November 29, 2005
"I took a trip by myself in January of 2002 to Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria, and I told each of the heads of state that it was my view that George Bush had already made up his mind to go to war against Iraq — that that was a predetermined set course which had taken shape shortly after 9/11." So spoke Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) on “Fox Sunday ”on November 14, 2005, who at the time of his trip was chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and is now its vice chairman. Please read the first paragraph once again, digest it (if your stomach can handle it), and consider its immense – if not treasonous – implications. By himself and fully armed with America’s most sensitive intelligence, Sen. Rockefeller decided to go to three Arab countries – including Syria which is on the State Department’s list of terrorist regimes and a close ally of Saddam Hussein – and literally alert them to what (“in my view”) might befall a neighboring Arab state. This was Sen. Rockefeller’s judgment only four months after September 11th and a full year before President Bush had expressed any intention to go to war! By its very nature, Sen. Rockefeller’s solo trip, his lofty rank on one of the senate’s most prestigious and sensitive committees, and most important his words were no doubt received for what they were – a clarion heads-up! There is no doubt that even before he departed the palaces of his hosts, high officials from terrorist Syria, fair-weather-friend Saudi Arabia (that Sen. Rockefeller, with his Standard Oil inheritance, may feel very akin to), and even “moderate” Jordan, were telegraphing the president’s intentions to the Butcher of Baghdad: “Get ready! And whatever you have in the way of WMD, whatever can implicate us, get rid of them!” What followed Sen. Rockefeller’s treachery was the lengthy and painstaking road to war and the prelude to ways that he and other leftists have tried to sabotage the president, compromise National Security and undermine our troops. As author What was Senator Rockefeller doing? What was he thinking? How about an investigation …into what exactly [he] told Syria and just what Syria might have done with the information…before it was made available to the U.N., the Senate, or the American people? Sen. Rockefeller may have seriously harmed, impeded, and hindered our war efforts, our troops, and the entire operation in the Middle East. This should be investigated immediately; and perhaps Senator Rockefeller should step down from the Intelligence Committee until an investigation is complete.” What Happened Next – 2002
A full year elapsed and, with it, the grim first anniversary of the 3,000 innocent people who were murdered by Islamic terrorists on September 11th – also, a full year in which Iraq had both the means and opportunity to rid itself of its weapons of mass destruction. Thank you Senator Rockefeller! Time for Action – 2003
Although terrorists (invariably called “insurgents” by the old media) began pouring into Iraq from Syria (thank you Sen. Rockefeller!) and Iran, Democrats were beside themselves that under the president’s leadership, Saddam Hussein had been captured, the world was rid of his bestial sons, an interim democratic government had been installed in the former dictatorship, and there was hard evidence of democracy spreading throughout the Middle East. Out For Blood – 2004 January: It was nothing short of thrilling to the languishing liberal leftists – who preach freedom but practice appeasement – when David Kay, former head of the U.S. weapons-inspection teams in Iraq, told a senate committee that no WMDs had been found in Iraq. Five days later, President Bush called for an independent commission to study intelligence failures, but even that could not stop the monotonous and malevolent mantra that drones on to this day: “Bush lied – thousands died.” April: The Left was once again salivating at the prospect of undermining the president when the Abu Ghraib prison scandal erupted with accusations of the abuse by American soldiers of terrorist detainees. While the old media blared the story for months on end, they all but ignored the beheading by Arab terrorists of American Nick Berg. June: Liberals and the old media took more swipes at the president with the release of the 9/11 Commission’s report and its finding that there was no connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq (another canard that has since been disproved). But the panel’s credibility was immediately called into question because one of its members, Jamie Gorelick – second-in-command at the Clinton White House Justice Department – had created “the wall” that prevented intelligence agencies from sharing information with the F.B.I. Since then, the commission’s credibility has been further eroded because of its refusal to interview members of the Able Danger project in which five Special Ops agents claimed to have identified Mohammed Atta and three other 9/11 murderers as possible members of an al Qaeda cell operating in the United States two years before the September 11th attack. The commission called the revelation”not historically significant,” which former FBI director Louis Freeh labeled “an astounding conclusion” that “raises serious challenges to the commission's credibility and, if the facts prove out, might just render the commission historically insignificant itself.” The Able Danger mission became public in June 2005 but hearings on this crucial subject – and testimony by its participants – was forbidden by the Department of Defense. Again, the old media – ever the stooges of the Clinton administration and its egregiously harmful foreign policy – have studiously avoided this explosive story, although Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) has been trying to keep it alive. November 2: President Bush reminded his liberal opponents what character and commitment are all about by winning an overwhelming reelection victory. Yet another year had passed and the desperate Democrats and their media echo chamber grew increasingly enraged that their best efforts to depose the president and his majority in the House and Senate were abysmal failures. The Circling Sharks – 2005January: Nearly eight million Iraqis took part in the first free election since 1954 to overwhelmingly approve the drafting of a new constitution. October 15: Once again, Iraqis voted in the millions to ratify the draft constitution with 78 percent in favor, 21 percent opposed.
Having utterly failed to undermine the president in over five years of relentless attacks, leftists in Congress and the old media nevertheless plowed on. Smelling blood in Washington’s roiling, polluted waters, they indicted and all-but-imprisoned at least a dozen of the president’s cabinet members and high-ranking advisors in the Wilson-Plame case. October 28: After 18 months of grand jury investigation, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald announced a solitary indictment, which is already being called into question. This seemed to be the final straw for the leftists. Driven half mad by an economy that is booming under the Bush administration and the inspiringly positive (but unacknowledged and unreported) progress in Iraq (see www.theotheriraq.com and www.iraqitruthproject.com), they jumped on the president’s recent, media-driven “defeats” to embark on a revival of their tired “no WMD” refrain. What About Those WMDLeave it to liberals to ignore the obvious. For the past two years, international security experts like John Loftus have been saying that because the U.N. and French obstructionists delayed the United States entrance into the Iraq war for over a year, Saddam Hussein – having been forewarned by Sen. Rockefeller’s solo mission to the Arab world – was busy ferreting his WMD out of Iraq. Loftus, an attorney and former Justice Department prosecutor, once held some of the highest security clearances in the world, with special access to NATO Cosmic, CIA codeword, and Top Secret Nuclear files. As early as January 2003, Loftus said, U.S. intelligence had identified a stream of tractor-trailer trucks moving from Iraq to Syria to Lebanon, but that “the significance of this sighting did not register on the CIA at the time.” U.S. intelligence sources, Loftus continued, “believe the area contains extended-range Scud-based missiles and parts for chemical and biological warheads.” In August 2003, Loftus reported that U.S. intelligence suspected they had located the WMD, but “getting to them will be nearly impossible for the U.S. and its allies because the containers with the strategic materials… are located in Lebanon's heavily fortified Bekaa Valley, swarming with Iranian and Syrian forces, and Hizbullah and ex-Iraqi agents.” And according to DEBKA files: “The relocation of Iraq’s WMD systems took place between January 10 and March 10 (2003) and was completed just 10 days before the US-led offensive was launched against Iraq. The banned arsenal, hauled in giant tankers from Iraq to Syria and from there to the Bekaa Valley under Syrian special forces and military intelligence escort, was discharged into pits 6-8 meters across and 25-35 meters deep dug by Syrian army engineers. They were sealed and planted over with new seedlings. Nonetheless, their location is known and detectable with the right instruments.” Last year, columnist Larry Elder reported that a Syrian journalist who defected to Paris reported that his friends in Syrian intelligence told him “exactly where the stuff is buried." He named three sites in Syria, which the Israelis confirmed. They know where the stuff is [and] we know from Israeli and defectors' intelligence that the son of the Syrian defense minister was paid 50 million bucks to bring the stuff across the border and bury it.” And just this month, the Weekly Standard’s Stephan Hayes reported on new documents that revealed that “recently discovered Iraqi documents now being translated by U.S. intelligence analysts indicate that Saddam Hussein's government made extensive plans to hide Iraq's weapons of mass destruction before the U.S. invasion in March 2003 – and had deep ties to al Qaeda before the 9/11 attacks.” Bill Tierney, a former military intelligence officer who worked at Guantanamo Bay in 2002 and as a counter-infiltration operator in Baghdad in 2004, was an inspector for the U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM) for overseeing the elimination of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles in Iraq from 1996 to 1998. Tierney recently told FrontPageMagazine.com: “It was only after Saddam realized that President Clinton lacked the nerve for anything more than a temper-tantrum demonstration that he knew the doors were wide open for him to continue his weapons program.” He goes on to say, “I believe Saddam planned for a U.S. invasion after President Bush’s speech at West Point in 2002. One of the steps taken was to… destroy or move WMDs to other countries, principally Syria. Starting in the summer of 2002, the Iraqis had months to purge their files and create cover stories.” The Left’s Rampant HypocrisyNeither the old media nor the deceptive Democrats have investigated these explosive – and highly credible – claims, preferring to keep their “Bush lied” mantra alive in order to justify what they hope will be yet another opportunity to bring down the president. But their tactics have backfired. Now that the new media – the Internet, blogs talk radio and conservative journalists – have thrown back at them their own statements about Saddam’s dire threat and the urgent need for “regime change” (Sen. Rockefeller even went further than the president, calling the threat “imminent’) as well as their votes for the war, the mewling, puling Democrats have started another chant: “The intelligence was cherry-picked, we were misled!” – a chant that historian Victor David Hanson calls “intellectually dishonest and morally reprehensible.” Of course, this flies in the face of the conclusions of the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004, the Silberman-Robb commission in 2005, and the British commission headed by Lord Butler.
