Too perfect to require comment - but I will anyway

Three quotations to think about:

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
- George Orwell

Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy.
- John Derbyshire

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.
- Thomas Friedman

Back in the 1920's liberals made excuses for "the excesses" of Benito Mussolini because he "made the trains run on time." In the 1930's liberals made excuses for "the excesses" of Adolph Hitler because he built superhighways and claimed he was building Volkswagens for the masses. In the 1940's liberals made excuses for "the excesses" of Joseph Stalin because he industrialized Russia. In the 1960's and to this very day, liberals make excuses for "the excesses" of Fidel Castro because he supposedly increased literacy in Cuba.

Here we are in 2009 and a liberal idiot is making excuses for "the excesses" of the jackbooted thugs who run China because those thugs are supposedly doing good things for the environment, which is untrue in any case. China's rulers are making polite noises to lefty environmentalist idiots like Thomas Friedman about developing alternative energy sources while they're building coal powered electricity generating plants and spewing out increasing amounts of pollution at a far greater rate than any other country in the world.

Does Thomas Freidman know this? Of course he knows it, every bit as much as his predecessor lefties knew that Uncle Joe Stalin was purposely starving millions of people in the Ukraine while the New York Times was writing about the Soviet economic miracle. For God's sake, the Chinese Communist government had to shut down the industries near Beijing in order to make the air quality decent enough to hold the Olympics. Does that sound like a country doing good things for the environment?

The more things change, the more things stay the same.

Hat tip to http://lyflines.blogspot.com/2009/09/quote-chain.html and to Jonah Goldberg of National Review who steered me to this.

A great letter about wrestling and the media

Jonah Goldberg at National Review's blog The Corner posted this letter from a reader which took me back even farther than the writer can remember. He talks about the World Wrestling Federation in the 1980's. I remember when me, Sam and Jas were watching Bobo Brazil wrestle the bad guys in the late 1950's. I don't know whether Sam and Jas realized that wrestling was phony back then, but I did. Just as I know the claims of fairness by ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and the New York Times are utterly phony.

Here's the letter for you wrestling fans:

"I’m 31, and when I was a kid the World Wrestling Federation would not admit that what it was doing was fake. We all knew Hulk Hogan and Jake the Snake were really just doing a big sweaty man-ballet, but they would never admit that fact. The media today is just like the WWF back then. They won’t admit that what they’re doing is phony, and that almost every supposedly non-partisan, registered independent host on the networks, CNN, and MSNBC is a liberal democrat. They, like the WWF in 80’s, will not admit that their obvious charade is phony."

Me again - I'm just re-reading that letter and realizing the writer was just being born when I was 31 years old. It's good to see a member of the younger generation is growing up smart. Or maybe this member of the younger generation is getting old enough to be smart.

There's an old political saying. I think it was Winston Churchill who used to say:
'A man who's a conservative at age 18 has no heart.
A man who's a liberal at age 30 has no head.'