GROUND CONTROL TO MAJOR CRANK: CONSERVATIVES CAN BE HUMANE TOO

Get a load of Walter Cronkite's latest:

Do you believe most reporters are liberal? I think they're on the humane side, and that would appear to many to be on the liberal side. A lot of newspaper people—and to a lesser degree today, the TV people—come up through the ranks, through the police-reporting side, and they see the problems of their fellow man, beginning with their low salaries—which newspaper people used to have anyway—and right on through their domestic quarrels, their living conditions. The meaner side of life is made visible to most young reporters. I think it affects their sentimental feeling toward their fellow man and that is interpreted by some less-sensitive people as being liberal.

Back in the day, I was a journalist. But the difference between me and most journos was that I came equipped with a background in the underbelly of society--my dad was one of those half cop, half firemen entities called an Arson Investigator. I heard lots and lots of stories about criminal cruelty growing up, and about people's efforts to break the law, kill other people and generally be evil. When I as a journalist (making a whopping $12k a year) would cover stories about a son murdering his mother with a shotgun blast to the head or the county judge who was a cokehead (I never quite nailed that one down, but a local JP set him up for an untimely appointment with the DEA later on), it just confirmed in my mind one simple truth: The most humane thing we can do for the vast majority of law-abiding citizens is to find and lock up the bad guys. Yes, enforcing the law and locking up criminals is humane. It keeps the rest of us safe, to the extent that safety is possible. It keeps our children out of the hands of predators. It is the right thing to do. I went into Cronkite's Dickensian world a hard-nosed law and order compassionate conservative, and came out the same way. Say, you don't suppose liberal journalists start out that way too, do you?

Cronkite is as usual just setting up a team of straw men and swatting them down. In his mind, liberalism=good, anything else=bad, and he's justifying that prejudice on some nebulous grounds of being "humane." Whatever.