jobs to Mexico.
3) PNTR – exported USA jobs to Communist China.
Sure W’s multi-trillion dollar Iraq “war” didn’t help matters – but please, credit where credit is due. The most devistating legislation was adopted under Clintons watch.
Libya – here we go again?
Dan,
Don’t give the Register any ideas. The longer they stay with the current format, the sooner they fade away onto the ash heaps of history.
Say-O-frackin’-nara.