CBS Uses Phony Documents to Promote Draft Hoax

Daniel Irvin Rather must be a masochist. You'd think that in the midst of the terrible publicity he is currently getting for working closely with a partisan Democrat bent on bringing down President Bush that Dan Rather would have the good sense to lay off the liberal bias for a while. But common sense seems to be in short supply at CBS News these days.

Three weeks after he denounced the internet as being "filled with rumors," the embattled CBS anchor ran a story on his Tuesday "Evening News" program hoping to stir up fear of an impending military draft.

In a story that was a textbook example of slipshod reporting, CBS reporter Richard Schlesinger used debunked internet hoax emails and an unlabeled interest group member to scare elderly "Evening" viewers into believing that the U.S. government is poised to resume the draft.

At the center of Schlesinger's piece was a woman named Beverly Cocco, a Philadelphia woman who is "sick to my stomach" that her two sons might be drafted. In his report, Schlesinger claimed that Cocco was a Republican and portrayed her as an apolitical (even Republican) mom worried about the future.

Schlesinger did not disclose that Cocco is a chapter president of an advocacy group called People Against the Draft (PAD) which, in addition to opposing any federal proscription, seeks to establish a "peaceful, rational foreign policy" by bringing all U.S. troops out of Iraq. Like Schlesinger's Cocco, the group portrays itself as "nonpartisan"although its leadership seems to be entirely bereft of any Republicans.

The group's domain is registered to a man named Jacob Levich, a left-wing activist who in a 2001 essay compared the Bush Administration to the totalitarian government portrayed in George Orwell's 1984.

PAD also lists Anita Dutt, a Green Party activist who is also a member of an anti-war group called Bronx Action for Justice and Peace. In a March 3, 2003 New York Times profile of the group reprinted on the organization's web site, Heidi Hynes, one of its leaders, said of her fellow members that "none of us are Republicans."

Also left out of the CBS story was the fact that while there are two bills in Congress that are seeking to reestablish the draft, both of them (S-89 and HR-163) are sponsored exclusively by Democrats and have been pronounced DOA by the Republican leadership.

Much more on this to come but in the mean time, click read more to see the transcript or watch the clip by clicking on the picture to the right.

DAN RATHER: It's no secret: The all- volunteer U.S. Military, especially the Army, Marines and many reserve units, are stretched thin in Iraq and Afghanistan. So what about bringing back the draft? A lot of Americans are worried about that. Where do the presidential candidates stand? CBS's Richard Schlesinger tells you in the "Eye on America" election series, "What does it mean to you?"

SCHLESINGER: Beverly Cocco has spent most of her life protecting children in Philadelphia.

SCHLESINGER: But as Election Day approaches, it's her own two grown sons who Beverly is most worried about.

BEVERLY COCCO ("Pennsylvania Voter"): I go to bed every night and I pray, and I actually get sick to my stomach. I'm very worried. I'm scared. I'm absolutely scared. I'm petrified.

SCHLESINGER: Beverly is petrified about a military draft, and she's not alone. Mass e-mails are circulating among worried parents. But neither president bush nor john kerry has said he will re- institute the draft. In fact, they both say they will not.

Sen. JOHN KERRY (Democratic presidential candidate): I will give us a foreign policy that absolutely makes it unnecessary to have a draft for this country.

SCHLESINGER: Kerry says he'll try to get allies of the U.S. to send troops that could relieve American soldiers in Iraq. The Bush Administration says that is pure fantasy. The president wants to train more Iraqi troops to take over for the Americans.

Pres. GEORGE W. BUSH: The war on terror will continue. It's going to take a while and no, we don't need a draft.

SCHLESINGER (voiceover): But Beverly's not buying it. She's a Republican, but she's also a single issue voter.

COCCO: Absolutely. I would vote for Howdie Doody if I thought it would keep my boys home and safe.

SCHLESINGER (voiceover): In fact, there are at least three votes in this house riding on the draft: Beverly's and her sons,' Carmen [sic] and Nick.

NICK COCCO (College senior): Yeah. It's the talk. The talk's there. Though people aren't actually coming out and saying it, it's, it's there.

SCHLESINGER: The machinery for a draft is already in place and the acting director of Selective Service believes he could start drafting people quickly.

JACK MARTIN (Selective Service System): I think we could do it in less than six months if we got the call.

SCHLESINGER: This time there would be no long deferments for college students and a lot more people could be eligible for the draft than ever before. Men and women aged 18 to 26 could be called up.

