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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PROLIFE who wrote (26546)	4/23/2008 10:34:07 AM
From: Ann Corrigan	Respond to of 224744

NYTimes throws Hillary under the bus with BO's grandmother: >The Low Road to Victory Editorial, nytimes.com Published: April 23, 2008 The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it. Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work. It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election. If nothing else, self interest should push her in that direction. Mrs. Clinton did not get the big win in Pennsylvania that she needed to challenge the calculus of the Democratic race. It is true that Senator Barack Obama outspent her 2-to-1. But Mrs. Clinton and her advisers should mainly blame themselves, because, as the political operatives say, they went heavily negative and ended up squandering a good part of what was once a 20-point lead. On the eve of this crucial primary, Mrs. Clinton became the first Democratic candidate to wave the bloody shirt of 9/11. A Clinton television ad — torn right from Karl Rove’s playbook — evoked the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, the Cuban missile crisis, the cold war and the 9/11 attacks, complete with video of Osama bin Laden. “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” the narrator intoned. If that was supposed to bolster Mrs. Clinton’s argument that she is the better prepared to be president in a dangerous world, she sent the opposite message on Tuesday morning by declaring in an interview on ABC News that if Iran attacked Israel while she were president: “We would be able to totally obliterate them.” By staying on the attack and not engaging Mr. Obama on the substance of issues like terrorism, the economy and how to organize an orderly exit from Iraq, Mrs. Clinton does more than just turn off voters who don’t like negative campaigning. She undercuts the rationale for her candidacy that led this page and others to support her: that she is more qualified, right now, to be president than Mr. Obama. Mr. Obama is not blameless when it comes to the negative and vapid nature of this campaign. He is increasingly rising to Mrs. Clinton’s bait, undercutting his own claims that he is offering a higher more inclusive form of politics. When she criticized his comments about “bitter” voters, Mr. Obama mocked her as an Annie Oakley wannabe. All that does is remind Americans who are on the fence about his relative youth and inexperience. No matter what the high-priced political operatives (from both camps) may think, it is not a disadvantage that Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton share many of the same essential values and sensible policy prescriptions. It is their strength, and they are doing their best to make voters forget it. And if they think that only Democrats are paying attention to this spectacle, they’re wrong. American voters deserve to hear a nuanced debate — right now and through the general campaign — about how each candidate will combat terrorism, protect civil liberties, address the housing crisis and end the war in Iraq. It is getting to be time for the superdelegates to do what the Democrats had in mind when they created superdelegates: settle a bloody race that cannot be won at the ballot box. Mrs. Clinton once had a big lead among the party elders, but has been steadily losing it, in large part because of her negative campaign. If she is ever to have a hope of persuading these most loyal of Democrats to come back to her side, let alone win over the larger body of voters, she has to call off the dogs. www.nytimes.com

To: PROLIFE who wrote (26546)	4/24/2008 2:37:29 PM
From: Ann Corrigan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224744

Incredible--Arianna HuffNpuff says msm is in bed with the right wing?? She must be living somewhere other than the US. >The mainstream news media jumps into bed with another propagandist. By Arianna Huffington April 24, 2008 Over the last seven years, the lunatic fringe in control of the Republican Party -- the people who believe in torture but don't believe in evolution -- have hijacked our democracy, aided and abetted by the news media. The heart of the problem is not the bias of Fox News or the blowhards on AM talk radio but a mainstream media that has completely internalized how the right frames all political debate. The right-wing message has become a part of the news media's DNA. The latest confirmation came with this week's announcement that Tony Snow, formerly a host at Fox News and press secretary for the White House, where he earned high marks as a gifted purveyor of Bush/Cheney propaganda, would be joining CNN as a commentator. I guess Karl Rove was too busy with his Newsweek gig and Bill Kristol with his New York Times column. What's next, NPR signing up "Scooter" Libby and David Addington? Certainly other White House insiders, such as William Safire and George Stephanopoulos, have made the leap to TV and print news. But this current crop remains unabashed propagandists. By embracing them, the mainstream media have revealed a mile-wide streak of self-loathing. Have they been so cowed by the Republicans' relentless branding of them as "liberal" that they feel compelled to sleep with the enemy? Make no mistake, Rove, Kristol and Snow are the enemies of honesty, truth, facts, reality and the public's right to know. Rove's commitment to deception is legendary. His entire career as a GOP shot-caller was built on it. Kristol, Dan Quayle's chief of staff in the first Bush administration, is neoconservatism's crown prince. As editor of the Weekly Standard, he was a prime pusher of invading Iraq, and his claims about the war's progress have been discredited again and again. His reward: a column in Time magazine in 2006-07, and then this year a conservative slot on the Gray Lady's Op-Ed page. The New York Times might as well have given a weekly column to infamous fabricator Jayson Blair. Now CNN, the self-anointed "most trusted name in news," has thrown its arms around Snow and handed him its international megaphone. Are the cable network's execs suffering from collective amnesia? Do they not remember the extremely distant relationship Snow had with the truth during his time as President Bush's mouthpiece? Because, in the end, the crux of this problem isn't Snow. It's the people who hired him -- and Kristol and Rove -- and their reasons for doing so. The prerequisite for any TV pundit is credibility. Viewers won't agree with every opinion expressed, but they do need to trust that it's an honest opinion, not some prepackaged PR line cooked up in the White House to keep us in the dark. That was always Snow's specialty -- along with a dismissive glibness that made him the poster child for the Bush administration's brand of Callous Conservatism. When the U.S. death toll in Iraq hit 2,500 in June 2006, Snow commemorated the news by saying "It's a number." When it was announced that in order to have enough troops for the "surge," a number of U.S. brigades would have to forgo the customary training in the Mojave Desert, Snow shrugged it off: "Well, but they can get desert training elsewhere, like in Iraq." Snow regularly displayed a gift for obfuscating rhetoric. In August 2006, faced with a rash of bombings and killings that had left 3,400 Iraqi civilians dead, Snow insisted that "there is not a civil war going on." Instead, he chalked the carnage up to "a number of sectarian violence operations going on." In December 2006, trying to put a positive spin on the highly critical Iraq Study Group report, Snow insisted that it agreed with Bush's "goal" in Iraq. Reminded that the report found that the president's policies in Iraq were "not working," he replied, "No, what they said is that you need a new policy." And he never let little things like the facts get in the way of his mission. In September 2006, just days after a Senate report unequivocally concluded there had been no prewar relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi, Snow insisted that such a relationship did exist, continuing to falsely link the Iraqi dictator to 9/11 -- evidence be damned. Misinformation accomplished. The fanatical right has put a modern media twist on Vladimir Lenin: "Self-loathing liberals will hand us the microphone with which we will bludgeon them."