However, if you are a conservative and every time you pick up your daily newspaper, you find that everything you believe, not to mention all the things you hold dear, are being ridiculed not only on the editorial page, but throughout the entire paper, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the day finally dawns when a lot of them are going to say, “Why am I paying for this bilge?”

The question that comes to mind is why a business, any business, would go out of its way to antagonize, depending on the city, between, say, 40 and 60% of its market. Is it possible that while my back was turned, the DNC bought up every paper in the country except for the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times?

Living in Los Angeles, as I have for the past 60-odd years, I’ve seen the L.A. Times bury one competitor after another. But ever since 2000, the paper has been slowly bleeding to death. In a desperate attempt to keep breathing, the paper has fired scores of employees and amputated entire sections. They’ve done virtually everything except try to put out a newspaper that doesn’t resemble one of James Carville’s wet dreams.

While I have no doubt that many of the 300,000 former subscribers simply decided there were cheaper, more convenient, ways to get the news, I happen to personally know that a good many left because of the paper’s relentless bashing of conservatives.

Even the letters to the editor are slanted. Rarely will they run a letter that disagrees with their editorial position. In fact, if you’re dying to see your name in the paper, all you have to do is attack George Bush or the war in Iraq. The Times will celebrate a blue moon or hell’s freezing over by publishing an op-ed piece by a conservative, but they absolutely draw the line at publishing a letter in praise of it. In fact, one could easily get the idea that Max Boot and Jonah Goldberg serve the same role as those poor saps at the amusement park who stick their heads through a hole in the wall so that the paying customers can bonk them in the noggin with baseballs.

I wouldn’t want to give you the idea that my hometown newspaper is entirely heartless when it comes to right-wingers. In fact, just recently, I had occasion to write the following letter to the editor: “First it was William F. Buckley who got a terrific, extremely respectful, front page sendoff. Today, it was Charlton Heston’s turn. Clearly, all a conservative has to do in order to get his just deserts from the L.A. Times is to die on a slow news day.”