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Politics : America Under Siege: The End of Innocence -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgal who wrote (24257)	2/15/2004 5:51:37 PM
From: calgal	Respond to of 27666

ClashPoint: The Arrogant Excretions of the Media Elite Doug Giles (archive) URL:http://www.townhall.com/columnists/GuestColumns/Giles20040207.shtml February 7, 2004 \| Print \| Send If you’re a conservative; if you drive a sperm whale size SUV; if you voted for George W. Bush in the last election; and if you supported the war in Iraq … then, according to the media elite, you’re Beavis. If you go to a Bible believing church on a regular basis; if you argue for the traditional family; if you live in a rural environment (especially) in the south; and if you fly the American flag … then, according to the media elite, you make Jethro Bodine look like a member of MENSA. If you own a gun; if you believe we should bolster our national defense; if you believe in the goodness of America and its founding principles; and if you think we should fight back when attacked … then, according to the media elite, you’re still in a Darwinian holding pattern. If you believe in limited government; if you argue that lower taxes spur economic growth; if you want our borders protected; and if you are a white man ... then, according to the media elite, you are the source of all that is wrong with America. That’s right: according to the media elite and their smarmy Thurston Howell, III’s, point of view, those of us who make up the core of traditional American values are woefully naïve bores. The average working hard, playing hard, salt-of-the-earth American is despicable to the pompous, wannabe-Euro-socialist-talking-heads that carp, fart and blather anti-American sentiments at us via the CBS, ABC, NBC and CNN nightly news. And you know what? Good, old Americans like us have had enough, and we are decisively turning them off en masse, for their unfair and unbalanced, blindingly liberal reporting and their condescension towards those of us who dare to differ. America is sick of the ridiculous, oh-so-obvious, Matt Lauer-like hard ball played when liberal journalists go toe-to-toe with a conservative, not budging an inch and always giving them that “Tsk-tsk, you’re guilty ‘til proven innocent” look on whatever stance the conservative takes on whichever issue. In the meantime, they preen, praise and pamper every liberal from Hillary Clinton to Ted Kennedy, and everyone in between. Bad conservative … BAD, BAD conservative for having a point of view other than the one that’s in agreement with those of Katie, Matt, Dan, Leslie and Aaron. Their biased bunk is more obvious than Janet Reno subbing in an all boy Japanese middle school wearing a day glow unitard. KY jelly is less transparent than Dan Rather’s ideological foundations. It’s no wonder the majority of newscasters (and I use that word loosely) are severely bent to the left. The top journalism schools from which the major broadcasting companies draw their “talent”, make David Koresh, Adolph Hitler and Jim Jones roll over in their graves with envy vis-à-vis their brainwashing abilities. Sure, these universities spit out a diverse group of professionals from various cultures, but ideologically speaking, they couldn’t be more inbred than the kid on the front porch picking a banjo in the movie Deliverance. My ClashPoint is this: Mr. and Ms. Media Elite, we don’t like you anymore. We don’t like to be told what to drive, how to vote, whom to worship or not worship. We don’t like to feel guilty and naughty if we dissent with your values. We don’t want to be like they are in Europe. That’s why we left. We don’t like to switch on TV and hear everything that we value somehow put down and vilified. We don’t like you trying to make us feel stupid because we believe in God, freedom, family and the flag. That’s why we’re taking our remote control and turning you off. Because, you see, you’re way off. Frankly, we would rather watch the paint-drying channel or the grass-growing marathon than listen to your too obviously imbalanced, liberal, psycho-political, brainwashing blather. And don’t think for one second it’s because we can’t handle the weight of your philosophic constructs – or destructs. It seems you’re not convertible. Therefore, we’ll just shake the dust off our TV clicker and move on down the road, to that which really is fair and balanced. Doug Giles pastors a church in Miami and hosts two award winning radio programs. His latest book, “Ruling in Babylon”, is available via Amazon.com. You can e-mail him at doug@clashradio.com, or visit the www.clashradio.com website. ©2003 Doug Giles

To: calgal who wrote (24257)	2/15/2004 5:51:47 PM
From: calgal	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 27666

The Wrong Culprit From the February 16, 2004 issue: In stopping proliferation, the problem has been political will, not faulty intel. by Henry Sokolski 02/16/2004, Volume 009, Issue 22 URL:http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/00... BOTH ZEALOUS CRITICS and supporters of President Bush's war against Saddam seem finally to have agreed on one thing--the Central Intelligence Agency goofed. The president's own Iraq weapons sleuth, David Kay, now asserts that our intelligence on Iraq was simply wrong, that Saddam didn't have weapons of mass destruction in 2003. This intelligence failure must be corrected, it is argued, lest we make fresh mistakes against the strategic weapons programs in North Korea and Iran. Hence, President Bush's announcement last week of a special panel to investigate our intelligence agencies' performance on Iraq. Implicit in all this is a belief that our government cannot succeed in its fight against proliferation of WMD unless our information on other countries' covert weapons programs is dramatically improved. "Pristine intelligence--good, accurate intelligence--is a fundamental benchstone of any sort of policy of preemption to even be thought about," as David Kay said. This seems plausible. What serious policymaker would insist on getting less intelligence? Ultimately, however, the clamor for more specific proliferation information is wrongheaded. Washington's problem isn't its sorry supply of good tactical intelligence on covert strategic weapons programs. Such intelligence has rarely been good and is unlikely to get much better. Instead, the challenge in nonproliferation has been the dearth of senior officials willing to respond to the generally sound strategic warnings our intelligence agencies produce years before any proliferation becomes a crisis. Far from heeding such warnings, policymakers often wish them away. This unwillingness to act on early intelligence warnings is the exact opposite of the problem everyone is now focusing on. Our intelligence agencies have in fact never been very good at pinpointing specific proliferation activities. U.S. intelligence got cold-cocked by the Soviets' first nuclear test in 1949; by India's nuclear tests in 1974 and 1998; by Israel's nuclear weapons deception efforts in the 1960s; and by Iraq's, Iran's, Pakistan's, and North Korea's strategic weapons programs in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s. All these tactical intelligence failures, though, were predictable. Unlike monitoring conventional arsenals--military forces that are hard to hide and rarely worrisome unless they're quite large--tracking small (but more deadly) covert missile, nuclear, biological, and chemical programs is highly prone to error. That's why the spread of these latter capabilities is a much greater threat than the acquisition of more common military systems. Trying to fix this intelligence weakness--the presumed aim of the Iraq intelligence investigations--may not be a fool's errand, but it's unlikely to succeed. Certainly, by the time our intelligence agencies could ever prove they knew exactly what other nations had in the way of strategic weapons capabilities and identified precisely where these capabilities were, the only options left to reverse what they had discovered would be to bomb or bribe--extreme measures neither of which is very attractive. Washington has long grappled with this truth. In some cases, it has done well. With Taiwan's, South Korea's, and Ukraine's nuclear weapons aspirations and the large-rocket ambitions of Argentina, Iraq, Egypt, and South Africa, U.S. officials chose to act upon receiving the earliest strategic intelligence warnings. None of these countries completed the programs it began; all were quietly nipped in the bud.