Of course, there hasn't been a draft since 1973. But that's not much comfort to Beverly Cocco. So she is keeping a sharp eye on the political traffic. She's a Bush supporter today, but if she doesn't like what she hears between now and November, Beverly could easily cross over. In Philadelphia, I'm Richard Schlesinger for Eye on America.

This is another left wing maggot blog/lie/creation that has been going on all summer:

http://www.pardonmyenglish.com/index.php?p=648

June 20, 2004
Exposing Himself: Bud Beck the “Lieberal”
Steve posted in English @ 4:22 pm in Freedom of Speech
Bud Beck fully exposed for the world to see. Scary thought isn’t it? Anyone who reads Beck’s work can tell he’s an exhibitionist who is lost in pompous self-adulation. His liberal sophistry is on display for everyone to see (and hear) on Politicalgateway.com, on his Mountain Laurel Review and apparently behind the microphone of some radio station that’s too embarrassed to be associated with his web site via The Bud Beck Show.

From what I can tell, Beck is fairly good at taking a huge stinking mound of liberal BS, adding a touch of obfuscation, sprinkling it liberally with outright lies, stirring it all up and shoving it back in the face of any leftist nitwit who’s willing to gobble it up. And although Beck is reasonably capable of taking a huge steaming pile of liberal crap and making it look enough like cream pie that his gullible leftist fans will eat it up, when all is said and done, all you’ve got is a big steaming pile of crap. And when I think of this metaphoric pile of crap, at least a couple of Beck’s recent columns come quickly to mind.

In the first of these columns, he tells blatant lies about George Bush and his intentions regarding the draft in an apparent attempt to alarm draft-age young men, who, he assumes, have the same aversion to defending our freedoms as he has. When my friend and fellow blogger on this site, Aaron Margolis, wrote a column pointing out the blatant lies Beck told about George Bush regarding the draft in his first column, Beck penned another column where – you guessed it – he tells more lies in an attempt to refute Aaron’s accurate (if diplomatic) portrayal of him as a liar. Given the sheer volume of the pomposity, arrogance, condescension, and above all, utter BS in Beck’s two columns, it’s hard to know where to begin. But the best thing to do is start with the lies.

First, the big lie – the one that started all this and the one Beck built his original column around:

I explained the Republican heroes in the White House, the Congress, and the Senate have introduced pending bills mandating the nation bring back the draft.

Right now there is pending draft legislation that is targeted to go into effect in the spring of 2005.

That’s right, I told them. The hated Draft will start once more in June 2005 - June 15 to be exact.

Actually this quote from Beck’s column contains a couple lies and a fairy tale prediction. As Aaron pointed out, the “Republican heroes” haven’t introduced pending bills mandating the nation bring back the draft – seditious Democrats did.

In his response to Aaron’s correct assertion that he’s a liar, what does Beck do? In true liberal fashion, he lies yet again:

He (Aaron) cried foul not because it wasn’t true. He cried foul because Democrats introduced both bills.

Now it’s admirable of Beck to admit that he lied. But it isn’t fair of him to couch his admission in misleading verbiage that serves only to confuse his simple-minded liberal fans. Maybe they have kind of a hard time with tough words like “explained” “heroes” and “mandating” (and perhaps even “in” and “the”) but the quote above, taken directly from his column “Graduation Presents” clearly says the Republicans introduced bills to reinstate the draft. I realize that the truth is a tough thing for liberals to own up to but I should think Beck could do a better job of bullshitting his way through this lie than that. Why I bet some of his sharper fans – the ones who skipped that fifteenth beer and/or tenth bong hit the night before – probably didn’t have any problem seeing through that one either. And I’m sure Bill Clinton would be ashamed of piss poor job Beck did of covering up this lie.

Next let’s address a partial lie allowed through purposeful omission. In other words this is where Beck tells you the truth he wants you to hear, which is only part of the whole truth, so you get just enough (mis) information to believe the lie he’s trying to tell you. Liberals are good at this. And what is the lie Beck is trying to tell us? Here you go:

While the public’s attention on the elections, Iraq, prisoner abuse and even the death of Ronald Reagan $28 million has already been added to the 2004 Selective Service System (SSS) budget to prepare for a military draft that could start as early as June 15, 2005.

