Oct. 5, 2003
America's unheralded victory
Our media jihadis
Sharon and Yom Kippur
Learn about California's recall...
A warning to journalists
We Won! - excerpts
Media double standard couldn't stop Schwarzenegger
Cowardice costs - excerpt
Great myths about the Great Depression
Will advocacy disguised as journalism succeed?
Weapons of mass distraction
Rush Limbaugh: Part I
Don't bother me with the facts
America's unheralded victory
By CAROLINE GLICK
FORT STEWART, Georgia I arrived at Fort Stewart, the home of the US Army's 3rd Infantry Division, early this week to meet with the soldiers and officers of the 2-7 Mechanized Infantry Battalion, 1st Brigade, who had recently returned home after completing their deployment in Iraq. It was with these men that I hitched a ride through Iraq as an embedded reporter during the major combat phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
The 3rd Infantry was the main combat force in Iraq from the March 19 invasion through the fall of Baghdad on April 9. After the city's fall, the 1st Brigade took control of neighborhoods on the eastern side of the city, where the bulk of the population lives.
"We relieved the 87th Marine Regiment of their sectors east of the Tigris River. When we arrived, we felt like we had entered the Wild West.
Buildings were burning, car-jackings and looting were rampant. We had Iraqi police officers wearing military uniforms armed with AK-47s who we assumed were Iraqi military forces," 1st Brigade Commander Col. William Grimsley explains. "We held the zones until June 5. During those two months we oversaw the transformation of the area from a chaotic environment to an ordered city."
From the soldiers' perspective, the main US failure in Iraq to date has little to do with the situation on the ground. The main failure is the inability to transmit the reality they experienced daily to the American people.
"Our biggest mistake was letting go of the embedded media," says 2-7 executive officer Maj. Kevin Cooney.
"After the embedded reporters left, the reports coming out had no context. The reporters didn't understand the situation. They had no sense of what was actually going on and they didn't seem to care. They acted like ambulance chasers moving from one attack against US soldiers to the next without giving any sense of the work that was being accomplished," says Maj. Rod Coffey.
That work was vast. They opened schools; they paid civil service employees; they purchased school supplies; they hired contractors to fix and build sewage, electrical and water lines; they secured vital installations; and they cultivated ties with Iraqi citizens who were capable of providing services to the citizenry and information and intelligence to the US forces.
Much of this work was conducted in the blazing summer heat when the soldiers themselves were living in substandard conditions with sporadic electricity and water supplies. In the meantime, they conducted surprise sweeps and raids in search of arms, fugitives and terrorists.
How were they able to make the transition from fighters to administrators? According to the men, the main reason was the warm welcome they received from the Iraqi people.
"Everywhere we went we were surrounded by dozens of children smiling and waving at us."
"Old people came out of these hovels they lived in and gave us bread and invited us into their homes.
"We knew that they were giving us what they had and we understood how much they appreciated that we had liberated them from Saddam," says Specialist Jennings Roberts.
Grimsley notes ruefully that after the embedded reporters left, the brigade had great difficulty persuading journalists to accompany his men on their missions to report on what they were doing.
"They were all living in the Palestine Hotel and did not want to leave," he says of the reporters. "We had to beg them to come out with us. And on a number of occasions when they did come, and we knew that they had written up what they had seen, we found that for whatever reason, their newspapers did not publish their stories."
The sense the men share of being welcome in Iraq by the majority of Iraqis is backed up by recent opinion polling data which show that the majority of Iraqis do not want the US forces to leave.Yet largely because of the slant of the news reports about Iraq, it is hard to grasp just how far the US has come in a country where tens of thousands took to the streets on September 12, 2001 to celebrate the bombings of New York and Washington.
The men are quick to admit that liberating Iraq physically was easier than shepherding its people towards democracy and fair governance.
"The Iraqis who worked under the regime are incapable of exerting authority. They survived under Saddam by carrying out instructions without question and they still refuse to make a decision without receiving permission from us," says Grimsley. "We realized this when they asked us for permission to open schools. We couldn't understand why they needed our permission to do something that seemed obvious to us, but then it sunk in that what we were seeing was the result of the perversion of a society that lived under total repression for more than 30 years."
The mindset will doubtlessly take years to change.
Even the capture or killing of Saddam will only solve part of the problem. The other problem is that the Bush administration is not sending a message of absolute resolve, while those forces who wish the US to fail are. By targeting GIs and supporters of the Iraqi Governing Council, these forces are working to create a perception of mayhem and chaos that flies in the face of the actual progress on the ground.
