THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

REPORTERS, REFUGESS, AND THE SUN | 2004-06-09

This really happened.

One thing we always used to do when we went to Myrtle Beach was get up early and go out and watch the sun rise over the ocean. It's beautiful!

A bunch of my crowd went out to California. During their time there they spent some days at the beach. So as part of their beach ritual they got up early and sat on the beach waiting for the sunrise over the ocean.

On the WEST coast!

The finally realized that the sun was coming up behind them and had a good laugh at themselves.

No harm done.

Now let me tell you about a similar incident. Nobody else who watches the news has a memory, and this happened a couple of years ago as a lead story in international news, so I am the only person who remembers it.

When the latest Iraq War was about to start, networks spent huge amounts of money stationing reporters on the borders of Iraq to interview all the refugees who would be pouring out of Iraq. After all, there are always huge streams of refugees in war, right? That is as routine and predictable as the sun rising over the ocean, right?

So the invasion began and a large part of the reporters sat there on the borders away from the invasion forces and waited for refugees, exactly the same way my crowd waited for the sun to rise over the ocean in California.

Just like my crowd waiting for the sun to rise over the West Coast beach, those reporters waited and waited and waited.

No refugees.

My crowd in California had the same problem, but there is one gigantic difference between them and those dumbass reporters. My crowd figured out what they were doing wrong and laughed at themselves. The reporters never figured it out.

So let me explain the situation here:

The sun comes up over the ocean on the Atlantic side, but it never rises over the ocean on Pacific side.

There are refugees in every war those reporters have covered, but they NEVER run away from Americans.

During the Vietnam War, the press was on the side of the Communists. So they always talked about the poor Vietnamese who were forced to become refugees. But they never even noticed that none of those refugees ever ran away from Americans to find nice, safe Communist territory. It was all America's fault there were refugees, so nobody mentioned which way those refugees were going.

The media never even NOTICED which way the refugees were going.

So there they sat on the Iraqi border for weeks waiting for the flood of refugees running away from the American invaders.

And those idiots STILL haven't figured out what happened.

OPEC DELENDA EST | 2003-04-05

In the Year of our Lord 1941, the United States was OPEC. We were the world's main producer of oil.

In 1941 Franklin Roosevelt wanted desperately to get America into World War II so he cut off all American oil shipments to Japan.

It worked and the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

Ten years from now everybody is going to be whining, "Why didn't we take out OPEC when we had the chance in Iraq?" Ten years from now, absolutely everybody will be saying that they wanted to take out OPEC but others didn't want to.

Look around you. Do you see anybody besides Whitaker who has even mentioned the possibility of using Iraq to end OPEC?

The OPEC cartel is a hostile act against America. Nobody denied that before the Iraq War. Nobody will deny that after the Iraq War. But right now we have to get that stupid idealistic look on our faces and repeat, "That oil belongs only to the Iraqi people."

In ten years everybody will be asking, "So why didn't you break OPEC when you had the chance? Why didn't you make a contract to get Iraqi oil at a decent price for the long term and only for the United States?"

Anybody ten years from now who admits he had the attitude Americans have right now will look like the cliche-mongering fool he is.

So everybody will say they were for it.

Only Whitaker mentions it, as usual. Only Whitaker will remember later how stupid everybody is right now.

FROM PROGRESSIVISM TO PC | 2010-05-31

My nephew-in-law is a computer man who went to college in the late 1970s. He said the awful thing about that time was that young people were told, "It's all over."

The future was organizing the resources we have and reducing them so that we would do as little harm to the environment as we could. More recently, our established religion came up with a term for that: carbon count.

Carbon count is a VERY religious term. Man is innately evil. No one can live without a carbon count, precisely in the same way that no human being under our previous established religions could live without sin.

One Calvinist writer said that there were savages who rejoiced at death and mourned at the birth of a child. He said that they were right in the latter case, because that pagan child was born to be damned.

One may hear Christians saying, "Everyone deserves death," meaning that we all deserve it, and only the intercession of Christ will save us from ""death,"" Notice I put two sets of quotes around that, because that has to be the most blatant use of a code word ever. They mean that everyone deserves Hell, compared to which death would be a mercy beyond comparison.

If you are raised in the Bible Belt the difference leaps out at you when they use that wimpy little "deserve death" bit.

Christianity rose with a preaching of the Gospel. To tell everybody that they deserve eternal agony and despair is not Good News. As Churches became institutions, here was less and less talk of Good News.

And churches that cold afford it filled up with graphic images of Hellish agony.

We have watched Progressivism do precisely the same thing. Early liberals were eugenicists and they looked to a Future of unlimited human progress. Like the early Gospel Christians, they sold Hope. As they became established their doctrine took on the color my niece-in-law suffered under.

The rule is clear enough: Growing faiths teach Hope, established faiths move toward Guilt. The early church was built on Salvation and the high morality the Church claimed. Once the Church got its privileges, the dream of rule by paragons and saints died.

So if they could not claim superior morality, the Church had to fall back on its power over Hell.

This is a conjecture, but in the case of Political Correctness it is far more obvious. Even in my lifetime Communists were claiming that their countries were catching up to the United States in creature comforts. A Workers' Paradise was literally on the way.

Soviet Science claimed that it would conquer space beginning with Sputnik. All the inventions capitalists had claimed, all the real scientific progress that would lead to a better, more fun life, had actually been invented by Russians.

Few here even know that Progressivism was a Gospel, a Good News that would end all poverty, take us into space, and drive the Evil Ones out of existence.

Now there is no hope whatsoever in progressive or Marxist politics for things to get better for us. Now it is ALL Guilt. Now it is ALL about how we are sinning by wanting too much. Now we are all carbon producers, and our goal is to produce as little sin or carbon until we die.

It is as if, just as Saint Paul picked up the last stages of Zoroastrianism and put it into Christianity, Progressives took the last stages of Christianity and found it very useful for the last stage of their rule as the established religion which has failed.

LAUREL AND HARDY, PROFESSORS AND THE MEDIA | 2002-01-26

Professors don't say they're Shrewd. They say they're "sophisticated."

Neither professors nor the media have ever gotten over the fact that after Harvard Think Tanks got us into Vietnam, it was under Ronald Reagan that Communism collapsed.

Now neither the media nor the professors can get used to the idea that Bush can handle foreign policy. That's because he's not "sophisticated," a.k.a., Shrewd.

Anything that confuses the professors totally blitzes the media. The only education media spokesmen have, after all, is the one that made them half-baked products of the professors. That's the only thing they ever had that could be called an "education."

Hardy thought he was smart, so he convinced poor little Laurel that he was smart. Like the media and the professors, Hardy was the only example of "smart" poor dumb Laurel had, and the professors were the only example of "educated" the media ever had.

So exactly like Laurel believed in Hardy, the media BELIEVE in professors.