So I just got done listening to NPR for the better part of two hours. I've learned two things:

First, it's not the left-wing bias, worldview, commentary, or writing that gets to me. I can deal. It's the music. Michael Kelly died today (requiem aeternas), and the music that played after the memorial peace was more jingly and upbeat than the funereal dirge they played when announcing that U.S., U.K., and Australian forces were within twenty miles of Baghdad.

The music ranges from inappropriate to insulting to jarring.

The second problem is not with NPR. It goes like this: I think a significant percentage of the black community in this country is in the middle of a delusional psychosis. I don't think every black American is like Maxine Waters -- God forfend -- and I know NPR was looking to play up opposition to war in Iraq in the black community, but:

The sheer begging for socialism is insane. More money for housing! Right. Ever hear of something called "the projects"? My dad grew up in them (for a little while) when they were only government-built and funded slums ... before they went downhill. Always paid for and cared for by HUD, by the way. I wanna know how much a 21,000 pound bomb costs, anyway! They can find the money for that, and there are people starving in this country! In order: A Daisy Cutter, which is about one third the size of a MOAB, costs $27,000 per. As a rule, (conventional) bombs get slightly cheaper with size, but for the sake of argument, let's say each MOAB costs $81,000. So? Ten of those is $810,000. At one hundred, you'd have enough to seed the funding for an additional level of incompetents to oversee Social Security! Think the lines are bad, the customer service actually evil, and the outlays pitiable now? Let's see what happens when you drop a whole new shock team of bureaucrats in! If you think that money would actually go out in the form of classic income transfers, I have a bridge on Long Island I'd like to offer you. And anyway, starving? You gotta be shitting me. I watch my paycheck bleed every week so that the poor kids nearby (and far away) can get fat -- and rest assured, they do.

This, ladies and germs, is what I'm talking about. It's nuts. I can't bring myself to believe most black people are this crazy; it simply wouldn't make sense. I'm forced to conclude that either a small group of nutcases, who comprise the majority of these sentiments in the black community, showed up at one well-covered rally; or a sizable enough percentage of black Americans are nuts to give an impression of the whole.