The Western media isn't helping matters. In underreporting the successes the US has achieved while over-reporting the difficulties, it creates irrational expectations among the American public that Iraq should be completely rehabilitated in a matter of months.
Equally unhelpful are the so-called multilateralists within the international community, who understand that American success in turning Iraq around bodes ill for the United Nations' bid to establish itself as the ultimate arbiter of global affairs.
Then too, the administration perhaps did not fully comprehend the magnitude of the task it was undertaking when the decision was made to go to war. Not only would Iraq have to be de-Baathified in the way Germany was de-Nazified. It would have to do so while some of Iraq's neighboring states remained under the control of totalitarian, American-baiting regimes intent on reversing the results of the war.
Yet in spite of the negative publicity, the international hostility, the meddling of neighbors and the work of saboteurs, US forces are quietly succeeding in their task. The men all noted that the day that Uday and Qusay Hussein were killed by US forces, the celebration on the streets of Baghdad put Independence Day fireworks to shame.
"And yet, when the 11PM curfew came around, the carnivals abruptly ended and everyone went home," Grimsley explains. "The Iraqis have a healthy respect for power judiciously applied." In other words, Iraqis both applaud and respect the US for deposing their oppressors.
The soldiers paid no attention to the politics in Washington while they were in Iraq. They try to avoid watching the news now that they are home. But when they do see the reports, they are troubled by the distortion.
"The reporters that came to see us when we returned home ignored the tremendous pride we all feel in what we accomplished while we were over there," says Coffey.
Coffey himself was the subject of an odd front page photograph in the New York Times three weeks ago. The photo-editor lopped off his head to show a picture of his son embracing a headless torso in uniform, weighed down with a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. Coffey's son was crying. ("Probably because he had just gotten into a fight with his older brother. He wasn't crying over me, I had already been home for a week.") The decorated chest evoked no emotion from a reader.
In a way, this bizarre photograph tells the entire story of the campaign to prevent the US from winning. If the American public is deprived of a view of its heroes, who won a war and are winning the peace, they will, sooner or later, abandon the fight.
Oct. 4, 2003
Our media jihadis
By BRET STEPHENS
So here's the question of the week, month, year: After Iraq, will the media ever again allow a democracy to topple a fascist dictatorship?
The question isn't mine but John Reid's. On March 31 at nine o'clock in the morning, the Labour Party Chairman was in 10 Downing Street watching the TV news. On screen were pictures of "distressed Iraqi civilians and dead allied soldiers." Reid became incensed. "The broadcasters are in Iraq not because they want to tell the truth, but because of commercial competition," the Glaswegian told Times Magazine writer Peter Stothard. "It's a disgrace."
As we know, within a few days the media that so irritated Reid got its comeuppance: The Marines entered Baghdad, Saddam's statues came down and, just as Dick Cheney had predicted, Iraqis cheered. But as we also know, that wasn't the end of the war, just the moment when Baathist unrepentants resorted to a death-by-one-thousand-cuts strategy. Ditto for the media unrepentants. They failed to stop the war and they failed to lose the war. But they haven't stopped trying to reverse the result, and it bids fair that they will yet do so.
WHO ARE these media jihadis? The charge sounds a bit McCarthyite, so I'll be specific.
"I have a confession," wrote Salon Executive Editor Gary Kamiya on April 10. "I have at times, as the war has unfolded, secretly wished for things to go wrong. Wished for the Iraqis to be more nationalistic, to resist longer. Wished for the Arab world to rise up in rage. Wished for all the things we feared would happen. I'm not alone: A number of serious, intelligent, morally sensitive people who oppose the war have told me they have identical feelings."
Or take Jonathan Schell, writing in the Sept. 22 issue of the Nation: "[Democratic Senator Joe] Biden says we must win the war. This is precisely wrong. The United States must learn to lose this war a harder task, in many ways, than winning, for it requires admitting mistakes and relinquishing attractive fantasies. This is the true moral mission of our time."
To their credit, Kamiya and Schell are candidly anti-American; there's no dissembling with them. Not so with other media jihadis. What, for instance, is one to make of New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who recently described US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as "the man who trashed two countries"? Or of her colleague Paul Krugman who, as Iraqis were still celebrating their freedom on April 11, could only sniff: "I won't pretend to have any insights into what is going on in the minds of the Iraqi people.