But liberals revile facts, which is why they continue to invoke the language of Vietnam – “quagmire,” “withdrawal,” etc. – and why they pretended to agree with Sen. John Murtha (D-PA), a decorated Vietnam War veteran, that we get out of Iraq immediately. But when brought to a Senate vote, 79 senators voted against Murtha’s plan and only 19 voted for it. In the House, the vote was 403 against and 3 for the proposition. (By the way, Murtha, who supported Howard Dean as DNC chairman, also voted to get out of Somalia 12 years ago).
As journalist Tony Blankely wrote during the brouhaha that preceded the vote: “The foul odor of the Vietnam War denouement wafted through the Senate chamber during the debate on Iraq…[proving] that no bureaucratic euphemism can cleanse the air of the stench of defeatism…Now the Watergate babies have grown old – and age has not improved them. They plan to finish their careers as they started them – in defeatism, betrayal and national dishonor.” TraitorsWhat is the difference between the kind of gutter politics Democrats routinely engage in for political gain and treason? If treason is, as The American Heritage Dictionary defines it – the betrayal of one’s country by consciously and purposefully acting to aid its enemies – then certainly those who abet our enemies while American troops are putting their lives on the line to defend our country are guilty as charged. The following statements reinforce this point: Bill Tierney, speaking about Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) citing a single source to “prove” no connection between Iraq and Al Queda: “Senator Levin, and his media servants think the public can’t read through his duplicity. He is plunging a dagger into the heart of his own country.” The FederalistPatriot.com: “The dishonest and politically motivated accusations of Kennedy, Reid, Durbin and their ilk, however, are nothing short of – and we don't use this term lightly – treasonous…how else to describe political leaders who so eagerly embolden our Jihadi enemies and erode the morale of our fighting forces in Iraq and around the world?” Ralph Peters, a retired Army officer: “Forget about the consequences. Forget about our dead soldiers…forget that our combat veterans are re-enlisting at remarkable rates…Just set a timetable for our troops to come home and show the world that America is an unreliable ally with no stomach for a fight…Tell the world that deserting the South Vietnamese and fleeing from Somalia weren't anomalies – that's what Americans do. For God's sake, don't talk about democracy in the Middle East. After all, democracy wasn't much fun for the Dems in 2000 or 2004. The irresponsibility of the Democrats on Capitol Hill is breathtaking. The Dems are ready to betray our troops, our allies and our country's future security for a few House seats. What do the Democrats fear…an American success in Iraq? They need us to fail.” Mark Steyn, international journalist: “…before they huff, `How dare you question my patriotism?’… Well, yes, I am questioning your patriotism – because you're failing to meet the challenge of the times. Thanks to you, Iraq is a quagmire – not in the Sunni Triangle, where U.S. armed forces are confident and effective, but on the home front, where soft-spined national legislators have turned the war into one almighty Linguini Triangle.” Jennifer King, a writer, has said that Sen. Rockefeller is “privy to wartime intelligence and thus…should feel compelled to stand on the side of his country during a war against an infinitely evil and implacable enemy. That he feels compelled, instead, to take the side of the enemy speaks volumes about the Democrat agenda and vision for the future.” Andrew E. Busch, professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in California: “This species of Democrats are once again proving, as they did in Vietnam in 1974-75, in Central America in the 1980s, and in Iraq during 2004, that they would rather lose a war than lose an election.” Dick Morris, former top White House advisor to President Clinton: “It was infuriating to hear [Clinton] deride the Iraq war to an Arab audience earlier in the week as a `big mistake’…for going to Dubai, a couple of hundred miles from where our troops are – darn near the middle of the war zone – saying that they're dying for a huge mistake." Don Bendell, former officer in four Special Forces Groups, including a tour on a green beret A-team in Vietnam in 1968-1969: “Wesley Clark, you are a retired Army general and John Murtha, a retired Marine colonel. Did you two completely forget a code of honor, supporting our troops, and tenacity in the face of adversity? Yes, you did, all for politics, which is empirically more important to you than the safety and psychological well being of our fighting men and women from whose ranks you rose. How many men under your commands died, so you could betray their legacy of courage by talking about cutting and running in the midst of a war? How dare you aid and abet the enemies of freedom, of democracy, of man’s inherent right to live without oppression, because of your egomaniacal visions…” Marcus Tullius Cicero (as quoted in the FederalistPatriot.com): "A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself." ***** Accustomed as he is to outfoxing, outwitting, and outmaneuvering his opponents and, by doing so, achieving his domestic and foreign policy initiatives in spite of them, President Bush has become seasoned in distinguishing legitimate debate from the rank hysteria of his largely impotent rivals. To his credit, the president ignores polls, avoids the leftist blather in the old media, retains his sense of optimism, responds invariably to the unremitting attacks against him by declaring “It’s just politics,” and – thankfully for every American – continues to keep his vision focused on the safety and security of America and on the heroic men and women who are fighting on the front lines to maintain those very goals.
