Cowboy Confessional

It took a while for me to realize that San Francisco is an ongoing set of contradictions. Little wonder then that our local scandal sheet is similarly schizophrenic.

Despite my occasionally poking a finger in their editorial eye – an unwise affliction for a writer who pens op/eds – the San Francisco Chronicle is a decent paper. This may be faint praise given the current state of American journalism. As Bagdikian observed, “Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach’s Saint Matthew’s Passion on a ukulele.” Yet the Chronic strives to at least be a fine rendition of Tip Toe Through the Tulips.

But some days the Bay Fish Wrapper is accidentally comical.

Today’s Insight section – a few pages devoted to opinion and occasional puddle-deep analysis – carried an editorial demanding the U.S. Senate enact President Obama’s green house gas cap-and-canard (even my green friends admit it is a tax and nothing more). The paper’s impassioned piece implored “It’s time to take the undeniable problem of global warming seriously …”

A few pages earlier their columnist Debra Saunders cited an Environmental Protection Agency analysis showing global cooling over the last eleven years, a period in which the industrial ascendancy of China and India have ejected more carbon into the sky than every before.

Page six scientifically states things are cooling while page 10 claims the sky is boiling. The former was based on analysis and the latter on too many mushrooms at the last Rat Dog concert.

The San Francisco Chronicle’s fevered favoritism in all things ecological reminded me of the passion shown for their present paramour Obama. I have it from a reliable (unnamed) source within the Chronicle news division that during Obama’s campaign interview in the Baghdad by the Bay, Chronicle reporters were issued knee pads, though the option of which side of Obama to osculate was left to the individual journalist.

San Francisco Chronicle reporting of the new administration said nothing remotely negative of the green (as in new) administration. Today was no exception though the Chronic did relate that during last week’s whistle-stop in Africa, Obama said:

“No country is going to create wealth if its leaders exploit the economy to enrich themselves,” he said. “No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top, or the head of the port authority is corrupt. No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery. That is not democracy, that is tyranny, and now is the time for it to end.”

Quite a stern lecture, from a man who during the presidential campaign assured:

“We’re not going to get countries to embrace our values simply by lecturing … “

Shame that the Chronicle did not mention this most recent Obama contradiction. That many major mirrors in one editorial page would have given the Sunday paper two comic sections.

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