| OCR Text |
Show A5 The Emery County Review, Tuesday, September 23, 2008 VIEWPOINT Opinion and Letters to the Editor PUBLISHER’S VIEW Fighting Against the Sensational Established January 2, 2007 James L. Davis, Publisher & Editor w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w Colleen A. Davis, Co-Publisher, Office & Advertising Manager Josie Luke, Assistant Editor Lyndsay Reid, Advertising Design Paige Motte, Advertising Sales Kathy P. Ockey, Staff Journalist Casey Wood, Webmaster Our Vision To be a valued member of the communities we serve and to be trusted as an honest, truthful and reliable source of news. w w w Our Mission To inform, entertain and provide a public forum for the discussion of events impacting the people of the Emery County area and to inform with news and features relevant to those who call the Castle Valley area home w w w Our Principles We will be ethical in all of our efforts to provide information to the public. We will be unbiased in our reporting and will report the facts as we see them and do our best to focus on the good news of the county, its people, history and way of life. We will be strong and active members of the community and assist in any way that we are able. We will strive to provide the best quality product possible to our readers and advertisers...always. We will verify the details of news we are reporting and if a mistake is made on our part we will correct it immediately. We will always listen to suggestions on how to do our job better. James L. Davis Politics can be poisonous. Mix politics with a healthy dose of journalism and you have a witches’ brew that boils over until it touches everything. The political storm swirling around Commissioner Drew Sitterud and his legal troubles erupted into a full-blown hurricane last week as Commissioner Gary Kofford publicly called for his resignation and blasted the local media for not making a big enough sensation out of the story. Sitting in the commission chambers on that Tuesday morning you could feel the tension in the air and when Kofford began to speak during the public comments portion of the meeting you knew that whatever was going to be said wasn’t going to be pleasant. It wasn’t. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, that’s one motto that newspaper editorial staffs just about everywhere can agree upon. Whether a public commission meeting was the proper place for Commissioner Kofford to make his angry outburst, is a matter of debate. For those who feel that Commissioner Sitterud has not been properly punished for his misdeeds, perhaps it is. For those who believe the commissioner admitted his wrongdoing and is trying to continue to do the job he was elected to do, then the answer is probably no, it was not appropriate. You quite often see two faces of journalism in the world today: journalists who still endeavor to report the news, and journalists who endeavor to make the news. In covering the issues revolving around Commissioner Sitterud, The Emery County Review has attempted to report the facts to the best of our ability and without bias. When the story about charges against the commissioner first broke an article reporting the facts against Commissioner Sitterud ran on the front page. Realizing that in a small community rumors fly like a thrown dagger and can do as much harm, I wrote an editorial encouraging the community to let the legal system do its job before anyone jumped to conclusions about the commissioner’s guilt or innocence. I wrote the editorial because when all is said and done, when the issue is behind us, when the elections are over, we will still be a community and need to put our differences behind us. When Commissioner Kofford stated that he did not think we had sensationalized the story enough I at first thought I hadn’t heard him correctly. The journalism profession is accused of being too sensational virtually every day, yet here we were being accused of not being sensational enough. I believed then and I continue to believe now that it is not the job of journalists, especially small town, community newspaper journalists, to sensationalize any story, no matter how small, no matter how big. It is our job to report the news as accurately as we can and your job as the reader to interpret the news. Within the pages of The Emery County Review we will endeavor to keep our opinions right where they belong, on the editorial page…right beside your own. Editorial Submission Guidelines The Emery County Review welcomes and invites letters to the editor and guest opinion articles on public policy or current events. We welcome letters of thanks to individuals who have helped make our community a better place to live, work and play. The editorial staff reserves the right to edit all submissions for space constraints, clarity and errors in fact. Submissions must include author’s name and contact information. Contact information will not be published. Letter’s and opinion articles can be sent to