Sunday, August 03, 2008

Political imaginations running wild

Some people try to counter the fact that outspoken people like Dan Rather and Katie Couric dominate a mainstream media with a bias toward a statist ideology by claiming implausibly that they actually veer to the right.

Here is another nail in that coffin. Lexington Herald Leader columnist Tom Eblen said this morning, in his description of the Fancy Farm picnic:
"Young Republicans dressed as Arab sheikhs, “thanking” Lunsford for higher oil prices, through some stretch of the political imagination. Young Democrats dressed as characters with the names “Texas Oilman Mitch” and “Bush's Lapdog Mitch.”"

Lunsford hopes to join a party in the Senate that has quashed every effort to expand domestic oil exploration for many years. Joined by a handful of "Republicans" who agreed with them the last few years, they have been able to shut off the domestic spigot unimpeded for decades. Seeking to add one more vote to that sentiment, as Lunsford does, is indeed worthy of appreciation from Arab oil producers.

And that brings us to the next sentence in Eblen's column. How can Lunsford's support for rising oil prices be imaginary when the "Texas Oilman Mitch" character isn't worthy of any kind of derogatory mention?