When liberal media outlets revel in Sarah Palin’s "Troopergate," it will only remind us of Bill Clinton’s scandal of the same name.
At a small party over the weekend, the subject of our presidential election arose. Living as I do in Connecticut, I was prepared for the typical onslaught a conservative is sure to endure from liberals in social situations in our state. I was, of course, not disappointed.
The insults, name-calling and foul language — staples of most liberal conversations — directed at my fiancé and me were to be expected, as we were the only representatives of a party that our fellow guests said, “makes them sick.” We once again witnessed the phenomenon where otherwise perfectly nice people were transformed into fire-breathing attack dogs at the mere mention of the GOP.
And the name most frequently offered up for hatred and derision was: Karl Rove. Yes, that Karl Rove, who ostensibly stepped down from public affairs over a year ago. But that didn’t stop three angry women from blaming the dimming of their star on the wily Rove. Just as frat-boy George W. Bush wasn’t capable of winning the White House without the dastardly dealings of his Texas cabal, so they are convinced that Barack Obama cannot lose unless Republican dirty-work is afoot. They told me they wished the Democrats would “fight back” once in a while against right-wing media bias. Some things never change.
The media in this country has for some time demonstrated its own agenda — witness Walter Cronkite’s false assertion that the Tet Offensive was a failure and the Vietnam War was “unwinnable” — yet they kept it pretty much under wraps. But this all seemed to change during and after the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Although driven from office, Richard Nixon escaped the ignominy that befell the man from Hope; an unthinkable injustice in the eyes of the press. Someone had to pay.
Even before George W. Bush was “selected” by the Supreme Court, the liberal media despised this man and sought at all costs to ensure his defeat. No gaffe went unreported, no misspeak was ignored and no scurrilous rumor went uninvestigated. And nowhere was this more apparent than the coverage of the 2000 election.
In August of that year, Al Gore’s son was arrested for reckless driving in North Carolina which resulted in the loss of his driving privileges there. Typical of the kind of coverage this received was this story on the younger Gore’s arrest last year on drug charges. After reporting the details, ABC went on to devote six paragraphs to the Bush Twins’ troubles. Yet, at the time, it was barely reported and certainly not the subject of countless Sunday morning panels and sordid speculation. Candidates’ families were off-limits then.
Likewise in 2004, the endless calls for every scrap of paper from Bush’s National Guard days did not suffice to quench the media’s thirst for GOP blood; notwithstanding that John Kerry saw fit to release virtually no information from his time in Vietnam. This treatment no doubt led the American people to give credence to the Swiftboats for Truth campaign, but liberals never learn. Today’s disgusting attacks on John McCain’s health, physical and otherwise — Moveon.org is calling for more info on his bout with cancer — are pretty rich coming from worshipers of Bill Clinton, who has yet to release his medical records.
And can you imagine if a Republican called Obama an “African-American who is articulate, bright and clean?” He’d be tarred, feathered and run out of town on a rail like George Allen; but coming as it did from the mouth of a man who seems to have arrived in Washington with Pierre L’Enfant, he was rewarded with the number two spot on the "change" ticket.
In the bad old days before Fox News and the Internet, this kind of hypocrisy went mostly unnoticed by the American people whose attention span was short. Now, when liberal media outlets revel in Sarah Palin’s "Troopergate," it will only remind us of Bill Clinton’s scandal of the same name. And when they question Palin’s experience, it will only serve to remind us of the lack of same at the top of their ticket.
But, unmindful of the fact that their relentless attacks have only served to get George W. Bush elected twice, and still confident that they can keep this country’s citizens under their former fog of liberal indoctrination, the media don’t show any signs of slowing down. They will continue to parrot left-wing talking points, denigrate people of faith and talk down to the majority of the American people. And they don’t need Karl Rove to do it.
I love it when you folks go off on the “liberal media.”
In 2000, that would be the same “liberal media” that picked up Al Gore’s “I invented the internet” and ran with it, despite the fact that he had never said such a thing, and had, in fact been right there with funding for precursors of the internet very early on.
And in 2004, it was the “liberal media” that gave the swiftboaters their day in the sun, never really debunking their lies.
Funny how the Republican candidate won in both elections in which the “liberal media” is supposed to have meddled so greatly. The “liberal media” had a big fat crush on George Bush from the moment he emerged into the spotlight until 2006 or so, when things got so bad, with debacle after debacle, that the “liberal media” couldn’t possibly deny it any more and retain any semblance of credibility.
Funny too, how the “liberal media” hounded John Kerry for having divorced and remarried into money. But gosh, there is a Republican candidate on the ticket this year who did the same thing, and is virtually celebrated for it. Where is the supposed “liberal media?”
And please don’t get me started on Vietnam. We lost that war in the 40s and 50s when we repeated blew off Ho Chi Minh’s pleas for assistance in obtaining independence, in favor of supporting French attempts to retake their former colony after WWII. By the sixties, when we were supporting a cruel Catholic dictator who systematically killed and tortured his citizens, we were on the tragically wrong side. To suggest that the war was “winnable” in light of what we know today is to display breathtaking ignorance.
In my last paragraph, “repeated” should be “repeatedly.”
You have got to be kidding me. Right wing media? Really?The same right wing media that used forged documents to attack Pres. Bush’s Nat’l Guard Service, and then basically refused to admit any wrong doing?
The same right wing media that proclaimed Florida for Gore a full hour before the polls closed in FL (despite Ms. Harris’s letter reminding them of FL’s 2 timezones), and refused to admit any wrong doing?
