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Politics : WHO IS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT IN 2004 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgal who wrote (1424)	3/14/2003 1:15:28 AM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10965

Brent Bozell URL:http://www.townhall.com/columnists/brentbozell/bb20030314.shtml March 14, 2003 White House press zombies? President Bush consented to another oral exam with his March 6 prime time press conference in the East Room. He passed, and the press failed. More importantly, however, was how they failed. This time, they flunked themselves. The press, you see, are being too easy on President Bush. Some really do believe that. Remember how we spent most of the 2000 campaign with liberal reporters and pundits relishing the idea of George W. Bush trying to handle a White House news conference? He couldn't put two sentences together, the frat-boy, not-ready-for-prime time lightweight. Now he goes long and deep into the White House press corps in prime time, and scores big. Why? It's not because he performed well. No, it's apparently because the malleable media are giving him a free ride. ABC's Terry Moran made waves after last week's press conference by insulting all the other reporters in the room. He told the Clinton-loving New York Observer newspaper that Bush left the press corps "looking like zombies." Moran ought to be getting dirty looks from his colleagues, who simply do not deserve the "zombie" tag for substance-free, Bush-enabling questions. CNN's John King cited Ted Kennedy's belief that "your fixation with Saddam Hussein is making the world a more dangerous place." Ed Chen of the Los Angeles Times demanded to know that if Bush "trusted the people" with their tax cuts, why not trust them enough to give them an estimate of the war costs? Bob Deans of Cox Newspapers even bizarrely suggested that the Vietnam War was somehow unjustified because "The regime is still there in Hanoi, and it hasn't harmed or threatened a single American in the 30 years since the war ended." Liberals cannot seriously claim these questions didn't echo their speeches. The standard for the event's worth, then, was not whether Bush was held accountable to his audience, but whether the press pounded him sufficiently. The press failed if there was no Bush blood spilled. The left-wing harangues about the White House zombies cited Moran as its entertaining exception. But Moran's question was channeling the nearby spirit of Helen Thomas. It wasn't a question meant to elicit news. It was a short campaign advertisement meant to portray Bush as an unpopular, globally isolated cowboy. He lectured the president that he had "generated opposition from the governments of France, Russia, China, Germany, Turkey, the Arab League and many other countries, opened a rift at NATO and at the U.N.; and drawn millions of ordinary citizens around the world into the streets and anti-war protests." That, in a nutshell, was the last two months of ABC reporting: Bush vs. The Rest of the World. But Moran wasn't done with his "question." He added: "May I ask what went wrong that so many governments and peoples around the world now not only disagree with you very strongly but see the U.S. under your leadership as an arrogant power?" Moran's been repeating this "arrogant power" line as if he received a check for $100 every time he used it on television. Afterward, Peter Jennings praised it as "straightforward." There's no doubt many Americans would have loved to see Bush turn the tables: "As if there's no arrogance of power coming from you and Peter Jennings." But that's what Moran wanted: not news, but bile ... pique ... a spectacle. Moran told the Observer that a questioner has to "create a moment of confrontation with the president," to make sure the president doesn't just "stand up there and use all the majesty of the presidency to amplify his image." ABC doesn't want us to go to the videotape and remind people of ABC's servile questioning of Bill Clinton. Days after his second inauguration in 1997, Clinton held a news conference with some tough questions about his fundraising abuses. But not all the reporters were tough. ABC's John Donvan asked if despite his "lofty goals" on education, for example, "many questions in the press and in Congress have focused on issues like campaign fundraising. My question is whether you are worried that the well is being poisoned even now for the realization of these goals before you can get out of the gate, particularly on the issue of bipartisanship?" That's odd. In the Bush presidency, poisoning the well for Bush's policy goals seems to be the primary mission, not the saddening side effect. So don't buy it when anyone complains the press conference was too easy, and too scripted. That accusation is a little odd coming from pampered, scripted network TV stars like Moran. Wouldn't it be fun to put him at the podium and give him a dose of his own arrogant medicine? He'd be pleading for "zombies" in no time. And he wouldn't deserve them. Brent Bozell is President of Media Research Center, a TownHall.com member group. ©2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

To: calgal who wrote (1424)	3/14/2003 1:21:35 AM
From: calgal	Respond to of 10965