When It Comes to America, Old Media Loves Bad News November 14, 2005
“There was another American death today in Iraq – the body count just keeps rising,” CNN’s Soledad O’Brien intoned the other day, while her co-anchorette empathically nodded and tsk-tsked. Soledad’s crocodile tears didn’t move me or fool me. Especially after it took her a mere nanosecond to seque from faux concern to delighted squealing: “What a great night it was for trick-or-treating last night, wasn’t it?” Of course, O’Brien – like simpatico leftists Couric, Imus, Harry Smith, John Roberts, the list, unfortunately, is endless – had three reasons for reciting the sad statistic. The Money FactorThe first was to boost the downwardly spiraling ratings of CNN (as well as those of the network and cable shows the others host). In the competitive world of TV “personalities,” where jobs are scarce, tenures are short, and the pay is fair (except in a few cases, where it is obscenely excessive), the here-today/gone-tomorrow likes of O’Brien have no choice but to obey the dictates of their superiors, i.e., those chief executives who echo the political philosophies of the stations’ owners. And why do those owners tout the liberal party line? Not because they believe it – the producer of the leftist propaganda show, “60 Minutes,” Don Hewitt, once told me: “I voted for Reagan twice!” – but because they think that’s where the big bucks lie. Yes, money talks, which makes the “ideologies” of hired hands questionable at best, unreliable at worst. Look no further than Paula Zahn’s largely conservative bent when she was hosting a Fox show and the political metamorphosis she underwent upon moving to CNN, or the liberal leanings of Geraldo Rivera at NBC and ABC and then his political transformation when he moved to Fox. In actuality, Zahn may be genuinely conservative and Rivera may be authentically liberal. But to pretend that the money they’re paid by the networks or cable shows that hire them doesn’t influence their “on air” opinions is sheer folly. The Bubba-Bush Factor The second reason leftist commentators cannot conceal their delight when something goes wrong for – or in – America is that they, like other liberals, have still not recovered from the impeachment of their Icon-in-Chief Bill Clinton, which is why they have been on a sustained rampage to impeach our current president. They might have recovered from this blow if President Bush had not beaten Clinton’s putative heir, Al Gore, in 2000. But the knockout punch, from which they’re still reeling, came after four years of utilizing their formidable resources to undermine, belittle, and vilify the president, only to see him overwhelmingly reelected in 2004. Since then, they have behaved like punch-drunk prizefighters who after sustaining traumatic head injuries can literally not think straight. How else to explain their seemingly purposeful distortion of cold hard facts or their amnesia about history itself? As they wake up every day in the freest country on earth, go to their high-profile jobs, engage in unrestrained free speech, and even pray to the god of their choice – which too often appears to be Cindy Sheehan or a Gitmo terrorist – they forget the history and sacrifice that has brought them to their very privileged lives. “The body count just keeps rising,” sniffled Harvard-educated O’Brien, reminding her (dwindling) audience that, “it’s now over 2,000.” As journalist Alan Caruba has said: “One got the feeling that the nation’s press was virtually salivating as it waited to report the two-thousandth U.S. casualty of the Iraq war, but consider that, in 2004, there were 16,137 murders in the United States. And on 9/11, more than 3,000 Americans died in a sneak attack,” Soledad must have missed the history class in which she would have learned that the Civil War that ended slavery and united the United States was won at a cost of 618,000 lives, that World War II claimed nearly a half-million lives, and that Vietnam exacted a toll of 58,000 lives. And also that neither Lincoln not FDR quit their wars because “journalists” told them to. Columnist Christopher Flickinger reminded his readers that: · On September 17, 1862, more than 26,000 soldiers – including some 12,000 Union soldiers – died in the Battle of Antietam. President Lincoln lost 12,000 men in one day, but did he quit? No. · On July 1863, after a three-day battle in the town of Gettysburg, more than 51,000 men lay dead including 23,000 Union soldiers. It was regarded as a major victory for the North and a turning point in the Civil War. · On June 6, 1944 – D-Day, allied forces sustained an estimated 10,000 casualties after storming the beaches of Normandy, France. But, General Dwight D. Eisenhower pressed his troops onward and won World War II. “Indeed,” said Flickinger, “let the dead teach the living! There is no price, no number too great for the cause of freedom.” Can you imagine O’Brien and her ilk reporting on any of those wars, sneering at Lincoln and slandering FDR? I can’t say the same for Vietnam because that war – fought for a noble cause but sabotaged by the leftists of the day – where the broadcasters who preceded O’Brien had the conceit that their judgment was equal if not superior to the U.S. government’s most sophisticated military intelligence. “But Iraq didn’t attack us!” is another mantra the public sees through. There’s that old history gap again! The Japanese did attack us but the Germans didn’t when Democrat FDR waged war against them. Korea didn’t attack us when Democrat Harry Truman waged war against that country. Vietnam didn’t attack us when Democrat John F. Kennedy sent our troops there. And Bosnia didn’t attack us when Democrat Bill Clinton (without U.N. or French approval) sent in the U.S. military. O’Brien and her fellow leftists know all this. But shameless as they are, they don’t hesitate to use the “Big Lie” tactic refined by the Nazis’ chief propagandist, Josef Goebbels, the same tactic that sent millions of Jews to their death during the Holocaust and now, I fear every day, is compromising the safety of the heroic men and women fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. As media analyst Roger Aronoff has said: “The sacrifices of our soldiers are for a noble cause that is transforming the Middle East. Our side is winning. Of course, the media don't like to think of themselves as being on `our side.’ And that is part of the problem our troops face day after day.” The Ego FactorThe third reason why the old media see only an empty glass when it comes to the legacy-making domestic and foreign-policy accomplishments of President Bush is because, for them, the personal really is political – and the political really is personal. As an ancient sage has said: “We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.” In other words, with the liberal media, it’s all about the self. It’s a personal affront to what they imagine are their superior IQs that the millions upon millions of words and images they brought to the American public during the 2004 campaign to convince them to vote for John Kerry were totally ignored and repudiated by the electorate. To this day, the sight of the red state-blue state map evinces a physical reaction in them – so emblematic is it of their failure! And it rankles them that the president doesn’t read or view their “opinions,” and, one can logically deduce, doesn’t respect them. This, I believe, is the overriding cause of the old media’s hysterical, unrelenting, hair-pulling hostility toward the president. Not his policies, which since September 11th have kept them all safe; not his sunny disposition and refusal to engage in the politics of personal destruction, which puts them all to shame; and not his measured responses to their rude assaults, which provide a dramatic contrast to their intemperate temper tantrums. Rather, it is the narcissistic injuries they’ve sustained by having a president whose visionary policies – from democratizing the Middle East to renewing New Orleans with conservative policies to creating a conservative Supreme Court, the list goes on – fly in the face of everything they’ve been conditioned to believe in, everything they’ve imagined distinguishes them from those big, bad Republicans, and everything they’ve tried to convey to the public – to absolutely no avail! Hell may hath no fury like a woman scorned, but fury has