Casual Quisling Candor

What libs really think, they're starting to say in public:

The United States should not lead the world, a top Washington Post editor told Red China's People's Daily. In a lengthy interview with the government-controlled newspaper's Washington correspondent, Yong Tang, Post managing editor Philip Bennett said, "I don't think U.S. should be the leader of the world."

As Eddie Murphy once said (edited for content), "Well tell us something we don't know, mother[BLEEP]er."

This next one, though, is a hoot:

Bennett added: "I also think it is unhealthy to have one country as the leader of the world. People in other countries don't want to be led by foreign countries. They may want to have good relations with it or they may want to share with what is good in that country." [my emphasis]

Apparently Bennett's consideration for the fragile pride of these "people" does not extend to his own countrymen, as he and his ilk are perfectly fine with Americans being led by the rest of the world, to which we are supposed to defer and concede the promulgation of our foreign policy.

Put another way, he doesn't question global hegemony in principle; just the fact that America is the country that currently exercises it.

Among Bennett's other anti-U.S. remarks:

The U.S. isn't really promoting democracy. "If you look around the world in strategically important places, is the U.S. actively engaged there promoting democracy or not? I don't think there is much evidence that promoting democracy is what the U.S. is doing. It is what it says it is doing."

This isn't blindness, it's sheer, unadulterated lunacy.

The Bush Administration is hiding the truth. "One of the jobs of our correspondents in Baghdad is to tell our readers what the Bush Administration is trying to hide. Bush says democracy is advancing in Iraq, but our correspondents say the situation there is much more complex than that."

Translation: reality is not conforming to the anti-Bush propaganda template of the American media establishment. Which is particularly lame, seeing as how even the New York Times has finally abandoned the "BUSH LIED!!!!!" canard.

"The government of the U.S. is becoming much more secretive, much more hostile to the press in terms of giving us access to the information. So a lot of what we do here is to fight for access to the information that we think the public should have. That takes a lot of our energy and resources."

Translation: the American press is becoming much more biased and much more hostile to the government of the U.S. in terms of reporting on its policies, actions, and pronouncements in such a way as to not remind news consumers of tabloid rags with headlines like "Boy trapped in refrigerator eats own foot."

Sounding strangely like New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty, who, while covering up Stalin's deliberate starvation of millions of Ukrainians, wrote, "I have seen the future and it works," Bennett told Yong Tang, "When I went to China, I felt I was seeing into the future."

I guess that means Bennett was lobbying for a plum job after the ChiComms conquer the world.

Boy, is he in for a shock.

The Post doesn't call China, one of the world's most repressive dictatorships, what it is: a dictatorship. "Neither The Washington Post, nor the New York Times, nor any other big newspapers, refer to China today as a dictatorship regime. We don't use these words on the paper any more. Now we say China is a communist country only because it is a fact. China is ruled by the Communist party."

And the communist party is a dictatorship with aggressive ambitions, as its runaway defense buildup ought to clearly indicate to any reasonable observer.

Remember the blogswarm over the willing pose of the Los Angeles Times' Barbara Demick as a propaganda conduit for North Korea? This Bennett interview is the same thing tenfold in that Bennett is serving not as propaganda facilitator but as propaganda mouthpiece both to the American public and their oppressed Chinese counterparts.

It would be easy to be generous and dismiss Bennett's toadying as merely an attempt to get in good with the Butchers of Beijing, not unlike the way that CNN kept the lid on Saddam Hussein's atrocities in order to hold onto their bureau in Baghdad. That would make the Post's managing editor "only" an ass-kissing, bootlicking sychophant. But as the past two years have amply shown, these are articles of religious faith with the American Left. They can't stand a confident, strong America leading the world; their galloping guilt complex and rampant self-loathing demand that the U.S. be brought down and trampled underfoot to "atone" for all of its "sins" and "arrogance", etc., etc., etc. And their failure to unseat George Bush last November has liberated them to be openly seditious, including to the "press" of an enemy power.

Phil Bennett's comments are the kind of thing that we on the right always figured libs really believed but would never actually admit, and to charge as much brought squawks of "McCarthyism!" Now they're not only admitting it, but plastering it all over billboards in every country that has designs on terminating the "pax Americana" - and America right along with it.

And to think libs objected to my description of their side as "the Disloyal Opposition." "Fifth Column" is beginning to drift into the range of etymological reason.