URL:http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/garner.htm

To: calgal who wrote (1424)	3/14/2003 1:54:18 AM
From: calgal	Respond to of 10965

March 14, 2003 Genuinely in charge R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. URL:http://www.washingtontimes.com/commentary/20030314-1400925.htm Last weekend there was a series of newspaper articles in all the major papers that struck me as odd. They attempted to describe how the president is doing during these vestibular days before war with Iraq. He is relaxed. He is the same in public as in private. He is comfortable with his decisions. Well, of course he is. George W. Bush is a very straightforward man. He is among the most genuine men to reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. since Warren Gamaliel Harding. Wait, wait, that is not meant as a slight. Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover were genuine. Harry Truman was genuine. Ronald Reagan was a genuine guy and perhaps even George Bush I, though George Bush I has held so many positions in public life it would be difficult for him not to adopt certain artifices. George Bush II is, however, down home and genuine. People who meet him usually recognize this. He does not take credit for things he has not done, and some of the admirable things that he does he does not boast about. He has come to the conclusion that terrorists and "those who harbor terrorists" are a threat to his fellow citizens. Like only one other president in the three decades during which terrorism has claimed the lives of 4,000 Americans (about 1,000 before September 11, 2001), he intends to treat terror as an act of war, not a crime. That other president was Ronald Reagan. President Reagan sent American warplanes in April 1986 to bomb Col. Moammar Gadhafi's compound after the Libyan dictator capped numerous bellicose acts worldwide by sending agents to a West Berlin disco frequented by American soldiers. There they set off a bomb that killed two American soldiers and wounded some 200 innocent people, among them 50 more American soldiers. Even in that surgical military strike against a dictator who had been terrorizing the world, certain European sophisticates were against us, most memorably Jacques Chirac, then only the French prime minister. Mr. Chirac denied French airspace to our strike force, causing its pilots to fly 2,400 more miles to attack Col. Gadhafi. Mr. Chirac's motives were the same then as they are today: commerce, moral posturing and procrastination. At the time in this column I described Col. Gadhafi's network of terror as "a new abomination in the annals of war." Expressing the disappointment that millions of Americans feel toward now President Chirac, I wondered if the French "would have allowed our planes to fly over a more precisely designated rout, leapfrogging such places as Ardennes, Suresnes, Rhone, the Lorraine Valley, St. James, St. Laurent and Espinal. All contain military cemeteries where American men lie face-up, forever gazing into the skies of France. Surely these men would not object if they were to see once more the underbelly of an American bomber flying far from home to defend the values of the West." The lines struck a chord then. Pilots from the USS John F. Kennedy wrote me to tell me that they posted the column on their bulletin board. I reproduce part of it in hopes of stirring today's pilots as they prepare to strike against an even more monstrous brute than Col. Gadhafi. The American military has served the cause of freedom as few other military forces ever have. I also reproduce these lines to remind us that the obduracy of certain European powers is not new. Nor is their reliance on American resolve. There is also another reason to recall our action against Libya. It sent Col. Gadhafi hunkering. The fiery brute lost his fire. Mr. Reagan went on to stare down the Soviet Union, which gave up on the Cold War a few years later. Peace unfortunately is not secured by French procrastination. They might have learned that from their decade of appeasement in the 1930s. The resolute man in the White House is of course mounting a vastly larger strike against Saddam today than President Reagan mounted against Libya's tin pot colonel. Yet he has more of the world on his side. He has most of Europe, the Arab emirates, Jordan, and Turkey probably will be with us. Students of war as knowledgeable as Britain's John Keegan estimate the fighting will last only a week or so. First will come the most formidable aerial attack in history. Then air-mobile assaults will be mounted with heavily armed helicopters and elite troops from our airborne divisions and special-ops units. Finally our ground forces will roll against what is left of the Iraqi army. Within a few days, Baghdad will be surrounded. Saddam will be dead or under arrest. The great questions that now cannot be answered are: Will the Western alliance recover? Will terrorism subside? Will Iraq accept peace and civilized government? My guess is that the answer to all three questions is yes, but the work that follows the war will be as arduous as the work that led up to it. R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. is editor in chief of the American Spectator and a contributing editor of the New York Sun.