no hellish limits for a media scorned. Or rather for the preening egos of the old media who simply cannot stand it that our president and the majority of members in the senate, congress, most governorships, and soon the Supreme Court are comprised of Republicans and conservatives. Like the protracted, last- gasp death throes of Marlon Brando in the first Godfather movie, the old media wheezes on, pretending they’re still relevant, imagining they’ll live forever. As their ratings plummet and viewers and readers turn them off, they careen from fiction to fiction, hoping against hope that maybe, hopefully, ideally, Allah be praised, they will bring down their nemesis, George Bush, who has single-handedly dealt such a death-blow to their very validity. The problem is that empiricism keeps getting in their way. As Washington Post columnist Howard Kurtz has reported, the NY Times has cut 45 newsroom jobs and its “profits at the parent company [have dropped] by more than half this quarter”; The Philadelphia Inquirer lost 15 percent of its editorial staff; The Boston Globe “is dismantling its national staff”; nearly 12 percent of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's editorial staff just accepted buyouts; The Baltimore Sun has closed two of its five foreign bureaus, shrunk its Washington bureau from 15 to seven, and laid off a major columnist; Knight Ridder's largest shareholder has called for the sale of the company; U.S. News & World Report has been decimated by layoffs; “network news is suffering from a long-term audience slide”; ABC is… trying to reinvent "Nightline"; and, “except for an uptick during Hurricane Katrina, the media's stock seems to be in a gradual decline – journalistically, financially and psychologically.” Kurtz’s conclusion is that all this “is unlikely to change as long as journalists keep behaving in ways that alienate their audiences.” Perhaps no
one has summed up the ego problem of media liberals better than Connecticut
talk-show host and former liberal Joseph Bell. “It is distressing and disturbing
that the party of Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Zell Miller and Henry Jackson has
become a threat to U.S. security. Today’s Democrats appear to care little for
U.S. history or for current events. They seem more hungry for power than for
truth, more interested in destroying a Republican administration than America’s
enemies, more concerned about their own future than America’s.” But repetition,
he adds, “will never turn their fiction into fact.” So how are the liberal old media trying to stay alive? · By insisting, against all empirical evidence, that the president “cooked” the rationale for going to war in Iraq, in spite of the fact that prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said that his indictment of Lewis Libby “is not about the war.” I predict that Libby’s trial will expose and discredit the leftist media once and for all. · By studiously avoiding the mention of Democrats like Georgia’s Cynthia McKinney, the sole Congressperson to vote against a resolution to condemn the president of Iran for stating that "Israel must be wiped off the map." (McKinney has been accused of making anti-Semitic comments in the past, and her father Billy McKinney assigned blame for her 2002 reelection defeat by spelling out the word "J-E-W-S.) · By failing to tell the American public that the French uprising was initiated by born-in-France Muslims (who they call “ethnic” youths) who detest the European mentality and aspire to convert the country to another Islamic state. · By failing to identify the Muslims who attacked a cruise ship off the African coast, instead calling them “pirates,” just as they failed to identify the Muslims who recently beheaded three Christian schoolgirls in Indonesia. · By failing to note that not one Muslim “cleric” in the world has condemned the French uprising (which is now spreading to Denmark and Belgium). · By failing to reveal that Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean, in spite of his blowhard posturing, has raised a paltry $6.8 million this year, compared to Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman, who has raised a walloping $34 million. · By purposefully not reporting the failures of African-American mayor Ray Nagin to save the citizens of New Orleans from the horrors they needlessly experienced. · By highlighting bogus negatives about the president’s nomination to the Supreme Court, Judge Samuel Alito, instead of highlighting his stellar accomplishments and his unique fitness for the job. · By steadfastly refusing to investigate and report on Joseph Wilson’s culpability in “outing” his wife as a CIA agent and ignoring several investigative reports about the lies he perpetuated in the service of smearing the president. · By failing to report on the Wall St. Journal article by inside-the-Beltway attorney Victoria Toensing that implicated the CIA’s role in the Wilson case, which she said was “either a brilliant covert action against the White House or inept intelligence tradecraft.” · By failing to report – as Jack Cashill, an Emmy-award filmmaker, has reported for Worldnetdaily.com – that Wilson, who spoke at the Education for Peace in Iraq Center in June 2003, explained to his left-leaning audience: “I remain of the view that we will find chemical and biological weapons, and we may well find something that indicates that Saddam's regime maintained an interest in nuclear weapons," adding – in unmistakably anti-Semitic remarks – that he believed the Iraq war was waged "to make [Israeli Prime Minister] Sharon's life easier"… to "provide the Israeli government with greater wherewithal to impose its terms and conditions on the Palestinian people"… and that "... American boys and girls are dying for Israel." · By barely reporting – in fact, tiptoeing around – the egregious corruption in their multicultural icon, the United Nations. · By utterly failing to correct the stories they ran about former Marine Staff Sgt. Jimmy Massey, the American soldier in Iraq who they lionized when he exposed egregious American war crimes – before, that is, he admitted they were total lies. Will Soledad and her leftwing compatriots in the old media take on these issues and start to engage in objective journalism? Don’t count on it! Will their brand of journalism survive, boost ratings and regain the American public’s confidence? Don’t count on it! Will President Bush survive their continuing biased onslaughts and prevail in bringing democracy to the Middle East and sustaining our glorious economy? Count on it!
“Misunderestimated” President Bush Always Prevails November 3, 2005
For the past couple of weeks, the old media’s leftists could barely conceal the saliva dripping from their gleeful mouths at the prospect of key advisors to the Bush White House being indicted. Indeed, the likes of MSNBC’s Keith Olberman, Ron Reagan and Chris Matthews, CNN’s Andrea Koppel and Bill Schneider, NBC’s Brian Wilson, Andrea Mitchell and Norah O’Donnell, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, and CBS’s Bob Scheiffer – to name but a tiny percentage of the partisan “journalists” who parade as objective reporters – were predicting the downfall of a president who, in their arrogance and stupidity, they continue to “misunderestimate (a term popularized by Republican analyst and author, Bill Sammon in his best-selling book, “The Misunderestimated President”). Endlessly regurgitating the liberal talking points e-mailed and faxed to them every minute of every day by the Democratic National Committee, they spoke of the president’s “crisis,” his “dependence” on Karl Rove, his being “overwhelmed” by scandals,” “the end of the Bush presidency,” et al., proving for the millionth time over the course of his presidency that they never, ever fail to get it wrong. And piling on with predictably distorted “news” coverage of the Plamegate affair was the NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times, Newsday, and endless numbers of other liberal publications that are staffed primarily with Merlot-swigging, self-inflating, Columbia-School-of-Journalism graduates. It is painful for them to admit that what the president has accomplished, in a mere five years in office, is what leftists like their icon President Clinton and his ilk failed to accomplish in the few years they had a chance to convince the