Robert Sheer Dumped by LA Times

Wait, I thought this was a free country? I thought we had tolerance for differing views? I thought we loved the truth? Oh, we love CONSERVATIVE truth.

Well, that IS different.

Scheer's forceful and independent commentary has often placed him in the middle of national debates. He has been one of the strongest critics of the White House over the Iraq War. For instance, in a pre-war column (8/6/02) that undercuts the current notion that everyone got the WMD story wrong, Scheer wrote that “a consensus of experts” told the Senate that Iraq’s chemical and biological arsenals were “almost totally destroyed during eight years of inspections.” Shortly after George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech, and well ahead of the pack, Scheer (6/3/03) called White House pretexts for war a “big lie.”

Scheer was also one of the first columnists to call for withdrawal from Iraq, in a November 4, 2003 column that presaged shifting public opinion on the issue--though his position is still hard to find among his fellow pundits. More than 1,700 U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis have died since Scheer’s call for withdrawal was published.

In 1999, with a Democrat in the White House, Scheer used his column to expose the racism and unfairness driving the government's (and media's) case against Wen Ho Lee, a Chinese-American scientist wrongly accused of spying. And when a federal court struck the words “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance in 2002, Scheer was one of the rare media figures who bucked the Republican/Democratic consensus by strongly defending the court's decision (See Extra! Update, 8/02.)

--snip--

"The Times has suggested that (Robert) Scheer's firing was simply part of a larger revamping of its opinion pages, but Scheer says he was fired for ideological reasons and because the Times' corporate parent, Tribune Company of Chicago, was caving in to outside pressure from conservatives. As Scheer told Democracy Now! (11/14/05), 'What happened is that I had been the subject of vicious attacks by Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh…. I was a punching bag for those guys. I'm still standing, and the people who run the paper collapsed.'"