DOBBS FILES FOR DIVORCE FROM REALITY.

DOBBS FILES FOR DIVORCE FROM REALITY. Now maybe it isn't fair to blame Lou Dobbs. Maybe it's the unwritten rule of television news programs (FOX excepted) that commentators must subscribe to a lower-brow version of the "pox on both their houses" David Broder school of punditry, no matter how vacuous and unfactual, that's making him do this. But Dobbs� column on cnn.com today is misleading to an extent that makes it inappropriate for a respected news organization to publish it. Here are a few problems, listed in increasing order of egregiousness:

...most of that money for Democrats and Republicans alike comes from corporate America. So what will be the outcome of this election? The only certainty is that corporate America will get what it's paid for, and that's more of the same.Whether the Democrats or Republicans take control of the House and Senate, corporate America has just bought a license to outsource more middle-class jobs to cheap foreign labor markets, to continue unabated so-called free trade and the destruction of more manufacturing jobs, and most likely to promote amnesty for the 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens living in this country.

Now, corporate money plays a horribly outsized role in American politics, to be sure, but it's surely worth distinguishing the party that's a wholly-owned servant of business interests from the one that includes business among a number of countervailing interest groups -- Democrats certainly don't take nearly as high a proportion or total amount of corporate money as Republicans. Second, one can contend that Democrats have allowed manufacturing jobs to dissipate and corporate-friendly free trade deals to proliferate when they've been in power, but clearly, whether you look at who voted for CAFTA (overwhelmingly Republicans) or which statewide and national candidates have made the loss of manufacturing jobs a campaign issue in the last few cycles (John Edwards, Sherrod Brown, and other Democrats), it's not fair to say Democrats as a whole are as content as Republicans to allow these conditions to persist.Dobbs goes on to really outdo himself:

Neither party at the national or local level is talking about what to do about the education crisis in our public schools. Both parties seem to think a 10-year plan to measure the decline of our schools through the No Child Left Behind law is an adequate response to what is an outright emergency.And God forbid we should disturb the orthodoxies of both parties that insist that we not secure our borders and ports, despite radical Islamist terrorist threats.

This is just absurd. As Dobbs well knows, NCLB was a Republican initiative and even the Democrats who backed it, like Ted Kennedy, have since come out against it for lack of funding. Improving education is a major platform plank for Dems nationally and at the state level (as in New York, where they had to sue Gov. Pataki to get the state to meet its funding mandates for New York City under the state constitution). And as for port security? Nevermind the fact that both the Kerry campaign and congressional Dems have made increased funding for port and rail security top priorities, doesn't Dobbs remember the brouhaha Dems raised over the Dubai ports deal? Shouldn't that have warmed the cockles of his nativist heart? Why does Dobbs write this nonsense?

--Ben Adler