American public that their ideas, their vision for the future, and their fidelity to the principles that have made our nation great, are impoverished, ineffective, self defeating, and even treasonous. Remarking that the media no longer answer the key questions required of them – who, what, when, and where – columnist Kathleen Parker described the past several week’s media reportage as “the tsunami in a thimble.” “The media don't cover the news,” Parker said. “They hunt it down, beat it to death, resuscitate it, and beat it to death again. Television news programs aren't information outlets so much as guess-the-news game shows where `experts’ analyze the unknown and pundits predict the unknowable. When there's nothing left to say, they enter the realm of fiction.” Worse, according to an e-mail from an active-duty soldier who asked me to keep his name anonymous, the leftwing media constantly works to undermine our armed forces by streaming via TV, newspapers, magazines, radio and the Internet “the vicious political fever and antiwar tone…constant images of Cindy Sheehan touting anti-war propaganda, constant accusations of the Bush administration being racist in the wake of natural disasters, soldiers’ actions being caught on film and then used against them in various investigations, and now more political indictments on issues that the majority of Americans have no idea about.” The soldier continues: “Unfortunately, the media are smearing whatever we have accomplished [and] all [that soldiers] perceive is negative content about the war, about their government, about their country. Take this tremendous fighting force and preach to them that they have been misled, tell them that they have been lied to, show them that they are not supported, suggest their government is corrupt, label them murderers, and explain to them that in the end we were wrong, and now expect them to continue to fight this war…” This is a far more devastating indictment than anything Patrick Fitzgerald could dream up! That is why columnist Jack Kelly entitled a recent article: “Iraqis and Americans on one side, terrorists and journalists on the other.” The Libby Affair Special prosecutor Fitzgerald gave leftists renewed hope last week, not only that he would indict perhaps 10 or 12 people associated with the Bush White House but also bring down a presidency that repudiates everything the leftwing embraces. This includes a pass on murderous regimes like those of Saddam Hussein and Bashir Assad; an embrace of the corrupt cesspool on First Avenue in Manhattan (also known as the United Nations); indiscriminately open borders; and a return to the good ole days of Bill Clinton and his co-president Hillary, in which they supported such life-affirming things as abortion-on-demand, the amnesty of criminals like Mark Rich, and their “it’s only sex” crimes. Yet Fitzgerald, who both right and left spokespeople pronounced “apolitical,” devastated the Left by handing down a single indictment to Vice President Cheney’s Chief of Staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby. According to William Powers of the NationalJournal.com, “If you were measuring journalists' public standing on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the best, right now we're in less-than-zero territory…” Powers specifically mentioned “The New York Times and its dodgy handling of the Plame spy case.” Lou Dobbs of CNN spun the fiction that Libby “was the first cabinet member in 134 years to be indicted,” failing to mention that:
· In 1984, Raymond J. Donovan, President Reagan’s labor secretary, was indicted for grand larceny – but acquitted. · In 1986, John M. Poindexter, President Reagan’s national security adviser, was indicted on charges of obstructing justice and making false statements in the Iran-Contra affair – conviction overturned. · In 1993, President Clinton fired Billy Dale and his travel-office staff, and Dale was indicted in on two counts of embezzlement – but acquitted. · In 1994, Mike Espy, Clinton’s agriculture secretary, was indicted on 39 corruption counts – but acquitted. · In 1996, Henry G. Cisneros, President Clinton's housing secretary, was indicted on 18 counts of conspiracy, obstruction and lying to the FBI – for which he was fined $10,000. And then there is former Clinton national security adviser Sandy Berger, who stole classified documents from the National Archives during the 9/11 Commission’s hearings in 2003 and for this major crime received a $50,000 fine and a suspension of his security privileges for a mere three years. And let’s not forget that Clinton’s CIA Director John Deutch was also caught with classified material but was pronounced “grossly negligent” and escaped with a slap on the wrist. Libby’s Alleged Sins As the
FederalistPatriot.com has described Libby’s plight: “Oops. In other words, if
they had asked him if he had ham and cheese on rye or wheat two years ago, and
he recalled wheat but his notes said rye, that constitutes perjury.” Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald went out of his way to explain to the public that the indictment he brought against Mr. Libby had nothing to do with “the leak” that supposedly “outed” Valerie Plame as a covert operative for the CIA. This is because since her husband Joseph Wilson asserted this allegation over two years ago, it has been proven that Plame is not covert but rather has had a desk job at the CIA for the past seven or so years. In addition, Fitzgerald said that his indictment had nothing to do with the war in Iraq in spite of Wilson’s accusations against the Bush administration, which he wrote about in a New York Times Op-Ed piece, accusations that have been thoroughly discredited, including by a congressional committee. But in the wake of Libby’s indictment, the leftwing media, never to have their ideologies confused with something as banal as mere facts, lionized, featured on its Sunday programs, and wrote about none other than Wilson – as if he were even remotely relevant! Why? Because the media are so frustrated and enraged by being discredited themselves by the Bush White House – and, according to ratings, by the American public – that they continue to hope that the public is as thickheaded as they are. Public to media: change your self-serving tune or we’ll continue to tune you out! GWB in “crisis” mode During the weeks leading up to Fitzgerald’s pronouncements (that can now be described as the mouse that roared), the president didn’t miss a beat. He did what the American public mandated him to do when they reelected him with a record-setting 60 million votes: Carry on. In his inveterately optimistic, I-believe-in-America way, he: · Remarked, with all due pride, on the Iraqis overwhelmingly positive vote to accept their newly created Constitution, a document that included all three of that country’s formerly fighting factions – Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds – and a stunning milestone that was studiously ignored by the old media. · Hosted a great number of important world leaders, ambassadors and statesmen in the White House to discuss the economic, military, and social policies that regard the future of our world. · Addressed major forums about economic issues in which he had nothing but good news to report about housing, lower gasoline prices, and our continuing booming economy. · Appointed the first Federal Reserve Chairman after nearly two decades, Dr. Ben Bernanke, who is expected to push forward the current GDP, which at a robust 3.8 percent. · Initiated a major effort to curb the streaming influx of illegal aliens. · Encouraged United Nations Ambassador John Bolton to pursue sanctions against the murderous regime of Syria. · Made a fifth visit to the Gulf Coast states that were ravaged by recent hurricanes, where his initiatives for renewal include several solid conservative approaches, such as enterprise zones, tax incentives and private accounts. · Accepted the resignation of Harriet Miers as a Supreme Court nominee with hardly a blip in his jam-packed schedule. And so, the President Bush still benefits from the sage advice of Karl Rove and has now energized Republicans and conservatives throughout the country with his nomination of a sterling conservative judge, Samuel Alito – leaving the old media to mumble and grumble that they’ve lost another one to the misunderestimated president.
