I didn’t have a chance to listen to any talk radio today. Therefore I have no opinions on anything and don’t know what to think or be up in arms about. I failed to download my programming from Rush, Sean and Medved and here I sit—a blank slate.

I must be more diligent to tune in tomorrow so I can recieve my orders from Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy HQ. I’ll have my pitchfork and torch at the ready.

As absurd as the above sounds, it is not far removed from the way many elites in the media establishment and in rarified liberal political circles think about those of us who hold conservatives views. Insulting? Heck, yeah. Wrongheaded? Beyond belief.

The latest evidence that these guys just don’t get it comes in the form of a study released by “non-partisan” (sure) Project for Excellence in Journalism, a group funded by the Pew Trusts (that’s a name you’ll hear a lot at the back of left-leaning programs on NPR.)

The study was highlighted in an online article headlined: “Talk Radio Helped Sink Immigration Reform“

Early in the article we read:

Talk radio focused on the immigration debate more intensely than the mainstream media did from April to June. . . Conservative hosts touched off a brushfire in the Republican base that President Bush and other party leaders were helpless to contain.

 The guys at the Project for Excellence in Journalism actually measured all the time conservative and liberal talk radio hosts spent talking about the immigration/amnesty bill and compared it to the time mainstream news outfits spent covering it.

Upon discovering that the conservative talk guys spent quite a bit more time focusing on it, what do they conclude? That Rush and Sean and Savage must have decided to try to kill the bill and therefore went to work whipping up the gullible, weak-minded listening masses into a stampede pointed at the congressional switchboard.

Here’s an alternative theory. Could it be that Rush simply knows his audience and, like any good programmer, chooses subject matter he knows they care about? Is it possible that Sean Hannity’s audience is leading him, rather than the other way around? Maybe. . .just maybe. . .conservative-minded radio listeners gravitate to Bill Bennet’s program, not to be told what to think, but to have what they already think validated?

Did it occur to the guys and gals at the Project for Excellence in Journalism to wonder why the mainstream network news outlets spent so little time focusing on an issue so many people were passionate about and that carried such huge implications for our nation’s future?

I think you know the answer to that.

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Were you looking for me thirty years ago this week? No? Well it’s a good thing. Because if you had been, you probably wouldn’t have thought to look for a kid from Wilburton, Oklahoma in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of New Mexico.

After graduating from high school in May (Senior ’77!) I spent a gloriously carefree Summer working at the local grocery store by day. By night, I dated as many area girls as I could juggle and played late-night/wee-hours tennis with my best friend. After all these years, it remains a serious contender for “best Summer ever.”

As this parenthesis of bliss nestled between the insecurities of high school and the complexities of college drew to a close I joined a group from the Baptist Student Union on a trip to the Glorieta Retreat Center in Northern New Mexico. There we and several thousand other college-age students from around the country heard inspirational speakers and attended breakout sessions.

In addition to the stunning beauty of the surroundings, one of the most striking things about the experience was the isolation from media. There were no radios (with 8-track tape players!), no televisions and, of course in 1977, no Internet. We joked about World War III breaking out without us knowing about it.

(Funny how we always assumed the next big thing would be “World War III.” Odder still that when it did commence on August 7, 1998 with the bombing of the U.S. embassies Kenya and Tanzania, few noticed. In fact, most still seem unaware that the battle for Western Civilation is on and we’re losing by default. But that’s another blog post for another day.)

Along those lines, I was speaking with a member of the camp staff about the isolation and he laughed. He said, “Yeah, it’s funny how college students get a little freaked out when they are cut off from all media. Every year without fail, a rumor starts flying around the camp that someone famous has suddenly died. Usually it’s Elvis Presley.”

Thus, I wasn’t surprised when, later on in the week, the camp started buzzing with the news that Elvis had died. “Hah!” I thought smugly. I’m not falling for that.” I knew better!

Except I didn’t.

I was never a fan. The Elvis my generation knew wasn’t the suave Rebel Elvis, but rather the cheesy Movie Elvis and then toward the end, the bloated Vegas Elvis. But none of that mattered. Elvis Presley was an icon THE icon of the postwar era. And we knew it.

And in a fleeting week of my life that I now know marked the dividing line between childhood and all that would follow, it seemed that the entire culture was crossing over, too.

Yesterday, middle daughter “G” turned 16 and got her driver’s license. Tomorrow morning we load up two vehicles and move oldest daughter “C” into a dorm at Baylor University (an event I waxed maudlin and treacly about in this post a couple of weeks ago).