Oh yes it’s true that “$28 million has already been added” to the Selective Service System’s budget”. But that figure is low. It’s really $28.3 million. And that’s the entire budget of the selective service system, up from $26.3 million in 2003. (Look it up here.) So, to cut through Beck’s BS, actually only $2 million “has already been added to the 2004 Selective Service System’s budget, just a tad more than warranted under baseline budgeting where, as any liberal can tell you, an increase is actually a decrease. The system hasn’t been “dormant for decades” as Beck asserts. Its sole purpose is to register young men in case, due to some national emergency we need the draft and its been doing that for decades. There isn’t any different or more sinister a purpose to it in 2004 than there was in 1982 or whenever it was that Reagan instituted it. So again, either the self-proclaimed “most outspoken and informed Liberal voice in America today!” really is “the most outspoken and informed” and he’s just flat out lying to us again thinking that we’re as big a bunch of dupes as his fans are. Or he’s an uninformed boob who picked up this crap off of the blog of some like-minded liberal who’s engaged his keyboard without engaging his brain and he thought it sounded plausible enough that he’d run with it. Perhaps Beck will let us know which it is. Is he a liar or just a stupid liberal dupe? I’d lay better than even odds that it’s the former rather than the latter.

So through his lies, Beck would have us believe that Bush is apparently, again as Aaron points out, conspiring with Democrats who hate him to reinstate the draft by June 15, 2005, a day that Beck apparently pulls straight out of his ass (behold, the fairy tale prediction).

These are the two main assertions he builds both his columns around. And they are both bald-faced, unabashed, lies. But there’s too much utter BS left in the rest of this column to go unrefuted.

In his column, Aaron outlined the views of some of the men who actually DID introduce the draft legislation. The views and actions of these so-called “men of our congress” (Beck’s words) show that Beck apparently respects them because the spout the same regurgitated and re-worked half-truths and outright lies that he does.

When you examine the words and actions of Jim McDermott, (D Washington) Neil Abercrombie (D Hawaii) and the other leftists Beck cites – John Conyers, and Charlie Rangel – you can begin to cut through the lies, half-truths and outright BS to get to the heart of the matter: Beck and his “men of the congress” probably wouldn’t support the War on Terror if Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda were marching through the streets of Washington D.C. on the way to the White House. But they somehow support the draft?

Beck and his liberal buddies in congress claim they support the draft because it’s fair in that it hits “sons of privilege” the same as it hits middle class young men. But why would people like Beck who so vehemently oppose war support sending anyone into battle? The truth is that it serves the pathetic agenda of Beck and his leftist heroes in Congress to have more young men be conscripted into war and come home in body bags because it would sway public opinion in their direction. That’s why these leftists are introducing legislation to bring back the draft. After all, it isn’t much of a leap in logic to infer that congressmen who, among other things, would aid and abet the enemy from the enemy’s soil during a time of conflict and call the President of the United States a “fascist” would mind bumping up the body count a little to help their cause. But for right now, Beck has to content himself with taunting his own “well to do” nephew and young men like Aaron with the prospect of a draft even if he has to lie to do it.

If you need any further evidence of Beck’s irrational peace-mongering, witness that on the eve of Super Tuesday back in March, Beck was endorsing Dennis Kucinich for president. How does Kucinich feel about the war in Iraq. About the same way Beck does, that is to say he also supports subjugating our security and freedoms for the cause of peace:

As President, Kucinich will work to implement two measures he sponsored in Congress: the Space Preservation Treaty, which bans space-based weapons, and a cabinet-level Department of Peace, to establish non-violence as an organizing principle in both domestic and international affairs.

A Kucinich administration will cut bloated and unneeded weaponry from a military budget that now almost equals the military spending of all other countries combined. The Kucinich peace dividend will be invested in education, health care, environmental clean-up, urban infrastructure, Social Security, veterans’ benefits, and other pressing domestic needs.

Pardon my ignorance, but perhaps Beck or Kucinich can explain to me how we have a “peace dividend” if we lose our freedoms and our country by establishing “non-violence as an organizing principle in both domestic and international affairs.” Because any reasonable person would understand that, if we followed Kucinich’s mandate, we would eventually lose both our freedoms and our country as we know it.

Through his lies and his endorsement of the acts of seditious pacifists, Beck has proven that he is not a reasonable person. He’s proven that he’s a left-wing nut whose common sense and rationality is skewed through the prism of his unreasonable embrace of peace at all costs and his failure to acknowledge that war, however horrible, is sometimes on of those necessary evils. One of those times is when we are fighting to defend our freedoms against terrorists who would like nothing better than to see us all dead. And that’s exactly what we are in the midst of now.

