The Washington Post's Manchurian Candidate

Let the blogswarm begin---Washington Post Managing Editor Philip Bennett lets the mask slip in an interview with a Communist Chinese propaganda mill and manifests effete Leftist fellow-traveling of the worst stripe:

Yong Tang: In such sense, do you think America should be the leader of the world?

Bennett: No, I don't think US should be the leader of the world. My job is helping my readers trying to understand what is happening now. What is happening now is very difficult to understand. The world is very complex. There are various complex forces occurring in it. I don't think you can imagine a world where one country or one group of people could lead everybody else. I can't imagine that could happen. I also think it is unhealthy to have one country as the leader of the world. People in other countries don't want to be led by foreign countries. They may want to have good relations with it or they may want to share with what is good in that country.

That is also a sort of colonial question. The world has gone through colonialism and imperialism. We have seen the danger and shortcomings of those systems. If we are heading into another period of imperialism where the US thinks itself as the leader of the area and its interest should prevail over all other interests of its neighbors and others, then I think the world will be in an unhappy period.

Yong Tang: So the world order should be democratic?

Bennett: Democracy means many things. How do you define democracy? As a Chinese journalist, you may have your own definition of democracy which corresponds to your history and your way of seeing the world. I may have another definition. Someone else may have their own definitions. Democracy means a lot of different things.

Let me give an example. Democracy in one sense means the majority decides, but it also means the rights of the minority are protected. As UK late Prime Minister Winston Churchill said, democracy is the least bad system that we have ever thught of. So democracy is never perfect. It always has problems. Our democracy here in the US has many contradictions, problems and challenges. So democracy is not a cure that could turn everything bad into good. It has its own advantages and its disadvantages.

Every time I see another idiotic utterance from the Hair Helmet Hamas, I think to myself---THESE guys think they're the elite in America?

If every American could sit in on a board meeting or shareholder meeting with the leadership of America's top companies, they'd walk away quite impressed with the intellect and drive of the American business executive.

If every American could hear just five minutes' worth of a Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting, they'd walk away convinced that America's military leadership represented some of the smartest and sharpest Americans around.

Whenever I hear America's top journalists teeing up propaganda soundbites which dictators will employ to break the will of political prisoners and erode the efforts of free nations to pressure them for peaceful regime change, I just shake my head.

It's real simple, Bennett---you can look up democracy in any dictionary and you'll see it's not compatible in any way, shape, or form with dictatorship.

Thank God that the U.S. is in the global driver's seat right now and not China, or you might find out what it's like to churn out government-mandated propaganda in a Chinese slave labor camp instead of spewing your weak-kneed equivocations in service of a brutal mandarinate from the sanctuary of a free nation made and kept so, to paraphrase John Stuart Mill, through the exertions of better men than yourself.

Of course, you probably wouldn't need the incentive of Chinese-perfected "reeducation" to churn out homilies to Maoism, would you, Phil?