Jim Webb’s response to the SOTU was a recap of the WSJ article we already commented on. And Nathan Smith’s analysis points out the difference between conservative and liberal approaches to poverty, which I believe helps to define a major distinction between compassion and populism.

The compassionate see the plight of the poor and seek ways to address it. Compassion has a certain degree of political appeal.

The populist exploits envy or resentment on the part of the less well off. Pols like Jim Webb gamble that this approach has an even larger appeal.

“Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still alive.”

Those of us who watched the news when there were only three networks and only one evening news time slot remember the death watch NBC maintained over the Spanish dictator.

In those days (1975), there was no cable news, no talk radio, and no blogosphere. (You would have a difficult time explaining “blogosphere” to someone in 1975.) The evening news did not carry stories about celebrity crimes (only their divorces), reality TV had just begun with the Loud family, and the imminent climate crisis was the coming ice age. The only media was the mainstream media, an institution in its heyday of power, which saw itself as having succeeded in not only getting U.S. troops out of Vietnam, but in cutting off military aid to the South Vietnamese afterwards.

But the MSM rarely covered news outside the U.S., just as today, unless it involved a disaster or conflict which took American lives. This fact was often brought up by foreign visitors, starved for news from home, whose only source of international news was a day-old newspaper from the airport or downtown newsstand in the nearest big city.

This fact was also apparent to John Chancellor, anchor of NBC Nightly News, who also served as a former foreign correspondent during his career. Wanting to devote more of the program to international events while trying to attract more viewers away from the more popular Walter Cronkite, he latched on to the imminent death of Franco, whom many journalists referred to as “the last remaining Fascist dictator in Europe.” (Tito, CeauÅŸescu, Dubček, Kádár, Jaruzelski, Honecker, Brezhnev, Hoxha, etc., while arguably fascistic but nominatively not Fascists, didn’t count.) Unfortunately, Franco didn’t die right away, and Chancellor became stuck in a daily “still alive” report that was later ridiculed on Saturday Night Live.

The segment of the population that was too young to remember WWII back then was about as large as those who are too young to remember the fall of the Berlin Wall today. Even fewer remembered the Spanish Civil War (which by then was no longer taught in schools beyond a paragraph in a world history book). And it was difficult to renew indignation against Franco’s past, when the Spain that he ruled was peaceful and prosperous, especially when compared to the brutal and backward states that made up Eastern Europe.

When Augusto Pinochet died in December 2006, few remembered the 1973 coup that bought him to power, until the MSM reminded us. What they didn’t remind us was that the Chilean Congress, Supreme Court, and a national referendum conferred the presidential title on him, and that he surrendered to a later referendum, leaving a peaceful, prosperous nation as his legacy. But the MSM continued to refer to Pinochet as a “dictator.”

Which brings us to Fidel. As of this writing, he is still alive, but could very well be dead. The MSM doesn’t give us much news from Cuba, much less cover the plight of the hundreds of dissidents rotting in Cuban prisons. But they did cover Cindy Shehan’s visit to protest Guantanamo. And how do they refer to poor Fidel? “President” or “Leader,” but “dictator” is not in their style manual.

Don’t believe me? Take note when Castro finally dies (or is reported dead), and see how it’s reported.