But there is a pattern in the Bush administration's way of doing business that does not bode well for the future...."?
Elsewhere in the world, it's pretty much the same. In its report on the toppling of Saddam's statue in Baghdad, a Guardian reporter could say only: "There are no statues of Ahmed Chalabi in Iraq just yet, but it is probably only a matter of time." Out with the old anti-American megalomaniac; in with the new pro-American megalomaniac. On the second anniversary of September 11, a presenter on the BBC's World Service remarked: "At the one extreme you have George W. Bush, at the other Osama bin Laden...."
And in France, Mathieu Lindon, a journalist writing in Liberation, described the mood of his colleagues: "We are very interested in American deaths in Iraq .... We will never admit it, [but] every American soldier killed in Iraq causes, if not happiness, at least a certain satisfaction."
Well, well.
At least the French aren't wishing their own boys ill. Not so with the jihadis of the American and British press. For Dowd, Schell, Kamiya, Krugman and their colleagues in Britain, hatred of Bush is the premise, the first principle, the animating impulse shaping all arguments. It's not exactly that they want America to lose. On that score they are pretty much indifferent. But what is certain is that they want Bush to lose, and insofar as his political fortunes rise or fall on coalition success in Iraq, they are on the side of failure.
Hence the jihadi tactics. Let's see: We've had Blair's sexed-up dossier; uranium from Niger; British scientist David Kelly's (apparent) suicide; and the "outing" of Joe Wilson's third wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame.
Each of these scandals has more or less amounted to nothing. So Bush, in his State of the Union address, noted that British intelligence believed Saddam was importing "yellow cake" uranium ore from Niger? Well, the British did make that claim. So Blair underscored that Iraq could deliver a WMD warhead within 45 minutes? Well, that's what his intelligence chiefs told him. So David Kelly killed himself as the glare of the public spotlight became unbearable? It turns out the BBC used him far worse than the government.
So Joe Wilson accuses the White House of blowing his wife's cover? Pretty rich, coming from a man who went on a secret CIA mission of his own and then wrote about it in a New York Times op-ed.
Of course, the hard fact upon which all these accusations are based is that so far weapons of mass destruction have not been found in Iraq. From that the conclusion is drawn that "Bush lied." It might bear pointing out that it took the US Army five months to discover an ordnance cache in the open desert weighing about 650,000 tons, so maybe it'll take a bit longer to find the elusive WMD. It might also bear pointing out (I'm hardly the first to do so) that Bush's "lies" were pretty much identical to Clinton's statements on the matter.
But never mind. The issue is not WMD, or what the president or prime minister knew, and when, or whether the peace process is advancing or retreating, or whether Iraq is better or worse off than before. The issue is, how is the president to be defeated at the next election? By miring the White House in scandal.
By creating the perception that things aren't going well in Iraq. By creating momentum to bring the boys home. This is guerrilla warfare, and it is the task to which the media jihadis have dedicated themselves.
THE BEST that can be said about these people is that they believe, honestly, that George Bush is the world's greatest menace, against which the Saddam's of the world pale. Hence the Guardian can editorialize (as it did September 16) that "Iran's Fears Are Real," that the ayatollahs' intentions are peaceful and that the only nations engaged in a "dastardly plot" are "located in the West." Hence development guru Jeff Sachs can allege that the $20 billion Bush wants to earmark for Iraqi reconstruction is a racist plot because Africans are worthier recipients of US largesse. Hence Paul Krugman can opine, in our post-September 11 world, that "The real threat isn't some terrorists who can kill a few people now... but the internal challenge from very powerful domestic political forces who want to do away with America as I know it."
But assume for a moment that these people really are, as Kamiya puts it above, "serious, intelligent, morally sensitive people." If that's the case, one must discount their honesty. Do the editorial writers at the Guardian truly believe Iran threatens nobody, and that its leaders only want "to develop the nation's economy"?
Does that country's apparatus of repression even rate their notice? What about Iran's threat to annihilate Israel? Does Maureen Dowd have nothing to say about Afghanistan and Iraq except that Rumsfeld "trashed" them? Can she muster no joy that millions of Iraqis and Afghans no longer live under the Baathist or Taliban boot? Does Jonathan Schell think democracy in Iraq is an idea worth attempting? Great liberal that he is, does he believe Arabs are capable of democracy?
