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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: calgal who wrote (503225)12/3/2003 9:57:25 PM
From: calgal  Respond to of 769670
 
Bush, puppet master of the press?
Brent Bozell (archive)

December 3, 2003 | Print | Send

The White House received some serious hand-rubbing good political news in the last week of November: passing a new Medicare bill, watching economic growth numbers revised upward to a startling 8.2 percent, and on Thanksgiving, the president secretly jetting into Baghdad to meet with wildly cheering troops.

With all this positive news, you just knew it wouldn't take long for liberals in the media to complain about pro-Bush media bias.

On "Fox News Sunday," Washington Post reporter Ceci Connolly sulked because the White House won't allow camera access to flag-draped coffins coming off planes at Dover Air Force Base, and complained about how the press was "never" allowed into Bush campaign fundraisers in 2000. Her conclusion: "George Bush, from the time he was a candidate in 2000, right on through Thanksgiving Day, has absolutely controlled, maybe even manipulated the press."

Pardon me, but it's hard to stop laughing.

This claim demands sarcasm. I'm sure reporters remember how they were all manipulated by Bush during the 2000 campaign cycle to "report" about how maybe, just maybe he snorted cocaine at some time in his party-hearty past. I'm sure they'll never forget how Bush insisted they tell the voters what a lame-brained bumpkin they thought he was. I'm positive journalists can recall absolutely being forced to hyperventilate on the airwaves about tabloid stories claiming "Bush knew" about September 11, but failed to stop it, right? Or how Time was conned by the White House into putting "Mission NOT Accomplished" on its cover? Even today, reporters are being fooled into noting each lost soldier with the trope that "that's now (insert number here) American deaths since President Bush declared major combat operations over."

That's how Bush is "controlling" the press.

But there's something quite annoying at the center of Connolly's complaint: that arrogant notion that journalists must be granted access to positively everything, or the world is shrouded in dangerous secrecy -- unless it involves a Clinton scandal, in which case it's time for America to "move on."

What liberal reporters are griping about is their fervent partisan desire not for policy substance, but for the damaging visual: They want to present a split screen of Bush speaking over video of military coffins being unloaded off airplanes -- which is exactly what CNN did to the first President Bush.

The media dread of positive Bush television images is sending some into hysterics. Connolly actually insisted on Fox that the president's flight to Baghdad was not a "troop movement," there should be less fuss about keeping the logistical details secret. In G.I. Ceci's world, keeping the commander-in-chief's movements quiet in a war zone is less important than troop movements. Is there any doubt that he is a highly desirable target for terrorists and Baathist remnants? She should not be surprised (but probably would be surprised) to hear the public's response: Oh, shut up. Criticize the policy if you want, or criticize the politician, but don't try to tell us that media access is more important than the president's security.

Not all journalists lacked sense on the Sunday shows. On CNN's "Reliable Sources," host Howard Kurtz goaded Post reporter Mike Allen and Newsweek Washington Bureau Chief Daniel Klaidman about the Baghdad trip, but they were decidedly less outraged than Kurtz was, as he asked: "Was the press used here for an elaborate two-hour, turkey-filled presidential photo-op?" Klaidman reminded Kurtz that the press is always seen as "used" in one way or another, and media behavior would have been as much or more of an issue had the press blown the secret of the president's trip.

For all the claims of Bush as puppet master of the press, by Friday morning, all three network morning shows were raining skepticism on the trip, to no one's surprise. ABC's Charlie Gibson wondered why "things are so unstable" that the president had to "sneak in, in darkness." CBS's Harry Smith insisted the president erred in his speech to soldiers, that he should not be connecting the Iraq war to the fight against terrorists. NBC's Matt Lauer wondered if the Baghdad trip was arranged to blunt criticism because "he did not attend any of the funerals of the fallen soldiers in Iraq."

This should have stopped G.I. Ceci from making silly claims of the press being "absolutely controlled" by Bush two days later. But that presupposes that she actually watched the TV news, which apparently is too much to expect.

Brent Bozell is President of Media Research Center, a Townhall.com member group.

