I Told You So

A while back, Vermont's socialist congressman Bernie Sanders went into a frothing rage when Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan credited the United States for having "the highest standard of living in the world" at a congressional hearing.

Sanders responded, quite angrily, "No, we do not. You go to Scandinavia, and you will find that people have a much higher standard of living, in terms of education, health care and decent paying jobs. Wrong, Mister."

Now, I'm no Nostradamus, but I feel secure in predicting that Bernie isn't going to get his normal enjoyment out of reading the Sunday New York Times today. The Times (to my surprise and the paper's credit) ran a really interesting and data-chocked analysis by Bruce Bawer, an American freelancer living in Oslo, Norway, comparing the standards of living for Americans and various Scandinavians. Bawer includes both telling anecdotes from his own experience:

Yet another post-Newsweekgate tendentious defense of the MSM today, this time from Terry M. Neal in the Washington Post. Most of it is now-familiar "fake but accurate" claptrap, and I was about to quit reading halfway through when Neal popped of with this howler:

Some conservative bloggers have suggested that the media should never criticize or raise critical questions of the military in wartime. Some have extended that criticism, conveniently, to cover the president's wartime policies.

Oh, really? Which ones? Can you provide a quote, a link, a reference to a single blogger who's said any such thing, or are did you just prop up an imaginary straw man?

Hey, Terry--here's a suggestion. After you've spent most of your column repeating cant Bush-bashing talking points and inventing non-quotes that no blogger ever actually wrote, it's not real smart to then go off on the old Helen Thomas "Of course we're liberals--all smart, open-minded people are liberals" wacky train. That's a really, really stupid thing to do in a column supposedly about now the press isn't biased.

Just for future reference, you know.