MSM is a used car salesman

The following is a very interesting perspective about our "Drive by

Media!" Victor Davis Hanson is a professor at Fresno State.

Keep in mind that Hanson wrote this article in August, 2006. Subsequent

events seem to have shown how well our Drive-by Media has succeeded in

its constant effort to create opposition to the Iraqi War. *

*/

/**California vs Iraq- The Eye of the Beholder*

by Victor Davis Hanson

'The American Enterprise Online'

August, 2006

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War-torn Iraq has about 26 million residents, a peaceful California

perhaps now 35 million. The former is a violent and impoverished

landscape, the latter said to be paradise on Earth. But how you envision

either place to some degree depends on the eye of the beholder and is

predicated on what the daily media appear to make of each.

As a fifth-generation Californian, I deeply love this state, but still

imagine what the reaction would be if the world awoke each morning to be

told that once again there were six more murders, 27 rapes, 38 arsons,

180 robberies, and 360 instances of assault in California yesterday,

today, tomorrow, and every day. I wonder if the headlines would scream

about "Nearly 200 poor Californians butchered again this month!"

How about a monthly media dose of "600 women raped in February alone!"

Or try, "Over 600 violent robberies and assaults in March, with no end

in sight!" Those do not even make up all of the state's yearly 200,000

violent acts that law enforcement knows about.

Iraq's judicial system seems a mess. On the eve of the war, Saddam let

Out 100,000 inmates from his vast prison archipelago. He himself sat in

the dock months after his trial began. But imagine an Iraq with a penal

system like California's with 170,000 criminals - an inmate population

larger than those of Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Singapore

combined.

Just to house such a shadow population costs our state nearly $7 billion

a year - or about the same price of keeping 40,000 Army personnel per

year in Iraq. What would be the image of our Golden State if we were

reminded each morning, "Another $20 million spent today on housing our

criminals"?

Some of California's most recent prison scandals would be easy to

sensationalize: "Guards watch as inmates are raped!" Or "Correction

officer accused of having sex with under-aged detainee!" And apropos of

Saddam's sluggish trial, remember that our home state multiple murderer,

Tookie Williams, was finally executed in December 2005. 26 years after

he was originally sentenced.

Much is made of the inability to patrol Iraq 's borders with Iran ,

Jordan, Kuwait , Saudi Arabia , Syria , and Turkey . But California has

only a single border with a foreign nation, not six. Yet over 3 million

foreigners who sneaked in illegally now live in our state. Worse, there

are about 15,000 convicted alien felons incarcerated in our penal

system, costing about $500 million a year. Imagine the potential tabloid

headlines:

"Illegal aliens in state comprise population larger than San Francisco!"

or "Drugs, criminals, and smugglers given free pass into California!"

Every year, over 4,000 Californians die in car crashes - nearly twice

the number of Americans lost so far in three years of combat operations

in Iraq. In some sense, then, our badly maintained roads, and often

poorly trained and sometimes intoxicated drivers, are even more lethal

than IED's (Improvised Explosive Devices.) Perhaps tomorrow's headline

might scream

out at us: "300 Californians to perish this month on state highways!

Hundreds more will be maimed and crippled!"

In 2001, California had 32 days of power outages, despite paying nearly

the highest rates for electricity in the United States. Before

complaining about the smoke in Baghdad rising from private generators,

think back to the run on generators in California when they were

contemplated as a future part of every household's line of defense.

We're told that Iraq's finances are a mess. Yet until recently, so were

California's. Two years ago, Governor Schwarzenegger inherited a $38

billion annual budget shortfall. That could have made for strong morning

newscast teasers: "Another $100 million borrowed today - $3 billion more

in red ink to pile up by month's end!"

So is California comparable to Iraq? Hardly! Yet it could easily be

sketched by a reporter intent on doing so as a bankrupt, crime-ridden

den with murderous highways, tens of thousands of inmates, with

wide-open borders.