Day: June 16, 2002

How hypocritical can you get?

/ Kevin B. O'Reilly

I guess that’s a rhetorical question, but I have an answer for you. Take Fred Barnes. Please. He spoke to an IPJ group last Sunday, I think it was, on whatever he wanted to talk about, I guess. There was no topic.

So he rambled on for a bit about what you should read to stay up on the news, that you had to get a fresh angle on stories, and that print was the most influential medium in D.C. Don’t do TV, he said. “Sure, the money’s nice, but it just takes up time you could be using to write.” OK. Then why do I see him on TV three times a day? Why has he made his whole career off peddling second-rate opinion columns but jumping in front of a camera every chance he gets.

Learn to practice what you preach, Fred. Jeez. Yeah, the money’s nice. Just say so, then. Don’t pretend like someone’s twisting your arm, making you do TV when you’d gladly be earning less money and remain completely anonymous like most scribes in the nation’s capital. Ah, well.

9/11 reform is a joke

/ Kevin B. O'Reilly

Does anyone seriously believe that promoting the ineffectual Office of Homeland Security to cabinet department-level status will make a difference? Cato’s Ivan Eland calmly and coolly obliterates the arguments for a Homeland Security Department in this Newsday op-ed. Eland concludes:

Consolidating even more numerous disparate and sometimes dysfunctional agencies into a new department is likely to result in the same problems and a burgeoning secretarial bureaucracy to attempt to control the whole unwieldy cacophony.

Uh-huh. Dubya just wants something done. It’s the story of his entire presidency — appearance over substance. But I suppose that should not come as a surprise, except to conservatives who actually thought it made a difference whether Gush or Bore was elected.