Don’t Get Mad, Get Even Mr. Bush #41

Reuters carries former President George Herbert Walker Bush’s angry reaction to “when the journalists' rhetoric goes beyond skepticism and goes over the line into overt, unrelenting hostility and personal animosity.” Speaking at a journalism event, the elder Bush said:

"I won't get too personal here -- but this antipathy got worse after the 43rd president took office," the former president said. He was speaking at a reception for a journalism scholarship awarded in honor of the late Hugh Sidey, White House correspondent for Time magazine.

"And so bad in fact that I found myself doing what I never should have done -- I talk back to the television set. And I said things that my mother wouldn't necessarily approve of," Bush's father said, according to a transcript of his remarks.

All well and good. But, it’s far beyond time to put your money and friends where your mouth, and anger, is.

Griping or watching lips won’t do.

It’s well beyond time for all those with public standing and resources to come together and fund a major organized effort to energetically expose, confront and combat the grossest excesses of the media and of those politicians it gives a pass to in their irresponsible and erroneous attacks. End your quibbles, and concentrate on the bigger picture: we are in a war, that if we fail to prosecute to a win will propel us and others into far worse.

The elder statesmen of politics, commentary and business owe that back to their country and fellow citizens.

A former generation of elders largely abdicated the fight during the Vietnam war, leaving much of the determinative portion of the war on the home front to radicals and (fewer compared to now) politician ninnies. Now grayer, those graduates of the ‘60’s have risen to political and media power, and are more excessive than ever.

Get off your comfortable duffs, get out your wallets, get organized, get active. Get going. Get even.

Your country, and other countries, depend upon you, more than ever, to do so.