Old Media In Desperate Straits October 21, 2005
Girding up their courage to face the possibility of the most gruesome of deaths by explosion or ambush – and let’s not rule out beheadings – an astounding 15.5 million of Iraq's 26 million people or nearly 65 percent turned out last week to cast their ballots for a referendum on their Constitution. The vote was clearly astonishing to an old media that have mired themselves consistently in doomsday predictions about the interim government’s inability to complete the document in time for the vote and about the diehard resistance of the Sunnis to participate in it. As usual, they got both things wrong. Actually, I got it wrong when I said they were “astonished.” It is more accurate to say that with barely disguised glee and the typical self-righteousness that characterizes liberals’ self-delusion of moral and intellectual superiority, they acted as if the failure of the war and the subsequent downfall of the president might, just might – finally – be just as they’ve been predicting. Before the returns were even in, one of the dimmer bulbs on CNN asked her interviewees – in the familiar broadcaster’s singsong voice, which gives Disney cartoons and war casualties the same valence – “But have the Iraqi people even read the Constitution?” This, implying that she and the other low-wattage anchors in the old media have read our Constitution – or for that matter, our glorious history! As witless commentator after witless commentator droned on about the inevitability of a Civil War in Iraq, the possible “failure” of Iraqis to vote in favor of the referendum, and “what this will mean” to the troop withdrawal that these self-appointed Commanders-in-Chief and military experts have been bleating about incessantly – as if mindless repetition was a legitimate substitute for objectivity – both their lack of historical perspective and knowledge of the American Constitution were glaringly on display. Instead of looking at the relatively short time we’ve been in Iraq (less than two-and-a-half years), the astounding accomplishments we’ve realized in deposing a murderous dictator and helping Iraqis to hold not one but two free elections, the general contagion of democracy throughout the Middle East, and, most important, the 12 years it took our Founding Fathers to ratify our own Constitution, all the old media could do was dredge up their tired repertoire of noxious negative comments. They only took a breather to inundate the public with more bad news about the ongoing suffering of hurricane survivors, the “scandals” of high-profile Republicans, the (in-their-minds) imminent Avian flu pandemic, and – their favorite – the “plummeting” poll numbers of President Bush, this last pronouncement with lilting vocal inflections that left no doubt how they “felt” about this matter. And we know how our elected leftists “felt.” Incredibly, Sen. Joe Biden told Tim Russert on “Meet The Press” that Americans shouldn’t assume that a 60-plus percent election turnout in Iraq "represents a victory for the U.S." And Sen. John Kerry (who voted for the Iraq war before he voted against it) only conceded progress to Russert after reminding the nation of the president’s “continued failures.” Aptly, James Taranto of the Wall St. Journal asked: “How will history remember those who argued that America would be better off if only we had a leader with (swallow coffee before reading on) the integrity of John Kerry or the maturity of Joe Biden?” To be sure, you’ll hear the old media defend their choice of subjects – and guests – by citing the old journalistic mantra, “If it bleeds, it leads.” But that is demonstrably untrue! The reason why the Fox News Network as well as conservative talk radio and conservative websites and blogs have quashed all competitors like so many scampering ants is because they regularly feature stories about what our heroic military is accomplishing in Iraq, about the significantly fewer terrorist attacks during the recent referendum (less than 12) than during the January elections (347), about tales of courage and renewal among those displaced during Hurricane Katrina, and about small factual things like Bill Clinton’s 37 percent poll rating during his second term – which makes President Bush’s current rating loom large in comparison. Bad CompanyAccording to writer Stephen Schwartz, the old media keep particularly ignominious company. “For a second time, the Iraqi people proved the Western mainstream media, Islamist radicals, self-righteous and nihilistic war protestors, disaffected Democrats, and neo-isolationists wrong: the referendum on the new constitution was successful.” But Schwartz omitted the American Civil Liberties Union as a prime culprit in undermining both troop morale and safety. Just recently, U.S. District Court Judge Alvin Hellerstein – who was appointed by none other than Bill Clinton – sided with the ACLU by agreeing to release close to 100 photos and four videotapes allegedly taken by American guards at the Abu Ghraib prison. According to columnist Jeffry Gardner, Hellerstein thus “sentenced tens, possibly hundreds, more American troops to their deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan and other wonderful bastions of religious tolerance around the globe.” Gardner reported that Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard Meyer told Hellerstein’s court that the images would become recruiting posters for al Qaeda and other murderous groups, much as the Newsweek story last summer about the so-called desecration of the Koran at Guantanamo Bay sparked attacks on Americans and “troops undoubtedly lost their lives as a result.” But Clinton’s appointee, Hellerstein, was unmoved. None Dare Call It TreasonColumnist Thomas Sowell writes that, “much of the Western media even cannot call a spade a spade. The Fourth Estate sometimes seems more like a Fifth Column” (a subversive organization working within a country to further its enemy's military and political aims). “You need to look no further than reporting on the war in Iraq to see the bias staring you in the face, day after day, on the front page of The New York Times and in much of the rest of the media,” Sowell says, adding that, “our media cannot even call terrorists terrorists, but instead give these cutthroats the bland name `insurgents’”. He notes the amazement military and civilian people express after visiting Iraq “at the difference between what they have seen with their own eyes and the far worse, one-sided picture that the media present to the public here.” Sowell reflects what The Media Research Center has recently documented in a study of broadcast network news coverage of the Iraq war this year. After reviewing all 1,388 Iraq stories broadcast on ABC’s World News Tonight, the CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News from January 1 through September 30, MRC found: *** More than half of all stories (848, or 61%) focused on negative topics or presented a pessimistic analysis, four times as many as featured U.S. or Iraqi achievements or offered an optimistic assessment (just 211 stories, or 15%). *** Positive stories had fallen to seven percent and the percentage of bad news stories swelled to 73 percent of all Iraq news, a ten-to-one disparity. *** Two out of every five network evening news stories (564) featured car bombings, assassinations, kidnappings or other attacks launched by the terrorists against the Iraqi people or coalition forces, more than any other topic. *** Just 17 stories recounted episodes of heroism or valor by U.S. troops or featured soldiers reaching out to help the Iraqi people, while 79 stories focused on allegations of combat mistakes or outright misconduct on the part of U.S. military personnel. The Media in FreefallThe only good news is that the American public is not buying what the old media are selling. According to the Newspaper Association of America, the circulation of daily U.S. newspapers is 55.2 million, down from 62.3 million in 1990. And newspaper advertising, which was $43.04 billion (adjusted for inflation) in 1985, was not much less than the $44.94 billion reported in 2003, which reflects just 4.4 percent real growth over 18 years, during which time the gross domestic product, measured in current dollars, grew 161 percent. Corroborating this trend is Editor and Publisher magazine, which reported drastic circulation drops in, among others, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The New Jersey Star Ledger, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Orlando Sentinel, et al. – actually 814 of the nation's largest daily newspapers. And that is not to omit Newsday, which inflated its circulation to advertisers, a move that resulted in several indictments of their top brass. No wonder that a Gallup Poll in June found that the public's confidence in newspapers and television has declined from 54 percent in 1989 to only 28 percent today – an all-time low since Gallup first asked the question in 1972. And no wonder that, in June, executive editor of the NY Times, Bill Keller, sent a 3,600-word “memo” – Assuring Our Credibility – to his entire staff, including 1,200 newsroom reporters, in which he stated: “There may have been a time when we could remain aloof and impervious in the face of criticism, but if so that time has passed.” Of course, that was before the Plame affair and the Times’ credibility took another nosedive, which is probably why it now occupies the Number Three position among New York’s three major dailies. “Mainstream” TV has fared just as poorly with combined viewing of the network evening newscasts at 28.8 million, down from 52.1 million in 1980. But the clueless members of the old media plod on, shaping and slanting the news to their leftist agendas and, in either their stupidity or arrogance, failing to notice that the American public has soundly repudiated them, not only ignoring their non-stop assaults on President Bush during his first four years in office and throughout his reelection campaign, but reelecting him with the greatest number of votes for any president in history. Now, the small-screen blatherers – who, no doubt, are responsible for TV being known as the “idiot box” – are again hoping that their blitzkrieg assault on the president and the troubles his own top brass are having will finish him off and render his presidency a failure. But after five years, the American public knows that the president is more focused, more effective, and immensely more intelligent than virtually all of his critics. And, to their everlasting horror, that his legacy – of having transformed the Middle East into democratic states, insuring America’s safety for decades to come, and introducing an “ownership” society that is sure to flourish in the coming years – will be etched in the historical record and will eclipse even the wispiest memory of his Leftwing detractors.