As for the Swiftboats, only one person could debunk their “lies,” and that was Sen. Kerry himself. Quite simple really. Just release the records. Every major newspaper (Washington Times being an exception, of course) blasted the Swifties, calling them liars and dishonorable, without ever refuting their points. Could it be that you can’t “debunk” facts?
Regarding the “Swiftboating” of Kerry, if he were innocent of the attacks, then why would we want a leader who would not stand up to the truth? The obvious conclusion is that he was not innocent and we, the American people, are better off without his lack of leadership. And dr. k., if you think it was 2006 before Bush was assailed by the media then you need to reread those articles.
DK,
I suppose you could be forgiven some of this, as you were not alive when some of it happened. You did not witness John Kerry flinging away medals he later claimed he kept, did not watch Kerry accuse every veteran then in Vietnam (including my brother) of crimes and atrocities that mostly never happened, did not see him cavort with radical-vets many of whom turned out fakes, did not see him violate inactive-duty officer restrictions on political activism, and did not see the nationally televised Kerry-O’Neill debate in which O’Neill demolished Kerry and his slanders.
Try to remember (or learn) this, if nothing else. The swift-boat vets who went public against Kerry were not motivated by partisanship. They are Republicans, Democrats and independents who would have gone public just as surely had Kerry been a Republican. They had nothing personal or political to gain from going public and more to lose. The media attacked them, not Kerry, for upsetting their carefully crafted image of the war and of the long hyped anti-war warrior. Kerry was and remains a media creation; and the media is not fond of having its creations challenged. Some of the media left it to Kerry to defend himself, but others exposed their partisanship by hotly defending the Kerry image. These ‘objective’ reporters repeated the Kerry version of his service as fact despite inconsistencies. They refused to report these inconsistencies and objected when others reported them. Few in the media, took the side of the swift-boaters; and then only to the extent the swift-boaters should be allowed an opportunity to make their case. Beyond that, these ‘conservatively biased’ reporters are guilty of reporting the swift-boater’s charges for the record. Rush, Hannity, and the rest of conservative media are, at most, ‘guilty’ of lending them a pulpit, encouragement, confirming their claims to the extent possible, and opining voters should have this information when entering the voting booth. Your charge of conservative bias, then, reduces to: ‘anything smacking of conservative interests (or, conversely, damaging to liberal interests) should be tarred and barred as bias.
The swift-boater objection was (and remains) to Kerry the man, not Kerry the Democrat, stepping into the role of Commander-in-Chief of a military he once trashed for personal political gain. Kerry, by his own account, fully intended getting into politics before he went to Vietnam and, had his military career been more successful (i.e., suspect military honors), he would have returned from Vietnam as a hawk rather than a dove. He admits to joining the Navy in the expectation it would enhance his political resume. However, when he realized public perception of the war was tending negative, his medals tainted by self-promotion, and unlikely his former ‘band of brothers’ would back his play, he most likely decided the radical path to glory held greater promise. As a radical, he was just as calculating and abandoned his radical buddies the moment things got too ‘interesting’ (just as he had his swift-boat comrades).
I was a Navy recruit around the time Kerry was tossing away his medals. His testimony not only savaged fellow Vietnam vets, it impugned all four principal branches of the service. It undermined morale at a critical point in the war, and it struck hardest among our officers from whom we expected leadership. While I was in engineman training, the Capital was bombed by radicals, the Pentagon Papers were made public, Lt. Calley was convicted, and a group of active-duty Air Cav vets refused a patrol assignment. Returning from leave and wearing my uniform en-route to my first assignment, a group of casual protesters spat on me and other servicemen passing through San Francisco airport while guards and others stood by. I later heard of servicemen attacked or struck by thrown objects (these brave protesters only attacked or provoked isolated servicemen, those of us who failed to acknowledge the anti-war drumbeat). What happened to us would have been unthinkable a couple of years earlier. Returning from training was like coming home to a strangely altered reality. In January, before I had gone off, Nixon declared the “end in sight” and by July was patching up relations with China and Russia, isolating the North Vietnamese government from its support. Vietnam was essentially over with the communist reeling from Tet and Linebacker. Overnight, the portrayal of the war was turned on its head, with the media redefining it as a disaster (where before it was a mopping up). It started coming apart just as American troops were pulled out, and it accelerated mainly because radicals were making it too hot for our government to put ground troops back in (a looming election and, then, Watergate clinched it). Generals Giap and Dung counted on American unwillingness to resume a fight we’d already broken off, and they weren’t disappointed. By 1973, we had not completely beaten the communists (as events would soon prove), but we had definitely forced them to the peace table, and had sufficient reason to believe they would honor the peace if only because we’d resume bombing.
The claim we ‘lost’ in Vietnam is just as false as saying we won. It was an unfinished business, but it was not a business we would have lost. It was costly, and that seems to have persuaded some more than it should have as the cost of not winning was higher, for the Vietnamese people if not us. Where we did lose it was in the public square where radicals like Kerry and Hayden deliberately misrepresented events and actors, made things hot for those who questioned their version of things, and made so much noise no other version could be heard. The version that has gone into the history books is mostly the one the left wants you to believe. Actual witnesses to history intrude on that version so, no doubt, they are anxious for our silence. I, for one, plan on sticking around a long time unearthing inconvenient facts.
Bob: Thank you for confirming a long held view I’ve expressed.
Libs like Dr. K. constantly shoot off their mouth, confusing the expression of an opinion with the analysis of a situation.
When confronted with a factual account of history that differs from their fantasies, they do not respond (or when they respond, ignore the substance of what was said and simply express their opinion again.)
They then reappear in another post to offer their opinion again, and start the process all over again.
Maybe someday some lib somewhere will actually engage in a debate, instead of just telling us how he feels about something.