John Gibson’s “Big Story” on Fox News sent out reporter Heather Nauert (schwing!) to interview the wacko protesters.
Which brought to mind that old, bad pick-up line: “What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?”
Gibson should be ashamed of himself for sending Nauert out among those beasts.
It’s not just the “national” media that has a problem with accuracy, fairness and simple honesty. The Sioux Falls Argus-Leader has too fallen victim to its own bias and arrogance.
In an effort to reveal the reality that is the anti-American protests in New York City, The Weekly Standard is offering a look at the brisk business done by the city’s finest.
This is old news, but I’m going to resurrect it because it follows a media storyline: Kerry is a flip-flopper.
John Kerry had just pumped up a huge crowd in downtown West Palm Beach, promising to make the state a battleground for his quest to oust President Bush, when a local television journalist posed the question that any candidate with Florida ambitions should expect:
What will you do about Cuba?
As the presumptive Democratic nominee, Kerry was ready with the bravado appropriate for a challenger who knows that every answer carries magnified importance in the state that put President Bush into office by just 537 votes.
”I’m pretty tough on Castro, because I think he’s running one of the last vestiges of a Stalinist secret police government in the world,” Kerry told WPLG-ABC 10 reporter Michael Putney in an interview to be aired at 11:30 this morning.
Then, reaching back eight years to one of the more significant efforts to toughen sanctions on the communist island, Kerry volunteered: “And I voted for the Helms-Burton legislation to be tough on companies that deal with him.”
It seemed the correct answer in a year in which Democratic strategists think they can make a play for at least a portion of the important Cuban-American vote — as they did in 1996 when more than three in 10 backed President Clinton’s reelection after he signed the sanctions measure written by Sen. Jesse Helms and Rep. Dan Burton.
There is only one problem: Kerry voted against it.
So, what is the Senator’s staff to do when Kerry pulls a “voted for it before I voted against it” moment?
Asked Friday to explain the discrepancy, Kerry aides said the senator cast one of the 22 nays that day in 1996 because he disagreed with some of the final technical aspects. But, said spokesman David Wade, Kerry supported the legislation in its purer form — and voted for it months earlier.
Thanks to John Kerry we know that no vote ever really matters. You can vote for it before you vote against it. You can vote against it before you vote for it.
As president, what happens if Kerry signs a bill before he vetoes it? What happens if he vetoes it before he signs it? These are puzzling questions that we may need the Supreme Court to eventually decide.
Today’s anti-527 editorial in The New York Times is interesting for its subtle nod toward the reality that there are some 527s who are supporting Sen. John Kerry.
Campaign finance reform has accomplished a good deal in forcing the parties to rely on relatively modest individual donations. But thanks to the F.E.C., the nation’s Potemkin political watchdog, the big soft money donations have found another channel. They go to “527″ advocacy groups, named for a section of the tax law under which they are supposedly beyond the F.E.C.’s reach. To really qualify under that law, groups would have to be totally independent from the political campaigns that are running George Bush and John Kerry for president. This abuse of common sense came to the public’s attention graphically in the Swift boat attack ads against Senator Kerry’s war record, run by a shadow group with clear ties to the Republican Party. [emphasis added]
While we should applaud the Times for acknowledging the possiblity of a Kerry campaign-527 connection. However, readers of the paper would be well-served if the Times would put its graphics artists to work and sketch out the connection for its readers.
The fact that the Times has stuck to the Democratic Party talking points on the shows that it has given up any pretension toward the journalistic goal of objectivity.
I wish I could’ve been there tonight to see Rudy Giuliani’s speech in person. It was a thing of beauty.
What most of the media will focus on is the attacks on John Kerry’s flip-floppity nature (“John Kerry’s record of inconsistent positions on combatting terrorism gives us no confidence he’ll pursue such a determined course.”). But what is perhaps the most informative part of Giuliani’s speech won’t be in the news — because it’s ancient history. History that too many of the American people have forgotten.
Terrorism did not start on September 11, 2001. It had been festering for many years.
And the world had created a response to it that allowed it to succeed. The attack on the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics was in 1972. And the pattern had already begun.
The three surviving terrorists were arrested and within two months released by the German government.
Action like this became the rule, not the exception.
Terrorists came to learn they could attack and often not face consequences.
In 1985, terrorists attacked the Achille Lauro and murdered an American citizen who was in a wheelchair, Leon Klinghoffer.
They marked him for murder solely because he was Jewish.
Some of those terrorist were released and some of the remaining terrorists allowed to escape by the Italian government because of fear of reprisals.
So terrorists learned they could intimidate the world community and too often the response, particularly in Europe, was “accommodation, appeasement and compromise.”
And worse the terrorists also learned that their cause would be taken more seriously, almost in direct proportion to the barbarity of the attack.
Terrorist acts became a ticket to the international bargaining table.
How else to explain Yasser Arafat winning the Nobel Peace Prize when he was supporting a terrorist plague in the Middle East that undermined any chance of peace?
Before September 11, we were living with an unrealistic view of the world much like our observing
Europe appease Hitler or trying to accommodate ourselves to peaceful co-existence with the Soviet Union through mutually assured destruction.
John Kerry has promised to respond as president if America is attacked.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t work anymore.
Two French journalists have been kidnapped by terrorists in Iraq. The French had believed that their opposition to the war in Iraq would act to inoculate their citizens against Islamic terrorism. They were wrong.
