It's time to say it: The Harrisonburg (VA) Daily News Record is the worst rag in journalism.

[Faygo Kid]

I don't live in Harrisonburg. I know James Madison University is a fine school. My late in-laws lived there, and I spent a lot of time there in the 1980s-90s. They were driven crazy by what a horrible newspaper they had to put up with then, and it has gotten no better. If you want to read a completely bonkers, right-wing rag that has the analytical skills of a fourth grader and parrots Rush Limbaugh, then the Harrisonburg Daily News Record is for you.

Harrisonburg is a nice community that deserves better than this ignorant, hate-filled sheet.

Here is an excerpt from Sunday's editorial. Every day sees the same repugnant slant:

Mr. Obama's Trip

Barack Obama’s journey to the Middle East and Europe, has, of course, been the subject of more media coverage than one would have thought possible, but the media’s being in the tank for Mr. Obama is nothing new. Even the media’s top leftists admit it.

Then again, nothing is new in anything he said on his campaign trip. Yes, it was a campaign trip, the idea being to show Americans how popular this grasping megalomaniac is overseas so more Americans will be inclined to vote for him. If this weren’t a campaign trip, why make it? As one columnist observed, Mr. Obama could have gone to Afghanistan as a senator. He could have visited Berlin as a senator. Why now? The answer is obvious. . .

. . . Mr. Obama’s odyssey was a big publicity stunt for a man short on credentials and long on warmed over Marxian mush. The thought that he and his retinue of daffy disciples could wind up running the country is almost too frightening to contemplate.

http://www.dnronline.com/opinion_details.php?AID=30171&CHID=36&sub=Editorial

These maniacs are just a paragraph short of calling for his outright assassination, and they grow closer to that each day. Decent people in the Shenandoah Valley need to speak up and reject this hatred.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

1. What the hell?

That's a real newspaper?

[Faygo Kid]

3. It has print and ink. But that's it. It is deranged in its full-blown hatred.

It is the print equivalent of right-wing radio, and it's shocking that the good people of the Valley don't boycott such hatred.

Scary stuff from scary people. Bush dead-enders, and worse.

[Postman]

2. The reaction to Obama in Europe is due to the psychopath in the White House now.

The only ones left standing who approve of the Bush Administration are their sycophant apparatchiks and the mentally disabled, no offense to the mentally disabled.

No sane, thinking, rational human being can possibly be voting foe a republican. Period.

[yellowcanine]

4. The had a column by Michelle Malkin in the same issue. Enough said. I look forward to them

downing a big helping of crow when Obama wins Virginia along the way to a crushing defeat of McCain.

[treestar]

5. One can only wonder what they said when McSame went abroad

No, one need not wonder.

[Blue_Tires]

6. wow...just wow

those 'necks are overflowing with jealousy and hatred...i hope an obama win pushes them to suicide

[Blue_Tires]

7. ttt

[Lyric]

8. I used to live there, and I was one of the few "liberals" whose LsTTE

were always printed. The editorial guy (his first name was George, I can't remember his last name) used to argue with me back and forth in e-mail about political issues, but he always printed my letters. I think he respected me in some strange way--like a worthy opponent. I used to have a refrigerator door covered with clipped prints of those letters. I wish I had held on to them.

And yes, the DNR is horrible. They make no attempt to pretend neutrality. They might as well put the Republican Party logo in the front page of every edition, because all of their stories and opinion pieces are so slanted that they make Faux News look "fair and balanced."

Of course, the community itself is just as bad. I lived in Harrisonburg/Rockingham County for nearly nine years, and went to high school at Turner Ashby HS in Bridgewater. The whole community is deeply, intensely religious, with a sizeable Mennonite population in Rockingham County and lots of fundamentalist Christians everywhere else. I had a friend who ran a metaphysical bookstore there and was trying to start up a CUUPs chapter, but I don't think she ever managed to keep it going.

We moved back to West Virginia (my home state) when a woman named Sharon Bottoms had her child taken away solely because a Virginia circuit court judge decided that as a lesbian, she was a "habitual, unrepentant felon", and was therefore an unfit parent. We heard that Ms. Bottoms eventually got her child back, but our own child was about two years old at the time, and we weren't willing to take any chances. We fled to West Virginia, where there haven't been sodomy laws (or the death penalty, for that matter) in thirty-odd years or longer.

Strange that backwoods, "uneducated" West Virginia, the object of so much DU contempt, is far more progressive that the state that Thomas Jefferson called home.

[Blue_Tires]

9. good insights

of course Western VA is different from North, Central or Eastern VA... but sadly sometimes the other three regions are not different enough