I should start reading the paper, again...

I used to read the LA Times, daily, when I lived in LA. It's not a great paper but it kept me up on a lot of things I wouldn't ordinarily have known about. Sometimes it even had interesting interviews. Of course, its penchant for taking the more conservative viewpoint on any political or social issue was irritating, at times, but I could handle it...except for the political cartoonist they used -- Michael Ramirez. He was such a right-wing ideologue so filled with hatred for liberals it dripped from the ink he used, I had to stop even looking at the Opinion page or I'd blow a gasket.

I'm thinking this because the Pulitzers were awarded, yesterday, and the NY Times and Washington Post got several...and I'm wondering if it's just because they're the Times and the Post. Gleaning my info strictly from the web, I've grown to see both papers as collapsing icons of truth now used to proselytize in the name of their conservative masters. But I don't actually READ either paper...and that's not right. If I'm going to bitch about something, I ought to know what it is I'm actually bitching about...and make sure that bitching's from my own experiences and not someone else's. I don't like it when people deign to tell me what my opinion should be when it's the right wing nuts doing the telling; maybe I should be more careful not to fall into that same trap with the left wing.

I'm a liberal, no question, but I don't follow ALL liberal thought blindly. I support the right of Israel to exist and think 85% of the Palestinians' troubles stem from their own actions. And while I opposed the invasion of Iraq and think the Bush administration belongs in jail for war crimes, and I hate the idea of how many Iraqis were probably killed, I'm glad the initial invasion went without huge numbers of casualties against our soldiers; it could have been a bloodbath all the way around. That it still became one wasn't the soldiers' fault; it was the fools running things who made the situation so much worse for everyone involved.

So...I think I'll start reading the "New York Times". Of course, that's between moments when I'm writing or working or just trying to be human. Doesn't leave many minutes in the day.