By:  Charles Benninghoff

Washington, D.C. (July 22, 2009) - There was a time, say the 1950s through the 1980s, when life was really simple in the United States.  We had a phone company, for example, called AT&T - no, not that one - and it controlled just about everything including the type of telephone you could have in your house.  We also had a similar arrangement with television as just three networks called ABC, CBS and NBC controlled all of the news that went into your living room.

At the pinnacle of each network was the "anchor" newsman (there were no newswomen) who would usually drone on from 7 PM to 8 PM, giving a bland, unpunctuated view of local, state, national and world news.  There was not a lot of video in those days, as we have now; thus, the news anchor did a lot of copy reading.  About the only seemingly extemporaneous occurrence was that the networks might mix up the commercials, of which there were far less than now.

At the top of the hill that all news anchors had to climb was a monotone, handsome man named Walter Cronkite. 

Cronkite was sort of a "war hero" due to his exploits during World War II in North Africa and Europe where he would regularly join in with combat patrols, bombing runs over hostile enemy territory and the like.  Very young at the time, in his twenties, it was quipped that his oblivious nature to peril and danger was either a result of youthful exuberance or a psyche willing to risk all for a moment of fame.  No one attributed the conduct to heroism.

Kurt Schlichter wrote in Big Hollywood yesterday:  Cronkite was supposed to be the voice of the people of Middle America, but he was really just a loud voice speaking at them.  And soon after they turned and rejected the man Cronkite dubbed the smartest of presidents - Jimmy Carter!?! - and elected Ronald Reagan, he threw in the towel.  He passed the torch to Dan Rather, and the sun set upon the Golden Age of Media Liberalism.  For all his faults, at least Cronkite maintained a certain dignity, but Crazy Dan is a catastrophe.  When Rather dies, the quickest way to find his obits will be to Google the terms “Texas Air National Guard fraud” or “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?”

Of course, the reason that Cronkite called Peanut Farmer Carter the "smartest of presidents" is because he and Jimmy had a deal.  The deal was painfully revealed in the photo showing Carter awarding St. Walter the Medal of Freedom in a lavish ceremony in the White House in 1981.  It was, as Mr. Schlichter stated, after the American electorate threw Carter out of the White House that St. Walter figured his time on the national stage had passed.

Were his liberalism alone the sole subjects of his defect, no one would have eulogized his passing except, pardon the pun, in passing.  What Cronkite did that made him a relevant person to today's anti-American crowd is that he told the American people that he did not believe the war in South East Asia was winnable and that, therefore, America should withdraw its troops.  This pro-communist rhetoric emboldened the leftists in the United States, gave great hope to the communists killing American soldiers in Viet Nam (some 59,000 Americans died there trying to build freedom for Viet Nam) and forever placed him in the Pantheon of America's detractors which the universal left worships hourly.

What the left is blind to, of course, is that Cronkite has the blood of millions of innocent Cambodians on his hands because after the Americans withdrew, the communists sought to invoke the greater glory of the proletariat by executing man, woman and child in a historic event we now call the Killing Fields.  While impossible to nail down exactly, it is generally agreed that more than two million people were starved, beaten, shot, tortured worked to death by the Khmer Rouge communists in Cambodia because of Cronkite.  The killing got so bad, the Vietnamese communists became embarassed and invaded Cambodia to stop it.  The reason the left loves Cronkite is because the left loves for innocent people to die (they consider it birth control) and they are equally gleeful if America can be disgraced in the process.

But, that is not all.  St. Walter also tried to do the same thing in Iraq!  He urged the United States to abandon the fight for freedom in Iraq and return all of our troops forthwith.  Were it not for the strength of George Bush, something like that might have happened.  Had it, the left would have been even happier as more innocent life would be shed to the massacre that would surely follow in that country ripe with sectarian strife.

Thus, it is with these somber thoughts of national peril created by a so-called icon that this article is written.  What is iconic, however, is that the left is so predictable.  The left makes heroic someone despicable and makes an icon a man with the blood of millions on his hands.

St. Walter, so long, goodbye... good riddance.