And because he is blinded by his overwhelming hatred of Bush and of war, instead of putting up a rational defense of his column, he continues on with his irrational screed by insulting young conservatives such as his nephew and Aaron:

Talk is cheap, Aaron. I did my time in my war and I know it is not something the unknowlegable or the foolish should rush in to. You may call what I wrote as “Beck’s misinformation", or “liberal propaganda", or even “lies and bigotry". We will see if you still believe “We all owe our country a debt of gratitude for the rights and privileges we’ve come to take for granted–and there is no better way to repay that debt than to serve your country, especially when asked” if you are asked. We will see.

Then Aaron it becomes a different story.

So sing yourself to sleep tonight or call your mommy and have her tell you everything is going to be okay in your life. I hope it will be. I really do. But the boogie man is out there and he isn’t a Democrat. Not on your life - pardon the pun.

So apparently anyone who was not alive during the Vietnam War – or maybe even anyone who was but wasn’t draft age at the time – isn’t qualified to have an opinion about whether a war is a just war or not. And Beck apparently thinks no war is a just war. Well I would submit to you Bud Beck, that young men such as your nephew and Aaron Margolis, and particularly the young men and women presently fighting for our freedom in the War on Terror have a better understanding of what our freedom means and what it takes to defend it than an over-the-hill peacenick such as yourself will ever have. Because they are looking at the situation reasonably and rationally – not through the eyes of some war hating, Bush hating liar with an overwhelming bent towards pacifism and submission to the enemy at all costs.

If “I did my time in war” is an allusion to Beck having fought in a war (at his age, Vietnam would be the obvious one) it’s obvious that his war experience left him jaded and may have something to do with the knee-jerk pacifism he displays today. I can’t comment on his war experience (if any) because there really isn’t enough information available. But I do know that the Vietnam War was an incredible waste of American lives – 58,000 lost in ten years – for no legitimate national security reason due to the inept micromanagement of the war by a Democratic administration. And his failure to see the difference between Vietnam and the War on Terror – in fact to lump all wars together under the category of “unjust” shows that he really doesn’t understand what we are fighting for in Iraq and Afghanistan – or simply doesn’t care to understand.

Facts are the enemies of liberal blowhards such as Beck. And his liberal facts, like the facts of most liberal blowhards, are like the liberal version of Constitutional interpretation – they think that facts, like the Constitution, are “living” and that they “evolve” much like the positions of their presidential candidate. They believe, as Beck has proven, that whatever BS happens to tumble from their mouths or fly off the keyboard and onto the screen is set up to be fact simply because it’s the opinion of some pompous, arrogant liberal. No need to prove your facts – it IS so simply because some blowhard liberal who claims to have “the most successful liberal talk show in any market in America!” says it. Whatever lie, half-truth, obfuscation, or assumption they throw out there is supposed to be accepted as fact simple because they regurgitate it to the masses.

As we’ve proven here, the only real fact about these two columns (and presumably many others written by Beck) is that they are pretty short on facts. And filled to the brim with pure unadulterated BS twisted up and mixed around in an attempt to make it palatable – and meant to scare the crap out of young men who could be subject to the draft. So all you draft age young men out there rest assured that despite the BS he spouts, Beck has no more of an idea about when or if the draft will be reinstituted than you or I do.

If we ARE forced to re-institute the draft someday, that eventuality is being made all the more certain by peacenick liberal blowhards like Beck. Because they apparently believe that there isn’t any evil in the world that can’t be overcome by conceding that were are just a bunch of evil capitalists who are just as much, if not more, at fault for the acts of terrorists and despots as they themselves are. Therefore, if we’d just roll over and play dead, capitulating to every little third-world tin pan dictator or terrorist leader everything would be cool. Or failing that, we should all just sit around cross-legged in some peacenick circle-jerk, chanting over an over again the famous refrain of John Lennon “all we are saying is give peace a chance” until it’s too late and we have to amass a huge military force in a hurry.

It is the so-called “peacenicks” like Beck who skew the debate, obfuscate the facts and do their damnedest to turn the tide of public opinion against the prosecution of a war that is no less important than the fight for our freedom that we so successfully prosecuted 60 years ago. These people who feel there is nothing worth going to war and dying for betray the fact that they just aren’t living in the real world. They can’t get past their pacifist blinders, their hatred of war and their hatred of George Bush to analyze the world political situation objectively. Therefore, their opinions should not be trusted by people such as us in this country who yearn to live free and to spread that freedom throughout the world. Their opinions must be regarded as what they are – steaming mounds of liberal crap dressed up to look like valid well-considered opinions.

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