I don't really know if our media jihadis are honest fools or dissembling geniuses. In my experience, people who speak of themselves as "serious, intelligent and morally sensitive" tend to be frivolous, glib and morally callous. Above all, they are self-deceiving. They love to talk about how much they care for the indigent and oppressed, and they believe what they say. But when George W. Bush goes ahead and does something for the indigent and oppressed, that's a lie and an outrage and a sweetheart deal for the Halliburton and Bechtel Corporations.
And they really believe that, too.
One day, perhaps, we'll get a satisfactory explanation as to why a president whose chief sins seem to be that he was born to an influential family, isn't articulate, and piously believes in Christ should be treated as the Great Satan. In the meantime, we must bend every effort to prevent our media jihadis from doing to Western public perception what the Middle East's jihadis are trying to do to Iraqi infrastructure: Destroying the foundations upon which a more hopeful future may arise.
bret@jpost.co.il
Oct. 1, 2003
Sharon and Yom Kippur
By URI DAN
When Ariel Sharon took office as prime minister in March 2001, he phoned to thank me for standing by his side. I had done so as a friend and journalist for many years, both when he was a senior IDF officer and later a political leader.
I replied that he didn't have to thank me, and that I was going to reveal a secret I had kept for many years.
"What's the secret?" asked Sharon with his usual curiosity. Some kind of mysterious skeleton, he perhaps thought.
I told him: "When I arrived in your APC at the western bank of the Suez Canal, at the rear of the Egyptian enemy on October 17, 1973, after you had been wounded on that same day, I made a vow to help you all my life; because only you were capable, in those impossible conditions, of crossing the canal and turning the initial Israeli defeat into victory."
For a moment there was silence. Then the prime minister, clearly moved, replied: "That's right."
"Now, as prime minister," I continued, "you will have to cross an ocean of Palestinian hatred in order to defeat their terror offensive."
"Also true," Sharon replied.
Just like 30 years ago, as a major-general commanding the 143 Reserve Armored Division on the Suez Canal, Prime Minister Sharon is a lone decision maker. He listens to everyone but makes the decisive sometime surprising decisions himself.
"This is the loneliness of the commander, which I have known for many years," the premier told me over a late evening meal at his official residence after another grueling day.
We talked about the Yom Kippur War. "The war could have been shortened if they had listened to me."
Now that audio tapes recorded at IDF supreme headquarters of the front have been released, what I already knew has become public knowledge: The high command caused a prolongation of the war in Suez because they didn't listen to Sharon.
On October 8, the third day of the war, he proposed a counter-attack against the Egyptians on the Canal with a force of two divisions.
I photographed him that day in all his command loneliness. On the one hand he was fighting the Egyptians, while on the other he had to struggle against IDF generals Shmuel Gorodish and Haim Bar-Lev and the CGS David (Dado) Elazar.
On that October 8, an attack by Maj.-Gen. Avraham (Bren) Adan's division was repulsed. Sharon had already established a bridgehead on the western bank of the Suez Canal and surprised the Egyptians.
"We lost at least two valuable days in the war when supreme headquarters halted the transfer of armor to the western bank of the Canal after we crossed," Sharon told me last month. "We could have shortened the war and achieved an even greater victory. Supreme headquarters had an excuse: "The bridgehead isn't secure."
Senior officers knew Sharon was the most talented general at the front. They couldn't bear looking up to him despite their seniority. "They didn't want me to be the first to cross the canal," said Sharon.
SHARON delivered more victories over the Arabs than all other senior officers combined.
It was when I watched him fighting both the Egyptians at the front, and the Jews back at headquarters and delivering victory against all odds over the Egyptians that I made the vow which I revealed to Sharon during that telephone conversation.
Sharon's task is not easy, particularly now that he is responsible not only for a single decisive battle, but for the fate of, as he puts it, "The entire Jewish nation." His daily decisions are not only on defense issues and international relations, but also the economy.
Yet even now many hateful opponents from within are trying to isolate him, employing slander in the hope of bringing him down accusing him of criminal activities in the hope of harming him.
Motivated by personal reasons, former national security advisor Ephraim Halevy has attacked him. A group of pilots recruited by the extreme Left to undermine Sharon's policy has, in effect, carried out a kamikaze mission.
The uproar it has caused will have no influence on the IDF's fighting ability. But it's a struggle. There are also some Jews and Israelis who, in their impudence and hatred of Sharon, vainly attempted to bring him to trial in Brussels for "war crimes."
In contrast to the views of Haaretz commentators, Sharon will serve out his entire term of office as Israel's premier. He is not one to lose his composure, and he is not prepared to give up the the lonely job of leadership.