Only One Survivor in The Perfect Political Storm – President Bush October 13, 2005
It is no surprise that President Bush has kept his head while practically everyone else in political life – his inveterate detractors, the old media echo chamber, and even some of his supporters – have lost theirs. Yet, as the perfect political storm has assailed him – the Sheehan sideshow, Katrina’s fury, escalating violence in Iraq leading up to the adoption of its Constitution, presidential advisor Karl Rove’s fourth summons to a grand jury, House Majority Leader Rep. Tom DeLay’s indictment and stepping down from his leadership role, and the hysteria over Harriet Miers’ nomination to the Supreme Court – the president seems to be the only one to keep his cool, retain his optimism, and plunge forward doing the only thing that matters, the business of the people. The Sheehan SideshowThe president refused to meet with Sheehan the second time she demanded an audience, only to see that his judgment was well placed. In short order, Sheehan proved to be a far leftist supported by Communists and radicals, and was promptly marginalized by a media that had embraced her unquestioningly only weeks before. RINO Sen. John McCain, who recently submitted an amendment to the $42 billion Pentagon authorization bill for 2006 to insure that we treat terrorist-prisoners with kid gloves, did meet with Sheehan, only to have her spit in his face by calling him a “warmonger.” The Katrina DisasterThe president declared New Orleans a disaster area days before Katrina obliterated the city, urging the city’s mayor and Louisiana’s governor to evacuate the city’s citizens with all due speed – which they didn’t! But his one-day-late response after the levees broke brought him widespread condemnation and preposterous accusations of racism by professional race-baiters, Democrat Al Sharpton, Democrat Jesse Jackson, and New York Democrat Rep. Charles Rangel, who compared the president to Democrat “Bull” Connor, the segregationist mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, who aimed attack dogs and fire hoses at civil rights marchers. That is not to omit the caterwauling Democrats from New Orleans, Democrats Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, whose astounding incompetence – as well as ignorance of local and state roles – accounted for the overwhelming problems that ensued. And what did the president do? He apologized for his tardiness, took full responsibility for any mismanagement, and endowed the stricken area with more money and resources that had ever before been expended for a natural disaster in America. The Iraq FactorThe president, who is more aware than anyone on earth of what is happening on the ground in Iraq, forewarned the American public early on that the adoption of that country’s Constitution would bring an escalation in violence by the terrorists who are, indeed, terrified of Iraqi freedom. While liberals were (and are) “stuck on stupid” in chanting their cut-and-run mantra, the president stood side-by-side with battlefield leaders who reinforced our progress and also delivered a powerful speech at the National Endowment for Democracy that reminded Americans of the ubiquitous nature of the threat we face and the non-negotiable necessity of fighting it. "The images and experience of September the 11th are unique for Americans,” President Bush said, “yet the evil of that morning has reappeared on other days, in other places – in Mombasa, and Casablanca, and Riyadh, and Jakarta, and Istanbul, and Madrid, and Beslan, and Taba, and Netanya, and Baghdad and elsewhere. Yet while the killers choose their victims indiscriminately, their attacks serve a clear and focused ideology, a set of beliefs and goals that are evil, but not insane." The president also reminded the public of the unthinkable price of failure, reassuring them that, “We will not tire or rest until the war on terror is won.” Most people “get” this, even if Democrat “leaders” Joseph Biden, Richard Durbin, Patrick Leahy, Nancy Pelosi, and Barbara Boxer – unfortunately for America, the list of liberal Democrats goes on and on – don’t. “The Law Is An Ass” (Mark Twain)The president had to be disappointed at the recent (and, I believe, bogus) indictment of Tom DeLay by the malevolent Detective-Javert-like fanatic, Austin D.A. Democrat Ronnie Earl, whose first two indictments of the congressman were thrown out of court, and when his powerful advisor, Karl Rove, was summoned to a grand jury in the equally bogus Plame case. How did he react? According, he said, to the letter of the law, which required that he not talk about the cases while they were ongoing. And in keeping with his style, he didn’t miss a beat in doing the business of the people. The president’s accomplishments include: presiding over a growing economy (that his tax cuts helped to create); a job-growth rate of 5%, which is lower than the average of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s; high consumer confidence, low inflation, a decreasing deficit (with projections to halve the deficit by 2009), and more Americans at work than ever before in history. In addition, the president has signed, among other legislation, the Central America And Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) which eliminates 80% of tariffs on U.S. exports and is expected to yield billions of dollars in increased sales of U.S. goods and farm exports as well as to keep jobs in the U.S., the first energy plan in more than a decade, a comprehensive Highway bill, the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act of 2005, a Class Action Reform Lawsuit Abuse bill, and the Bankruptcy Reform bill. And this week, the Senate voted to give the president $50 billion more for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and U.S. military efforts against terrorism – all this while meeting with world leaders and also health experts to discuss a possible Avian flu pandemic. The Harriet HysteriaThe president, after due deliberation, nominated Harriet Miers, his White House counsel, to the Supreme Court, only to receive an avalanche of criticism from some intellectual snobs and elitists (including some from his “base”) who condemned the candidate before they had heard her speak one word. The president has stood by his nominee and there is every reason to believe she will soon be a justice who, like the president’s appellate-court appointments – Priscilla Owens, Janice Rogers Brown, William Pryor, David McKeague and Richard Griffin – will steadfastly honor the Constitution and refuse to legislate from the bench. THE PRESIDENT’S INVETERATE DETRACTORSWhere are they now? Democrat Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid is still carping and whining. Democrat Sen. Ted Kennedy is still venting his spleen. Democrat House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, with her inimitable Betty Boop affect, is still delivering invective. Democrat National Committee chairman Howard Dean is still rewriting history (but not raising any significant money, which is his job!). Democrat Bill Clinton and his longtime Democrat lackey Sandy Berger are still in the news with their scandals and illegalities. Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin, second in status in the Senate, is still spewing slander and smears, as he did when he defamed our heroic military by saying their interrogations of terrorists at Guantanamo Bay were akin to the tactics of Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Pol Pot. Democrat Al Gore is… where? According to Sher Zieve of americandaily.com, the man she calls Apoplectic Al attended a liberal love-in last week in New York, the “We Media Conference,” where “he quoted from avowed communist Walter Lippman on the subject of `the refeudalization of the public sphere,’” and also stated that, “… every day they (i.e., the scary conservatives) unleash squadrons of digital brownshirts to harass and hector any journalist who is critical of the President!” This must be what the expression “more to be pitied than scorned” is all about. And Democrat Sen. Hillary Clinton, lusting after the presidency, is trying desperately to appeal to her true “base” of leftists while pretending to appear capable of leading our country in a time of war. And where is former counter-terrorism “expert” in the Clinton and Bush administrations, Richard Clarke, or former secretary of the treasury Paul O’Neill, or any of the dozens (if not hundreds) of other people who wrote books, fabricated virulently partisan documentaries, and had their 15-minutes of fame on leftist TV shows like “60 Minutes”? I’m sure they’re employed somewhere, but their voices are now mute as a result of what they believed, in 2000, was going to be “a referendum on George W. Bush.” They were right! President Bush received more votes – nearly 60 million – than any presidential candidate in American history. In a way, you have to feel sorry for them. Bereft of ideas, total failures at suggesting solutions to any of the problems and challenges that face our nation, liberals have been reduced to a motley crew of glass-is-half-empty bellyachers who, aided and abetted by the leftist old media, inevitably convey to the public that they want America to fail! Actually, it is they who are failing. Just the other day, the president of the Heritage Foundation, Ed Feulner, reported that the group America Coming Together (ACT), funded by America-hating billionaire George Soros with the intention of electing liberal House and Senate candidates and a liberal president in 2004, was closing its offices. Recalling Ukraine’s Orange Revolution and Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution that “drew support and inspiration from the United States, Feulner concluded that: “Liberals are long on rhetoric but short on solutions…big ideas beat big money.” Last Man StandingThe one adjective even the fans of liberals could never use to describe them is dignified. Nor could they describe them as patient or forbearing or having grace under pressure. Yet all of these adjectives describe President Bush who in his five years in office has never once devolved to the low level that Democrats occupy – in their speech and behavior –every day. They’ve tried everything to undermine, compromise and depose him – all to no avail! And so they’ve resorted to waging a campaign not to improve our foreign or domestic policies but rather to prove that a two-time governor of Texas and a two-time President of the United States is less of a politician, policy maker, leader and visionary than they are. What a laugh! While liberals are now most closely identified with veins bulging in their necks, groping for the next disparaging words to express their burning rage, and whipping themselves into irrational frenzies trying to convince the public that what they see in President Bush is not what they get, they forget that the public is watching a president who forges on through thick and thin, juggling the impossible demands of, among other exigencies, America’s war on Islamic fanaticism and also the most devastating natural disaster in our nation’s history. Perhaps David Warren, writing in The Ottawa Citizen, captured the president’s essence most accurately when he quoted lines from Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “If.” If you can keep
can keep your head when
all about you Is there a liberal (or, come to think of it, a Democrat) who even one line of this poem applies to? That is why there is only one survivor in the perfect political storm that has swirled around President Bush for the past couple of months, because his behavior embodies every line of Kipling’s poem. And that is why the Left is going stark raving mad!