That’s a lot of change to process in a 48-hour window—especially for my sweet wife.

She’s the one who did most of the driver’s training paperwork and accompanied “G” to the DMV. She’s the one who’s been staying up late nights sewing bedding, curtains, pillows and things for the dorm room. She’s the one fully caught in the cyclonic winds of emotion generated by the these two milestone events. (Topped off by the implausible reality that “O,” a.k.a., “the baby,” turned 14 a couple of weeks ago.)

So how’s she holding up?

 Well, at 1:32 a.m. this morning my wife gasped, threw off the covers, leapt out of bed, and frantically yelled, “Oh my gosh! We forgot to pick up the babies!”

After a few heart-pounding, disoriented seconds, I realized she was dreaming. Her eyes were open. She was talking and responding to me. But she was asleep—in the midst of a sort of night terror. (This is something she has experienced in the past during times of great pressure or emotional turmoil.)

As I learned later, in this particular nightmare all three of our daughters were babies again. And we had somehow, someway, lost them. And they weren’t with us any more.

“It’s okay honey,” I told her. “You’re dreaming.”

“Where are the babies!?”

“Honey, everything’s okay. We don’t have any babies.”

She turned to look at me. In the soft light of the digital alarm clock her face moved from alarm; to confusion as she begin to cross over into wakefulness; to. . . sadness.

This morning, as she recalled the episode, she told me that at that point, she realized she had been dreaming and basically said to herself:

“Oh. Right. The girls are big now. But where are they? Are they safe? She went up the list in her mind, O: She’s upstairs in bed. G: she’s spending the night with a friend. C: Did she make it home? I didn’t hear the door. It’s 1:30. . .is she home?”

She went up stairs and found C safe in her room, in bed. We hadn’t heard her come in earlier.

We laughed about it this morning. But it wasn’t so funny last night.

You see, time and Nature and Nature’s God have done their thing. That means both of us, each in our own way—in my blog posts and in her dreams—must come to grips with the truth:

We don’t have any babies.

Not anymore. 

Those of us who got all worked up over the McCain-Kennedy immigration amnesty bill earlier this year—and there were millions of us—repeatedly stated, as I did in this post, “Secure the borders first, then we’ll talk about what to do with the illegals we already have.”

The proponents of the bill, including the President, basically said, “Trust us. We will secure the border. Why look! We’ve appropriated money to build a fence and we’ve sent National Guard troops to help! So, go ahead and give us this amnesty.”

Our response. “We don’t believe you.”

Well, never has mistrust been so well placed and skepticism so fully validated. Check out this story in today’s Washington Times. Here’s the lead paragraph:

The U.S. Border Patrol is asking for volunteers among its agents to help build fences on the U.S.-Mexico border, even as President Bush is withdrawing half the National Guard troops he sent there last year to build fences.

Over at Hugh Hewitt’s blog, Duane Patterson comments on the story:

This is precisely why the blowback at the Senate’s comprehensive bill a couple of months ago was as high as it was. People simply don’t trust the government to keep its word, especially when it comes to enforcing immigration. 700 miles of fencing was passed by Congress and signed by the President at the end of last year.

Here’s a video clip I don’t think I’d ever seen before until the other day. It is a two-year-old Tiger Woods with his dad making an appearance on the Mike Douglas Show.

Tiger shows his swing to Mike and Bob Hope.

Earl Woods pretty much groomed Tiger to play professional golf from the womb. I guess it’s a good thing the guy actually had the gifts and desire to play, because if he had been born with a talent for the oboe or pottery rather than golf, his father would not have taken it well and he would be one emotionally scarred dude today.

Professional golf is the only sport I follow with any degree of passion. But I must say watching Tiger win 60-70% of the tournaments he bothers to enter is getting a little tiresome.

Not that he doesn’t deserve to win. He is obviously the perfect-storm combination  of God-given talent, parental preparation, and personal dedication and drive.  I don’t want Tiger to do worse. I want other guys to do better. 

Talent aside, the fact is, Tiger is often one of the only guys on the course who actually looks like a professional athlete.  Frankly, a lot of the guys out there look like, uh, me. Or him. . .

There was a time in professional baseball when guys like Babe Ruth could party, smoke, be fat, and generally let themselves go and still perform at a pretty high level because, like golf, the game had a lot do with hand-eye coordination. But aspiring major leaguers realized those days died back in the 60s. And when the money for being good at baseball got crazy huge, guys not only did everything they could (naturally) to be in top physical condition, some have been willing break the rules and do everything they can unnaturally.

