On TV last week, George W. Bush talked about liberty, and the History Channel took liberties.

The President’s words shot in the face of the liberal establishment, and the History Channel’s words seem to have been written by the liberal establishment.

Bush subtly -- but noticeably -- razzed Presidents Carter and Clinton, while the network allegedly aimed at teaching history elevated the buffoons to unparalleled heights.

At his inauguration, President George Bush set forth not so much a revolutionary goal, but a brave goal.  Presidents have been talking about the spread of freedom for centuries, and, as every liberal in the world has now pointed out, John F. Kennedy is among them.  (Unlike Kennedy, Ronald Reagan talked about freedom and went on to produce it.)  But Bush did more than both of these men.  He didn’t say the United States would help freedom-fighters or ask the UN to please support freedom-fighters; he said the official, explicit policy of the world’s sole superpower is to vanquish tyranny.  That’s more than can be said for any ex-president.

Which is not to say that all past presidents failed.  Reagan really didn’t have time to worry about the darkest reaches of totalitarianism, because he was dealing with the brainchild of totalitarianism, the USSR.  Note that it no longer exists.  President Ford hardly had time to learn the names of the White House staff, let alone bring an end to worldwide oppression.  And Carter -- he has the best excuses of them all -- had to pick out sweaters, consult his wife on matters of national policy, and send American optimism to near-collapse.  So we all have our reasons.

But Bush is different, and now the world knows it.  This, and other accomplishments by Republican presidents, doesn’t sit well with the History Channel, which recently linked the ascendancy of Newt Gingrich to 9/11.  If it hadn’t been so evil, it would have been a masterstroke.

According to The Presidents, produced this year and shown in primetime all of last week, Speaker Gingrich and Republicans closed down the government (lie), which emptied the White House of observant individuals (lie), which allowed Monica Lewinsky to become “unusually close” to Clinton (lie), which allowed the press to focus solely on sex (lie), which allowed Osama bin Laden to plan 9/11 (lie).  So there you have it:  Contract With America killed 3,000 Americans.

To review:

-- The government shut down for a short period in the mid-90s because Clinton stubbornly refused to realize that he had lost Congress.  Gingrich and the GOP majority got to run the show, Clinton disagreed, no compromise was reached, and the government temporarily closed.  Republicans may share responsibility with Clinton, but Clinton was absolutely at fault.

-- Monica Lewinsky was a White House intern, not a street-walking floozy: she and President Clinton knew exactly what they were doing, and they knew the consequences.  The idea that they were victims of Gingrich’s plot to clean out the White House is absurd.  On the basis of all the other women who had come out claiming to have been sexually abused by Clinton, it’s totally improbable that he, as The Presidents asserts, only had sex with Lewinsky because of loneliness.

-- Republicans were the people obsessively demanding that the press shut up about sex and talk about the real issues of perjury and obstruction of justice.  Reporters wrote about sex because they thought they were protecting Clinton -- not harming him.  They thought all they had to do was change the subject, and Bubba would be saved.

-- Osama bin Laden knew Clinton was weak long before impeachment.  When terrorists exploded a bomb at the World Trade Center in 1993 and Clinton, advised by “whistleblower” Dick Clarke, did nothing, bin Laden naturally formulated an idea about Clinton’s willingness to fight.  His opinion was only validated when Clinton ordered troops home after the Somalia bloodbath; when Clinton did nothing in response to five Americans being killed by a car bomb in Saudi Arabia in 1995; when Clinton naively lobbed bombs hundreds of miles from Saddam in 1997.  The bombings of our African embassies, ignored by Clinton, also added to bin Laden’s understanding of what Clinton was made.   

The Fantastic Lies Channel didn’t bother with any of that.  They’d rather tie Republicans to 9/11 than tell the truth.

Isaiah Z. Sterrett, a resident of Aptos, California, is a Lifetime Member of the California Junior Scholarship Federation and a Sustaining Member of the Republican National Committee.

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