President Bush’s Immunity to Liberal Smears September 15, 2005 (Full Text Coming Soon)
The Reptilian Brains of Terri’s Executioners For decades, neuroscientists have recognized that the brain has three distinct systems. One is derived from primitive reptiles that were adept at survival strategies. Another includes the limbic system – often called the “seat of emotions.” The third includes the neocortex and prefrontal lobes (comprising the right and left hemispheres of the brain) that account for thinking, verbal abilities and other “higher” functions. My theory is that Terri’s putative husband Michael, his attorney George J. Felos, and Judge George Greer – who ruled for years against Terri’s right to life – have highly developed reptilian brains and prefrontal lobes, but that they are sorely lacking in anything resembling a normal limbic system. What exactly is the limbic system? Located just below the neocortex, it is the part of the brain that governs – among other emotions – affection, feelings, and most of all empathy
What is empathy? Simply, it is the ability to feel what others are feeling. It is not sympathy, which is feeling sorry for someone or that something happened. Empathy, on the other hand, is the ability to put oneself in the place of another person and actually experience the feelings they are experiencing – be they joy, anxiety, fear or pain. Persuasive research over the past several decades, conducted by the most prestigious science institutions both in America and abroad, has relied on PET and more recently fMRI scans (the “f” stands for functional) that visualize brain activity to demonstrate that structural and functional abnormalities in several brain regions (the limbic system, the amygadala, the hippocampus, et al) account for a lack of empathy. People who lack empathy are called sociopaths, a euphemistic version of what was once called psychopaths. Like all cold-blooded killers, they are literally incapable of feeling what another person feels. While they may be expert at affecting what amounts to a parody of normality and integrity, charm and intellect, underneath their guises is a total inability to “feel your pain.” Calling a Spade a Spade You can call it bad character or you can say, as liberals and retro psychotherapists do, that the unfeeling person – like the terrorists who murdered nearly 3,000 innocent Americans on September 11, 2001 – are “victims” of their upbringings or circumstances. I say that no matter the source of the behavior, people lacking the kind of empathy that allows them to kill without remorse – for instance, to starve a healthy woman to death – are no different than other 21st Century terrorists and deserve the same consequences: indictment, conviction and imprisonment. While antidepressant, anti-anxiety and anti-psychotic drugs have successfully treated millions of people with biologically driven mental illnesses – there is NO CURE for sociopaths! Does this describe the likes of Schiavo, Felos and Greer? You decide. From what I observed, all of them are reptilian in their icy coldness, and malevolent fakers when they use the “higher centers” of their brains to dissemble and pretend that they “feel” what they clearly don’t feel at all. They all knew exactly what starvation would entail for Terri, who at the time of her court-ordered death sentence was vibrantly healthy, save for her limited mental function. To name but a few horrifying symptoms that she probably experienced were:
And these merchants of death were also aware that the dehydration they ordered – depriving Terri of water – would entail:
Snakes Don’t CareOstensibly unmoved by her plight were the triumvirate of reptiles. Terri’s money-hungry husband had already collected a million dollars in a malpractice settlement about his claim that doctors failed to diagnose her so-called but still-undocumented bulimia, and he now stands to receive $1.2 million as the heir to the remainder of the that judgment. Then there was his seemingly euthanasia-infatuated attorney and the idealogue judge. All of them were unmoved by Terri’s agonizingly slow death because they claimed she would have chosen that fate for herself. Never mind the absence of a signed Living Will or videotape of her wishes. During the nearly two weeks that Terri suffered after her feeding tube was removed, empathic people throughout the world had a heightened awareness of their own hunger pangs and thirst, and the merciful availability of the food and drink at their fingertips. But the reptiles didn’t.
When Michael Schiavo – who has obviously been busy following the money – decided that “for better or worse, through sickness and health, ‘til death do us part” was inconvenient, he chose not to divorce Terri nor to seek an annulment of their marriage, but opted instead for bigamy and to father two children. And the normal empathy that develops when people become parents didn’t appear to happen to Michael. Instead of “feeling” the pain that Terri’s parents experienced and identifying with their determination to care for their daughter “in sickness and in health,” he seemed to feel – as all reptiles do – nothing. And in what federalist.com called “the final act of selfish cruelty, [he] arrived only minutes before her death [and] denied the Schindlers' request to remain with Terri for her final breath.” A Voice of Morality The website’s commentary went on to cite the words of Pope John Paul II, whose empathy for humanity and evolved morality provide stark contrast to the reptilian natures of Michael Schiavo and company. Last year, the Pope – on a feeding tube himself in his final days – ”effectively declared his `living will’ in a speech to doctors and ethicists,” saying: “The administration of water and food, even when provided by artificial means, always represents a natural means of preserving life, not a medical act." He described the denial of such care “euthanasia by omission." As far back as 1950, Five Star General Omar Bradley stated what could be aptly applied to the Terri Schiavo case: "We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount...the world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants." “What can we expect?” asks Christopher Flickinger in an article in www.therant.us. “For those citizens with handicaps or disabilities, you are forewarned – someone may have his eye on you. If you’re blind, deaf, mute, in a wheelchair, on crutches, use a walker or a cane, walk with a limp or have an appendage missing, you better mind your P’s and Q’s. One little slip-up, just one, and someone could deem your life unfit for living, take away your wheelchair, put you in a Hospice center and starve you to death. [The] excuse would be, “Well, they’re worthless shells of a human. Those cripples have been draining my pocketbook for years – all those ramps and elevators and special parking spots. Forget about legislation in order to fix Social Security. I’ll fix it myself by lightening our load... With this new precedent of social Darwinism sweeping the nation, there’s no end to the possibilities. In a way, we’ll pick-up were Hitler failed. Forget about a master race. We’re more interest in preserving the lives of those who can win the race. And as for everyone else, Pandora’s box is now wide open.” In Schiavo’s case, criminal proceedings may yet ensue. According to NewsMax.com, Florida's Department of Children and Families had received 89 allegations that Schiavo had abused his wife – but Judge Greer (surprise!) ruled that DCF summaries of those allegations must remain secret to everyone except (surprise!) Michael Schiavo himself. However, The St. Petersburg Times and the Tampa Tribune have now filed lawsuits for the release of the abuse summaries. It’s too late for Terri, but it’s not too late for American citizens to take careful note of those elected officials – overwhelmingly liberals – who through their support of abortion and now euthanasia are responsible for what has become a “culture of death” in our country, and to boot them out of office or make sure they are never elected.
Please feel free to E-mail me with any questions or comments at: joan@joanswirsky.com
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