©2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

townhall.com



To: calgal who wrote (503225)12/3/2003 9:59:43 PM
From: PartyTime  Respond to of 769670
 
Oh, she'll work wonders no doubt. eom



To: calgal who wrote (503225)12/3/2003 10:01:07 PM
From: calgal  Read Replies (3) | Respond to of 769670
 
Hate speech
Gary Aldrich (archive)

December 3, 2003 | Print | Send

Having studied the Clintons up-close and personal, I have long since concluded that their politics are not the ideals of Liberals, nor are they the dreams of the naive. Instead, they matured from the radical New Left into the hateful “Hard-Left.”

Nothing I have discovered has discouraged me from concluding that Hillary Clinton and her sometimes brilliant, sometimes useful-dupe husband are less than dedicated Marxists. Her mentor was Saul D. Alinsky, long-time Communist Party, U.S.A. member, and author of the Hard-Left’s playbook, “Rules for Radicals – A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals.”

If you ever read this book, readily available in any book store and most college campus libraries, you will instantly recognize Bill and Hillary Clinton’s pattern of political conduct. Not only that, but once you read this book, you can predict every political move Hillary Clinton will ever make.

I’d be surprised to learn that the Republican National Committee does not have this book as required reading for every staff member. If they don’t, they would be well-advised to order some copies.

Let others hint and imply, I worked in “the nest,” and I know. I was there, met their friends and saw their backgrounds. I heard them talk and express a visceral hatred toward Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and anyone who ever worked for them.

They are hard-hearted, Hard-Left and very hateful people. Which brings me to my point.

I saw what the Clintons did to our White House, to employees who worked there, to the military officers unlucky enough to serve there – and I was myself subjected to one of the most hateful smear campaigns ever launched against a Clinton truth-teller. I didn’t hate them then, and I don’t hate them now.

To give in to that emotion would be to admit that I am powerless in the face of their power, which is not true then, now, or ever.

I never hated them, no matter what they did – anymore than I hated the Mafia crook, the kidnapper or the drug dealers I put in prison. I never hated these people, because they only represent human failure, which I do hate. I hate Communism, Socialism and National Socialism (Nazi), because these ideologies represent the worst character flaws in humans. They feed on human failure.

All these collectivist political movements have the same thing in common. In order for them to get and keep power, people must fail – or enough of them must fail to be ready to turn their lives over to people like Hillary on the basis of a lie, on the promise that somehow life will become better.

Except that it never does; it only gets worse. Millions of corpses in thousands of mass graves are silent testimony to the most deadly time on our planet – the last 100 years – when at least 100,000,000 died at the hands of their own governments, all of them Communist or Socialist.

That’s why I truly hate the sickness called Communism – because it is deadly.

That people can be born and raised in this country and grow up to hate America, hate Christians because of their beliefs, hate Capitalism because some do better than others – hate President George Bush because no matter what, he continues to do the right thing and his popularity with the American people continues to grow – that there are actually those who hate George Bush enough to fly to Iraq and make a political speech criticizing the Commander-in-Chief on Thanksgiving Day is truly appalling!

I hate the sickness that takes over a woman’s mind, allowing her to snatch every opportunity to misuse her moment in time, to keep that kind of hate alive.

But I cannot hate the persons of Hillary or Bill Clinton. I feel sorry for them. They have been especially privileged and lucky, and now they are especially rich, having sold books they did not write – and I would posit, never could write.

And yet they remain unhappy. They want to tear down this country. They support an ideology that will eventually destroy Democracy and Capitalism, if not stopped now.

And they will do anything they have to do to get their power back. They will lie, cheat and destroy others to get what they want. But they are no worse than others I met as an FBI agent. Except, in every profession but politics, you can be put in prison for lying, fraud, stealing, and trying to falsely imprison innocents – like Billy Dale, of the White House Travel Office, for example.

But in politics, you can reach high office, and then lie about the Commander-in-Chief during a time of war, in a foreign land, on Thanksgiving Day. You can bad-mouth President Bush to his own troops who are there and prepared to die for this country. You can do all that, and more, and not fear any consequence for your actions.

What Hillary just did is the perfect way to define hate.

Gary Aldrich is president and founder of The Patrick Henry Center for Individual Liberty, a Townhall.com member group.

©2003 Gary W. Aldrich

townhall.com