Today there are more gifted golfers than ever before chasing a finite number of slots on the tour. But until more begin to think and act like professional athletes, Tiger may remain alone on the top tier of the world’s players.

Dateline—Holiday Inn; Richmond, Virginia.

Wrapping up three days of TV production here in Richmond which followed three days of radio production back home which was preceded by a couple of days of donor chats in Houston which came a couple of days after a three-day client trip to Charlotte, North Carolina.

Which tends to make me a little off balance. Why, I’m as bewildered as. . .; As bewildered as. . .

Hmmm. My euphemism/simile creation utility in my brain seems to be offline. It happens. In fact it happens more often than a. . . than a. . .  (dang it.)

It is at these times I sorely wish some enterprising soul would compile all the pithy sayings of Festus from the old Gunsmoke series and make them available in a searchable online database. Festus would be able to capture my level of disorientation. I just know it.

“Golly Matthew, that feller’s as bumfuzzled as a yearling hog in a goose-down frog strangler.”

Of course, it doesn’t actually make any sense. But it conveys the message all the same.

Here’s an entire web site that is basically a shrine to Ken Curtis, the actor who played Festus. (Sound warning: It starts playing a sound file of Ken Curtis crooning a song when you launch it.) It also features a page of little sound clips of Festus saying things like, “I’ll give it to you before you can say, ‘rat run over the roof with a piece of raw liver in his mouth.'” (No, I’m not making that up.)

Or maybe someone could come with with an automatic “Festus Euphemism Fabricator” along the lines of the Shakespeare Insult Generator. Until someone does, the internet isn’t fully living up to the hype.

So. . . Paid a visit to the family doc yesterday. I have pneumonia, I’m told.

Well, that explains a few things—including that sensation I’ve had for the last couple of weeks that I have inadvertantly inhaled an echidna in my sleep that has become lodged under my sternum.

Apparently my lifestyle — long stretches of high stress periodically relieved by seasons of bone-crunching stress and time-and-space-warping stress — has compromised my immune system a bit.

 Which also explains my blood pressure readings in the last couple of visits, featuring systolic and diastolic numbers that look like a bad SAT score.

Judging by James Lileks’ blog this morning, he’s feeling it, too. James writes:

This isn’t fun. The individual components of my life are fun; I still love what I do, but the aggregate effect is doubleplus unfun. I know it’s hard to understand why I can’t fix the flippin’ email and RESPOND to people to whom I owe responses, but the moment there’s one millisecond of free time the phone rings, or I have to make Gnat lunch, or the Oak Island Water Feature makes a horrid gurgle and I have to shut it off, or the dog yarks up half a crayon, or Gnat needs to have the spelling checked on her thank you notes – honest to God, I feel like a gong that’s being struck every 17 seconds.

All of which explains why God has been speaking loudly and consistently to me about the principle of the Sabbath lately. Seems that everywhere I turn, someone is teaching, preaching or writing about how we ignore God’s prescription of one day of rest in every seven at our peril.

It was even in the Wall Street Journal for crying out loud.

Message received, Lord. A sabbath rest is like tithing. You can never “afford” to do it. You just do it and trust Him to multiply the remainder. And He does.

James Lileks over at Buzz.mn has spotted several instances of the shameful phenomenon I described in this post below.

An excerpt:

Fred Phelps and his contemptible claque believe that God made the bridge fall because Minneapolitans didn’t round up the gays and burn them at a Loring Park bonfire, so they’re going to protest the funerals of the people who died in the bridge collapse.

Fred has issues.

If you haven’t been following the controversy over The New Republic’s Baghdad Diaries written by the anonymous “Scott Thomas,” don’t bother with this post. It’s too complicated to explain.

But if you have, you’ll be interested to know that The Weekly Standard is reporting that the author has now recanted. The opening paragraph:

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has learned from a military source close to the investigation that Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp–author of the much-disputed “Shock Troops” article in the New Republic’s July 23 issue as well as two previous “Baghdad Diarist” columns–signed a sworn statement admitting that all three articles he published in the New Republic were exaggerations and falsehoods–fabrications containing only “a smidgen of truth,” in the words of our source.

Back on July 18th I posted on the story under the headline, “The New Republic’s New ‘Fabulist.'”  It now seems that comparison was all too appropriate. And it serves as further evidence (as though we needed any) that the media elites cannot be trusted to check any story that fits their preferred narrative or report any news which doesn’t.