On Fox News Watch there was a debate about whether US networks should be showing violent film-clips provided by Al Jazeera. Obviously they get them from terrorists.

The lead liberal on News Watch, Gabriel something, is the official liberal on the show and therefore the official conscience. He is always earnest and nobody ever ridicules him. Pope Gabriel made his pronouncement:

“The question is whether there is some kind of collaboration between the media and Al Jazeera.”

The normal response to this is a horselaugh. The media always collaborates.

Who decided which reporter covers Havana?

Fidel, of course.

If Ho Chin Min wanted any story in the American media, he sent one of his guys down to the Saigon bar where the fearless Journalists were getting smashed with each other — none of them knew any American soldiers — and handed the story to them.

If any network was too hard on the Soviet Union, every story they could have been given (all pre-written so they wouldn’t have to work) dried up.

When I was at the Voice of America we did some stories about runaway alcoholism in the Soviet Union. The bulletin boards were full of complaints about these stories put up by pro-Soviet employees of VOA. All members of the staff were Federal Civil Service employees.

So there were plenty of openly pro-Soviet people there.

Actually, the stories we put out came from the Soviets themselves. We were lazy too.

These alcoholism stories were largely part of the breakup of Soviet tyranny. Gorbachev was openly worried about alcoholism in the USSR, and HE provided the stories. But the pro-Soviet VOA staff was back in the Brezhnev era, and such gut criticism of the USSR was a no-no to them.

To be a “professional journalist” you either have to work or be a prostitute.

The last working journalist died decades ago.

Whenever a “professional journalist” bitches about The Drudge Report or someone else as “not a REAL journalist,” they mean somebody who does WORK and takes real chances

You cannot be a “real journalist” unless you are a lazy prostitute.

The blog I just wrote on “Water” could take care of illegal immigration.

What happens if you try to get into Mexico by going around the Mexican police?

It happens. Some Americans and other foreigners with property or other interests in Mexico are banned from there. So what happens if they sneak in?

Are they given a long list of appeal rights while they stay free in Mexico?

You’ve GOT to be joking. They go to jails.

MEXICAN jails.

And they don’t leave until they have served their prison sentences.

In MEXICAN prisons.

Viva Mejico!

If every illegal alien spent a few months chasing water in one of the places I would set aside, immigration would no longer be a game.

The first lines of Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “Gunga Din,” are:

YOU may talk o’ gin an’ beer
When you’re quartered safe out ‘ere,
An’ you’re sent to penny-fights an’ Aldershot it;
But if it comes to slaughter
You will do your work on water,
An’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ‘im that’s got it.

I’ve seen that.

Wouldn’t it be nice if hard-core prisoners spent none of their lives thinking about how to throw feces at guards or getting drugs or lawyers, and all their time thinking about water?

It could be done.

Put them in the desert. Give each one a time and place when his very limited supply of water would be dropped. It would be different each time.

Restricted zone. If you have a pilot’s license this is one area you KNOW about. Any aircraft violating it gets shot down. This area strictly for the water-dropping aircraft.

Nothing gets into a prison zone without being shot at.

So we have a slab of desert where the prisoner’s ONLY concern is getting his water and, incidentally, anything else he needs.

Believe me, when you need water, water is everything.

We have lots of desert, at least a hundred thousand square miles federally owned. If all those tough guys in prison could end up there, they would be very, very different people.

Being desperate for water is a whole different experience.

When I was working at the Voice of America, a new secretary was a young black woman fresh out of eastern North Carolina. We got to be good buddies.

I knew why she was glad to talk to me. When I first got to Washington I would often listen to a black man at a local station who would just sit back and talk to his black audience. I missed home, and he talked in a way I was used to.

But as I said this young black woman was FRESH out of North Carolina, and she said something to a white lady working there that nobody knew how to handle, including me. She was complaining that her boy friend had dated white women.

She said to the white girl, a Federal employee, “There’s no way YOU would date a black man, is there?”

The white girl simply did not know what to say. Here was role reversal with a vengeance. If she said she WOULD date a black man, my buddy would have obviously considered her a slut. If she said she WOULDN’T date black men, every chance she ever had of promotion would be gone, if she kept her job at all.

I don’t remember the outcome. That is not the point.

The point is that the black woman did not know her role, the role we all take for granted.

As a Designated Black Woman, her job was to report any white female who even hinted she would not love to go to bed with a black man. Everybody in the room knew that but her.

It was a given. It was a basic. It was her ROLE.

Any black man or woman is free to say he will not date whites. I have heard many a black man openly proclaim that he will not date black women. For a white MAN to say he will not date black girls is asking for trouble.

But for a white GIRL to say she will not date blacks is asking, not just for trouble, but for DISASTER. That is the Mortal Sin of the religion of Political Correctness. You know it, I know it, everybody knew it.

Except for this one black woman.

No, I do not mean talking about Christianity or Buddhism or Islam or Judaism. They have nothing to do with religion today.