jldavis@theemerycountyreview.com, mailed to The Emery County Review, P.O. Box 487, Orangeville, UT. 84537 or faxed to 435-748-2543. The Party is Over Patrick J. Buchanan The Crash of 2008, which is now wiping out trillions of dollars of our people’s wealth, is, like the Crash of 1929, likely to mark the end of one era and the onset of another. The new era will see a more sober and much diminished America. The “Omnipower” and “Indispensable Nation” we heard about in all the hubris and braggadocio following our Cold War victory is history. Seizing on the crisis, the left says we are witnessing the failure of market economics, a failure of conservatism. This is nonsense. What we are witnessing is the collapse of Gordon Gecko (“Greed Is Good!”) capitalism. What we are witnessing is what happens to a prodigal nation that ignores history, and forgets and abandons the philosophy and principles that made it great. A true conservative cherishes prudence and believes in fiscal responsibility, balanced budgets and a selfreliant republic. He believes in saving for retirement and a rainy day, in deferred gratification, in not buying on credit what you cannot afford, in living within your means. Is that really what got Wall Street and us into this mess -- that we followed too religiously the gospel of Robert Taft and Russell Kirk? “Government must save us!” cries the left, as ever. Yet, who got us into this mess if not the government -- the Fed with its easy money, Bush with his profligate spending, and Congress and the SEC by liberating Wall Street and failing to step in and stop the drunken orgy? For years, we Americans have spent more than we earned. We save nothing. Credit card debt, consumer debt, auto debt, mortgage debt, corporate debt -- all are at record levels. And with pensions and savings being wiped out, much of that debt will never be repaid. Our standard of living is inevitably going to fall. For foreigners will not forever buy our bonds or lend us more money if they rightly fear that they will be paid back, if at all, in cheaper dollars. We are going to have to learn to live again without our means. The party’s over Up through World War II, we followed the Hamiltonian idea that America must remain economically independent of the world in order to remain politically independent. But this generation decided that was yesterday’s bromide and we must march bravely forward into a Global Economy, where we all depend on one another. American companies morphed into “global companies” and moved plants and factories to Mexico, Asia, China and India, and we began buying more cheaply from abroad what we used to make at home: shoes, clothes, bikes, cars, radios, TVs, planes, computers. As the trade deficits began inexorably to rise to 6 percent of GDP, we began vast borrowing from abroad to continue buying from abroad. At home, propelled by tax cuts, war in Iraq and an explosion in social spending, surpluses vanished and deficits reappeared and began to rise. The dollar began to sink, and gold began to soar. Yet, still, the promises of the politicians come. Barack Obama will give us national health insurance and tax cuts for all but that 2 percent of the nation that already carries 50 percent of the federal income tax load. John McCain is going to cut taxes, expand the military, move NATO into Georgia and Ukraine, confront Russia and force Iran to stop enriching uranium or “bomb, bomb, bomb,” with Joe Lieberman as wartime consigliere. Who are we kidding? What we are witnessing today is how empires end. The Last Superpower is unable to defend its borders, protect its currency, win its wars or balance its budget. Medicare and Social Security are headed for the cliff with unfunded liabilities in the tens of trillions of dollars. What we are witnessing today is nothing less than a Katrina-like failure of government, of our political class, and of democracy itself, casting a cloud over the viability and longevity of the system. Notice who is managing the crisis. Not our elected leaders. Nancy Pelosi says she had nothing to do with it. Congress is paralyzed and heading home. President Bush is nowhere to be seen. Hank Paulson of Goldman Sachs and Ben Bernanke of the Fed chose to bail out Bear Sterns but let Lehman go under. They decided to nationalize Fannie and Freddie at a cost to taxpayers of hundreds of billions, putting the U.S. government behind $5 trillion in mortgages. They decided to buy AIG with $85 billion rather than see the insurance giant sink beneath the waves. An unelected financial elite is now entrusted with the assignment of getting us out of a disaster into which an unelected financial elite plunged the nation. We are just spectators. What the Greatest Generation handed down to us - the richest, most powerful, most self-sufficient republic in history, with the highest standard of living any nation had ever achieved -- the baby boomers, oblivious and self-indulgent to the end, have frittered away. (Copyright 2008 Creators Syndicate Inc.) |