Instead, the terrorists are demanding that France “reconsider” its law banning overtly religious symbols in schools — specifically the muslim headscarve or hijab.
In a televised statement, Chirac demanded that the militants free the journalists, who have been missing for more than a week, and announced he had dispatched his foreign minister to the Middle East to seek their release.
Yeah, that’s gonna do it.
The French still don’t get it. In the war against Islamofascism, there can be no non-aligned nations. For the French to believe that they are somehow immune would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic for the two journalists who will likely die for their nation’s hubris.
The French can also thank their neighbors the Spanish and other countries like the Philippines who have demonstrated that some civilized nations can be intimidated by the brutal murder of a couple of its citizens.
Patterico points to some analysis made by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders — one of the minority conservatives in the media — on the voting tendencies of journalists.
KURTZ: I mention MoveOn, because there are a lot of liberal groups, as you know, Debra Saunders, these 527s — have there been a double standard in the media in not trying to make Kerry denounce the liberal ads, while reporters ask the president every day, why won’t you disassociate yourself from the swift boat ads?
SAUNDERS: I’ve never seen a voter say to John Kerry, but couldn’t you just denounce the ad? Or they say that Bush is whatever. They don’t ask him that question. But how many reporters would look at Bush and say, can’t you just denounce this one ad? I think that we get used in this. And I think the other thing that I find so…
KURTZ: You’re suggesting a double standard?
SAUNDERS: I am suggesting a double standard.
KURTZ: Why do you think that is?
SAUNDERS: I think that most journalists support John Kerry.
KURTZ: You really think that that’s the reason?
SAUNDERS: Yes, I do. I work for “The San Francisco Chronicle.”
I’ll add my voice to that. I think most journalists support John Kerry and I work for the San Diego Union-Tribune. Yes, the U-T is editorially moderate-conservative, but the newsroom is much like any other: liberal.
Just two days ago I was handed a flyer for an anti-war rally Sunday in Balboa Park. I’d just worked six days in a row, so I wasn’t going to go to the freak show — after all, I’ve heard it all before — but this was being passed out in the newsroom. I’m sure that this individual had no idea that he was handing the flyer to one of the few people in the newsroom who is politically conservative.
There is also an editor in the newsroom who confessed to me that she was working to register Democrats to vote because just voting against President Bush in this election is “not enough.”
Is the media objective and unbiased? Hardly.
If you have never read John Kerry’s testimony to the Senate foreign relations committee, then you should. If you’ve seen the most recent Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ad, then you’ve heard some of what John Kerry had to say more than three decades ago about his larger “band of brothers.”
I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.
…
They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, tape wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the country side of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.
John Kerry’s decision to slander the men who served in Vietnam for his own political gain and what that says about his character is a legitimate subject of debate as America chooses who will be its next commander in chief.
My knowledge of the Vietnam era certainly doesn’t match that of people who were in their teens and twenties as the war was being fought. The majority of my knowledge comes from history books and, to a lesser extent, movies.
I watched “We Were Soldiers” again yesterday, to get a sense of Vietnam. I’ve also read the book by Harold Moore and Joseph Galloway (the movie only covers one-half of the book, which includes several more days of the larger battle). Perhaps the most telling moment of the Mel Gibson movie was a simple shot near the end where one soldier pushes another soldier in a wheelchair, his head wrapped in bandages, down the concourse of an airport. A woman, with her children, grabs the youngest and pulls her away from the soldiers — much as one would react to a drunken wino walking down a dark alley.
What does it say about an America that treats its men in uniform that way? What does it say about John Kerry that that is the America he helped to create?
Some commentators have talked about John Kerry’s service in Vietnam and contrasted that with George W. Bush. In a time of war, John Kerry’s service, they say, gives him a credibilty with the military that George W. Bush doesn’t have.
Though Bush didn’t serve in Vietnam, the commentators who espouse the aforementioned view have miscalculated. President Bush has the respect of the armed forces because he respects their service and he respects them.
Despite his four months in Vietnam, Kerry is really another Bill Clinton. Clinton dodged the draft, protested against the U.S. overseas and his disdain for the military was well known. Members of the military recounted being sneered at by young Democrat staffers in the Clinton White House.
What Kerry did to the Vietnam veterans, to the poison American public opinion against people in the military who have made sacrifices — including giving up their own lives, was worse than anything Bill Clinton ever did.
That the media and the Democratic Party didn’t see the impact that a John Kerry candidacy would have on middle America is more evidence of how out of touch with reality they both are.
Much was made of how, during the Democratic Convention, nary a mention was made of President Bush. But there was something else that wasn’t mentioned either — there was no praise for the men and women fighting terrorism overseas. No thanks to those who have given their lives to bring freedom and democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq.
Democrats were thinking that they had nominated a war hero. They forgot that their war hero was, 30 years ago, one of those hate-America wackos who are marching in the streets of New York.
You know it’s bad when they won’t even try to fake it any more. National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru reports on an e-mail response from Reuters to a press release sent out by the National Right to Life committee.
What’s your plan for parenting & educating all the unwanted children you people want to bring into the world? Who will pay for policing our streets & maintaining the prisons needed to contain them when you, their parents & the system fail them? Oh, sorry. All that money has been earmarked to pay off the Bush deficit. Give me a frigging break, will you?
I’d like to say that this viewpoint is the exception, but I can’t.
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