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Politics : THE VAST RIGHT WING CONSPIRACY -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgal who wrote (4723)	12/9/2003 12:15:42 AM
From: calgal	Respond to of 6358

Hillary blanches at being branded as un-American By Audrey Hudson THE WASHINGTON TIMES Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton yesterday called it "so sad" that she is being criticized as un-American for questioning Bush administration war policies while visiting troops in Iraq over the Thanksgiving holiday. "I think that's reflective of the efforts by this administration to deny and divert attention from what everybody knows. I mean, it is like the old children's story, 'The Emperor Has No Clothes,' " Mrs. Clinton said. The New York Democrat appeared on Sunday television talk shows and in wide-ranging interviews called the Bush administration "radical" and "extreme," and accused the president of linking presidential politics to the Iraq war timetable. She insisted again that she's not running for president in 2004: "No, no," Mrs. Clinton told NBC's "Meet the Press." "I have said no. I've said no, no, no, no." On CBS' "Face the Nation," Mrs. Clinton accused Andrew H. Card Jr., White House chief of staff, of painting a "rosy scenario" of the ongoing war. Mr. Card defended the administration's policies and said that Iraq "is in much better shape today than it was before the war." "The one thing that is sure is that the Iraqi people are better off without Saddam Hussein," Mr. Card told CNN's "Late Edition." "There is hope and opportunity." "I disagree with Hillary Clinton about a lot of things," Mr. Card said. "The one thing I do agree with her is that we've got tremendous men and women wearing the uniform of the United States fighting to beat back terrorists and to secure the hopes and dreams of the Iraqi people. And I was pleased that she went to Iraq to pay tribute to our troops, and the president paid tribute to the troops, and that's appropriate." Mrs. Clinton told troops she visited overseas "there are many questions at home about the administration's policies" but that "Americans are wholeheartedly proud of what you are doing." Mrs. Clinton said she did not undercut morale by criticizing the commander in chief to U.S. soldiers in Iraq. "It is fully appropriate, in talking with our soldiers, to have that kind of conversation with them," Mrs. Clinton said. The issue, she said, has been overblown and "largely fueled by a lot of the talk shows and the other sort of right-wing apparatus." Mrs. Clinton said she regrets using the word "conspiracy" in describing the right wing, saying there is nothing secret about it. "There's a tremendous infrastructure that supports these quite radical ideas and the administration is peopled with officials who are working to implement them," Mrs. Clinton said. Republicans are "taking aim at the New Deal" and have "a mission in mind to radically restructure the social safety net, the kind of consumer and worker protections that have been at the base of building the American middle class," she said. Asked on ABC's "This Week" program why Democrats are siding with Republicans on several issues if the policies are so radical and extreme, Mrs. Clinton declined to answer except that she voted for the Iraq resolution. Mrs. Clinton said she does not regret that vote "but I regret the way the president has used the authority." Asked whether the administration's policies or "dumb luck" was to thank for zero terrorist attacks in the United States since September 11, Mrs. Clinton replied: both. "We have made some real progress when it comes to homeland security, but we haven't done nearly enough, according to any expert, any nonpartisan, independent observer who has looked at what we've done since September 11. Have we made ourselves safer? Yes, we have; we've done some good work that needed to be done," Mrs. Clinton said.

To: calgal who wrote (4723)	12/9/2003 12:16:16 AM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6358

Liberalism's obituary Dennis Prager (archive) December 9, 2003 \| Print \| Send On Dec. 1, 2003, this obituary headline appeared in the New York Times: "Sylvia Bernstein, 88, Civil Rights Activist, Dies." Though the passing of Mrs. Bernstein was reported in almost every major newspaper in the country, there is a good chance you missed it. Too bad. Because the headline and the obituary tell you a great deal about the moral compass of mainstream American (and world) journalism. For, if you read through the entire piece (almost always either a verbatim or edited Associated Press report), you will come across this one line: "Members of the Communist Party in the 1940s, the Bernsteins were targets of government scrutiny." Note the headline: Mrs. Bernstein is described simply as a "civil rights activist." Indeed the whole obituary is a laudatory description of her and her husband's work "to desegregate area restaurants, an amusement park and pools and playgrounds. She advocated home rule for the District of Columbia and protested the Vietnam War and the development of nuclear weapons." Quite a terrific lady, no? According to every one of the seven major newspapers I checked, Mrs. Bernstein was described as essentially a wonderful, idealistic lady. So what if she was a member of the Communist Party at a time when Joseph Stalin was murdering and enslaving more human beings than anyone else had in history? So what if she was a member of the party that supported those who wished to destroy America, the land that her parents had fled to in order to be free people? So what if she remained in the Communist Party even after it supported the Soviet peace pact with Hitler's Nazi Germany? None of this matters to mainstream journalists. For these people, the fact that a person was a member of the American Communist Party when it obeyed Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party is as irrelevant to a moral assessment of that person as if she had been a member of a stamp club. In fact, the only time her membership was even mentioned in the AP obituary printed in the New York Times, the Washington Post and elsewhere, was to invoke Mrs. Bernstein's victimhood. As noted above, in the words of the AP report as printed in the New York Times: "Members of the Communist Party in the 1940s, the Bernsteins were targets of government scrutiny." In the Washington Post's words: " . . . the Bernsteins were Communist Party members in the mid-1940s and endured long persecution by the government for their political beliefs." The poor Bernsteins. Investigated by the American government for being members of a genocidal, totalitarian, anti-American party. Our language has become Orwellian. Communists are described as "social activists"; and when communists are investigated by a democratic government, the government is the villain and the communists are victims. To better appreciate the nonchalance with which mainstream (i.e., liberal and leftist) journalists greet Communist Party affiliation, imagine if Mrs. Bernstein had been a member of the American Nazi Party or the Ku Klux Klan, and had gone on to be a prominent "social activist" on behalf of right-wing causes in America. Needless to say, if her death would have been reported at all, her membership in those organizations and her subsequent right-wing social activism would not merely have been noted in passing. They would have been noted in the headline and featured in the body of the text. As a New York-born and raised Jewish liberal, when I am asked when I left liberalism, I answer that I never left it. It left me -- first and foremost over the issue of communism. At one time, to be a liberal meant being anti-communist as well as anti-fascist. Shortly after the death of John F. Kennedy, however, liberalism ceased being anti-communist. Instead it became anti-anti-communist. Though communism is largely dead, this has not changed. That is why our press regards Sylvia Bernstein merely as a social activist. ©2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc.