Here's an example from faraway New Zealand that offers proof that not every member of the foreign press is a Bush basher and America hater. You can bet there are more like-minded people out there, but probably afraid to express their view since the dominant McCarthyite left has a way of punishing anyone who dares stray too far from the reservation. So much for tolerance and diversity.
MM
condensed from: New Zealand News - Dialogue - Paul Thomas: Hear ye, hear ye, doomsday is nigh, yet again:
'Tis the season of the wolf. Crying wolf, that is. According to World Conservation Union officials, we're on the brink of the sixth mass extinction in the history of Planet Earth, with nearly 16,000 species in danger of disappearing.
Dr Helen Caldicott, Aussie Nobel Peace Prize nominee could be described as the doom mongers' doom monger and, as befits a big cheese in the End-of-the-World industry, she doesn't deal in centuries, or even decades.
Eat, drink and be merry, folks, because it could be all over in four years.
Naturally, it's all the fault of those horrid Americans for re-electing a fascist hell-bent on world domination. Nuclear Armageddon here we come. A hard rain's gonna fall and wash away every last one of us. We might get one more crack at the Rugby World Cup but if you were saving to go to the Beijing Olympics, forget it.
It's not that I'm cynical, but I am a little doomed-out. There's always an expert out there predicting apocalypse tomorrow. The thing they have in common is that they all know better than the elected politicians and a hell of a lot better than the great unwashed.
Back at the time of the first oil shock, the experts told us the world would run out of oil by 1995. Or was it 1985? Then there were the 300-odd economists who wrote a letter to the Times predicting that Margaret Thatcher's free-market economic policies would reduce Britain to a post-industrial parking lot roamed by starving mobs.
Bizarrely, Britain's unemployment rate is now lower than in the good old days when trade union barons exercised the right of veto over economic policy on behalf of their membership and at the expense of the community.
Dr Caldicott is even more devastated by Bush's re-election than she was when Ronald Reagan won a second term, which was devastating for me as I was heavily involved in the anti-nuclear movement.
No doubt back in 1984 she was painting a grim picture of what the world could expect from four more years of Reagan. After all the USSR, or the Evil Empire as the old simpleton called it, was nuked up and ready to rumble.
But Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev negotiated the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the first arms control treaty that eliminated nuclear weapons. The INF treaty effectively ended the arms race and signalled the end of the Cold War.
You'd think Dr Caldicott would be less eager to rush to judgment these days, but one way to sustain a black-and-white world view over the long haul is to avoid testing it against events.
If you keep predicting disaster, chances are you will eventually be proven right. But if your predictions have been frivolous or hysterical, you'll find, like the boy who cried wolf, that when you do have something to shout about, no one will take any notice.
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