From today’s point of view, what we normally call “religion” is actually mythology. After the Christians took over in the fourth century, people still studied Zeus and Athena and all the other old gods, but they studied them as the outdated beliefs of their ancestors.

Today, schools still teach about what the churches or mosques or temples or synagogues believe, but from the outside, the way you study a species of bug that you are not part of. That’s mythology or maybe entomology, but it’s not theology.

Real theology today is an examination of words like “education” or “diversity,” the things we pay for, the things we are required to believe in, but for which there is no evidence in this world. Religion is a faith in things that are unseen and unseeable.

An established religion is a faith in things which are unseeable but which you not only have to believe in, you have to pay for it. The established religion makes you use its words and obey and observe its rites, like our society’s rigid requirement that there is something about four years spent in an institution with no known output and the supposed value of a college degree.

Notice I said “***a*** college degree.” It is required for many things. To advance above a certain rank in the military, you have to have two years of college.

What college? It doesn’t matter? Do you have to learn anything? Of course not. No priest is required to take a test to decide whether the can perform transubstantiation at the altar. No professor is asked to prove he did anything but sign a paper saying you took a course.

Like any priest, all a professor needs is the proper ordination. He has to be in “an accredited institution,” which means a school other professors, the priests of our established religion, have to determine are sound in all matters of faith and Politically Correct morality.

I am choosing my words carefully here. Can you see any way on earth this process of “education” cannot be called a religion?”

I have had to use M-15′s and 16′s, Kalashnikovs and I probably spelled it all wrong. I don’t know a thing about them. I don’t know the difference between the British M5 and M6, and I’ve been chased by both of them.

I don’t think I’ve ever cleaned a gun. I know I field stripped one once, but I don’t remember how I did it. The thing was jammed and I didn’t have a hell of a lot of choice.

It’s only a matter of time before some Army geek will develop a weapon that no longer goes by the only rule I know: You point the hole in one end the other way, (No, Bob, you do NOT put that against your shoulder!) and you put your finger in the little ring and pull back the little pully thing.

Thus endeth our Weapons Training Program for today.

A Real Army Man will tell you that the idea of an armed militia as a defense against tyranny is absurd. You can’t fight the Modern Army with civilian weapons.

What the government calls “assault weapons,” the ones civilians are not allowed to have because they look mean, are weapons no soldier would take into real combat, into a real assault. The guns civilians can have are not combat weapons.

The Military Man will say there is no point in civilians being armed.

What his military training did not teach him is that that is not the point.

Until the World War II Generation took over, one of the staple pictures in magazines and newspapers was an old lady sitting on a porch with a shotgun on her lap. She was waiting on the bulldozer that was going to destroy the house she had lived in all her life.

Grandma with the shotgun didn’t have much book learning, but she knew very well that she couldn’t defeat the entire United Sates Army.

Her point was not, “I can fight the whole army.”

Her point was, “If you want to take my home, you’ll have to kill me to get it.”

Since the group that calls itself The Greatest Generation took over after four years of Obedience Training in the Second World War, old grandma with her shotgun is considered silly.

Now grandma is supposed to use Civil Disobedience.

But, unless the media is one your side, Civil Disobedience is Obedience.

That is why so many right-wing demonstrations are pointless. Civil Disobedience is only covered by the media if they want to cover it.

The media won’t cover grandma sitting on a porch with a flower in her lap. But if she’s got a scatter gun she gets attention, and lots of it.

If the media can disarm you, they can ignore you.

One of the major reasons Teddy Kennedy destroyed his chances for the Democratic presidential nomination at Chappaquiddick was because the national media loved him dearly. Like his brother John Kennedy, Teddy was protected from any exposure of his increasingly insane personal scandals.

Drunk and womanizing all the time, Teddy Kennedy was a disaster waiting to happen, and it happened at Chappaquiddick. Those of us the media hated were kept in line.

If the media hate you, it keeps you clean. Those of us the media hated had to stick closely to the adage, “Don’t do anything you would not want to be on the front page of the Washington Post tomorrow.”

I have never seen anyone mention this before, but what the media to us was exactly what it is SUPPOSED to do. For us, they acted as watchdogs. No liberal is bothered until he is on his way to prison. Which is one reason so many of them get indicted.

In fact, there is only one exception I know to the rule that the media went after anti-liberals hammer and tong while ignoring anything liberals did. That was the case of homosexuals.

Two hard-core conservative congressmen, Bob Bauman and Jon Hinson, had been cruising the gay bars and, in Hinson’s case, conducted homosexual orgies right there on Capitol Hill. If those activities had been with women, they would have been in the media at the start.

But homosexual scandals, no matter how blatant, were always ignored by the media. So Bauman and Hinson were not discussed until they were being kicked out of congress. They could have been stopped from going to Kennedy extremes if the media had done its job.

When I got my higher and higher security clearances there was no doubt in anybody’s mind that the media had vetted me thoroughly. But when Theodore Sorensen, a good leftist, went for his security clearance for a very high level presidential appointment, he was denied it. The media had ignored all the things that made him a suspect of subversion.

The press only does its job when it hates you.