Posted on 07/22/2003 6:45:27 AM PDT by Jeff Gannon
It hasn’t been called “Intelligence-gate” yet, but it won’t be long before somebody uses the term. The media feeding frenzy over the “16 words” in the President’s State of the Union address continues to overshadow all other news. Despite official explanations, the release of intelligence reports and a White House spokesman calling the implication that the President deliberately misled the nation “nonsense”, it seems that nothing will stop the media’s quest for a pound of flesh. Even the fact that George W. Bush’s statement about Iraq’s attempts to purchase uranium from Africa is “technically accurate” doesn’t seem to be an obstacle for the agenda-driven press corps.
Last week, a White House reporter spoke of impeachment while Senator Bob Graham (D-FL) was simultaneously suggesting to a New Hampshire audience that perhaps the President should be removed from office. In the course of asking more than 100 questions about the matter, the White House press corps has referred to it as a “crisis” and a “scandal”. One reporter builds on the question of the previous reporter in a continuous barrage against whoever is behind the podium, looking for a slip-up.
The media has been decidedly hostile toward the Bush administration, something that became clear in the period leading up to the war in Iraq. They portrayed the anti-war protests as a mainstream political movement when in fact most of the organization and funding for the events came from socialist groups. The marchers themselves turned out to be 60’s refugees, disaffected African-Americans, college students from liberal campuses and anti-capitalist agitators.
Hollywood celebrities were featured in news shows claiming their free speech was being stifled because patriotic Americans criticized them for their anti-war views. Consumers exercised their freedom of choice by not listening to their music or watching their movies. The media decried that a modern “McCarthyism” had swept the nation, but paid little attention to American flags are being removed from public buildings, college campuses and fire trucks out of concern for the feelings of those who hated the United States.
In the weeks leading up to the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the news programs focused on the opposition of France, Germany and Russia instead of the support from Great Britain, Spain, Italy and any number of former Eastern European countries freed from the grip of communism by Ronald Reagan.
After the first ten days of the operation, the New York Times reported that coalition forces were bogged down and conjured the image of a quagmire. But the reality is that there is a quagmire in the media, their obsession to destroy the presidency of George W. Bush has become their exclusive mission.
When the war began, the media focused on the Iraqi civilian casualties. After the fall of Baghdad, all they switched their attention to anti-American demonstrations in Iraq, but failed to mention that the protests are stirred up by Iranian Shi’ites. ABC recently interviewed American soldiers in Iraq to show the fatigue and dissatisfaction of some of the troops. Several soldiers criticized their superiors and one was quoted calling for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Despite their reporting, a majority of Americans supported the war and still do. After all that effort, they were unable to undermine the President. But a new offensive is underway.
The imagery of the Vietnam War is being evoked to draw the necessary parallel of failure. The strategy is to erode American morale by suggesting that while the United States won the war, it is losing the peace. With the current mantra of “one casualty a day” they hope to undermine support for the mission in Iraq as well as the Bush administration. They choose to overlook the fact that 287 Marines were killed in a single terrorist attack in Lebanon twenty years ago in a mission that liberated not a single citizen of that nation, yet less than that have paid the ultimate price for the emancipation of 24 million Iraqis. It is the press corps that has become “Vietnamized”, not the war in Iraq.
Democrats complain that Bush and the Republicans want to turn the clock back to the 50’s, but it is clear that the Democrats want to return to 1974. Last year, they persuaded Walter Mondale and Frank Lautenberg to go out on the “Back to the Future” tour. Now, the icon of the liberal Democrats, former Senator George McGovern (D-SD) has emerged from obscurity to write an op-ed in for the Los Angeles Times.
He wrote, “These days, my name is back in the news. I’m being held up as some kind of sober warning to Democratic candidates. Don’t be another George McGovern, the warning goes. Don’t be too liberal. Don’t be too outspoken. Watch what you say and play to the middle, so that you don’t end up losing 49 states, too.” Democrats are ignoring that warning, however, as former Vermont governor Howard Dean’s dramatic rise in the polls show. They identify themselves as “progressive” but the label still translates to “liberal”.
McGovern praises the former Klansman and civil rights opponent Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) who “courageously challenged the Bush administration’s unconstitutional invasion of Iraq” and outlandishly claims the Bush administration of raised taxes to pay for the Department of Homeland Security.
The most startling aspect of the 1972 Democratic presidential candidate’s missive is what he writes about truth. He details the transgressions of Richard Nixon and the former President’s 1968 campaign promise of a “secret plan” to end the Vietnam War. He accuses Nixon of deceiving the American people and seamlessly segues to the operation in Iraq and Bush’s State of the Union speech. McGovern conveniently forgets that it was a member of his party who first committed troops to Southeast Asia and another that lied in order to expand U. S. involvement.
His reappearance now to speak on behalf of presidential truth-telling suggests that it took him longer to thaw from his cryogenic state than Mondale and Lautenberg. Surely someone so devoted to the truth could not have remained silent during the rule of Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Truth again will take a beating from the Democrats as they launch TV ads that feature only 10 of the President’s 16 words. The reference to the British intelligence report that the statement is based upon is edited out. They deliberately deceive the viewer while accusing Bush of misleading the American people.
McGovern’s op-ed was perfectly coordinated with the L. A. Times’ publication of a tasteless political cartoon that showed Bush being executed by “politics” in Baghdad based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning My Lai photograph.
The final stop on this BS Express is Watergate. But the President’s 16 words in a speech is not a scandal, and the only similarity it bears to Watergate is the media coverage aimed at crippling President Bush’s credibility and driving him from office.
Jeff Gannon is the Washington Bureau Chief and White House correspondent for Talon News.
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