The St. Louis Post-Dispatch was once a powerful, respected cornerstone of the Pulitzer publishing company. Today, it’s little more than a community newspaper. Some near-tomorrow, it will go the way of Rocky Mountain News. Its demise can be traced in large measure to the arrogance of its editorial board.
Take Eric Mink. This is a man who rose through the organization by leveling unfair, nearly libelous attacks on anyone who deviated from Mink’s party line. In the early 1980s, when Mink was already over his head writing about television, he launched an attack against Douglas Leonard, then head of programming for KETC Channel 9. Mr. Leonard’s crime was preempting a Nova episode of KGB, anti-Reagan propaganda.
This week, Mink’s thin skin exposed itself in his editorial, “St. Louis Is Not Conservative.” Mr. Mink’s sole criterion for measuring conservatism is, of course, election results. In Mink’s little mind, conservatives vote Republican, and liberals vote Democrat. To “prove” his point, Mink gerrymandered a statistical lie, weaving together 12 counties in the Southern Illinois-Eastern Missouri region which, added together, voted Democrat in their presidential votes in 2000, 2004, and 2008.
Also this week, the Post attacked the thousand-plus people who attended the Tea Party Protest at the Arch. An unnamed editorial the people who gathered to preserve and defend our Republic of selfishness. Editorial board member, Eddie Roth, went even further in his denunciation of our protests. First, Roth extended the paper’s accusation of pure greed against those who protested on February 27. Then Roth proclaimed that we protesters are imposters to the conservative creed:
I also think that true conservatives recognize the dissonance of staging a rally in these times in which the chant, essentially, is “me, me, me, me.”
We shall see. Mr. Roth, it seems, subscribes to the sick and twisted notion that only government can save us now. He ignores the fact that every step the government takes makes matters worse. Did the Wall Street bailout in September prevent a 6.2 percent GDP contraction in October through December? No. Did the stimulus pork stop the stock market from falling another 20 percent? No. Did Obama’s socialist budget stop the market from reaching mid-1990s levels? No. Has the government arrested the acceleration in joblessness? No.
Mr. Roth may pray on bended knee before the alter of Big Government until his pants rot; I will march alongside my fellow patriots and conservatives and small business owners until Washington Repeals the Pork and its authors Retire from public life.
With great assistance from Ed Martin, I have submitted a response to that editorial and to Mr. Roth’s little tantrum.
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