I see him there, just as I saw him at the Suez Canal 30 years ago, making the toughest decisions fortunately for Israel. Yesterday's thunder of guns at Suez, and the repudiation of Sharon by the Supreme Command, were far more dangerous than today's poisonous attacks by his political opponents.
Note: Sharon almost never raises his voice. He didn't raise it when he spoke over the IDF communications net from the armored corps that crossed the Suez Canal in 1973. Nor does he today, 30 years on.
The writer is Israel corespondent for The New York Post.
Learn about California's recall...from an apolitical source (Berkeley Univ).
http://www.igs.berkeley.edu/library/htRecall2003.html
A warning to journalists
http://www.jewishworldreview.com | "At Syms, an educated consumer is our best customer." That's the slogan of the Manhattan clothier but followers of current national events should not have to rely on their own efforts to get at the truth. That is supposed to be the duty of journalists but sadly, that is no longer the case. To accurately decipher current events and their importance, readers have to educate themselves rather than rely on certain news sources. Opinions that used to be restricted to the editorial pages now cloud news articles and not only are readers recognizing that fact, they are starting to rebel.
Over 1000 subscribers to the LA Times canceled their subscriptions because of that paper's obvious partisan attack on Arnold Schwarzenegger just days before the recall election. The West Coast newspaper used to have a policy rejecting all charges made by anonymous sources. According to syndicated columnist Jill Stewart, that was the case in 1997 when the paper rejected her article asserting leveling negative charges against Governor Gray Davis. The LA Times, however, had no compunction in reporting anonymous charges against Schwarzenegger in the final hours of the campaign.
It used to be difficult to assess the political predilection of journalists but that was a very long time ago. Walter Cronkite was once named the most trusted man in America because he could be relied on to report the facts fairly and sans bias. He waited for his retirement to reveal which side his political loyalties lie but no such mystery exists about current broadcast anchors. In my opinion, Tim Russert of NBC's Meet the Press is the only network journalist who understands the importance of a fair and balanced interview.
What may be fueling the increasing lack of impartiality among journalists is the high level of animosity towards President Bush emanating from traditional liberals in the Fourth Estate. Many regard this as payback for the shrill voices of the Clinton-haters during and after that administration. But is turnabout fair play when so many lives are at stake? I think not.
While vicious discourse has always been part and parcel of the political forum, we are now engaged in WWIII, a global struggle in which many lives and our own existence are at stake. Kudos to a brave Democratic congressman, Jim Marshall of Georgia, who recognized the hazards of extreme partisanship.
In an interview with Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media, the congressman warned, "we have a problem with overly pessimistic media coverage that emboldens our enemies, discourages our potential allies and lessens our resolve." He also said, "media bias is killing our troops." Congressman Marshall who is a member of the House Armed Services Committee was on a fact finding trip to Iraq and reported that there is good news to balance the bad but that there is " a disconnect between the reporting and the reality."
I'll say! Consider the recent release of U.S. Weapons Inspector David Kay's progress report to Congress on the search for WMD's. The New York Times headlined the story "No Illicit Arms Found in Iraq." On the other hand, John Podhoretz of the New York Post reported that key evidence was found. In both cases, the information was accurate but a careful reading of the report itself, however, not only vindicates the president's position it also supports his contention that danger was imminent.
Mr. Kay's statement includes details of a $10 million contract between North Korea and Iraq for the purchase of prohibited military equipment and 1,300-km range ballistic missiles. Military experts have concluded that the only reason North Korea did not deliver that equipment was because it knew that the U.S was going to attack Iraq. What if we had not gone to war? Mr. Kay 's reported testimony from Iraqi scientists and senior government officials confirm that Saddam still wanted to obtain nuclear weapons. But don't just take my word for it. Read it yourself at www.CIA.gov.
This significance of Kay's report should have been given widespread and accurate coverage in the mainstream press. Instead it has been spun to satisfy each editor's ideological agenda and the public is further polarized. I watched a pundit on the Chris Matthews show argue that the report proves that the United States was not in danger because the missiles could not reach our shores. Apparently, the danger to Israel and the rest of the Middle East is unimportant.
It's foolish and inaccurate to bandy the word 'treason" about lightly but the level of partisan sniping is so out of control that it needs to be reined in. I am reminded of the brilliant Alec Guiness' portrayal of a British POW in Bridge on the River Kwai.
His character is so consumed with ego and ambition that he collaborates with the enemy to build a strategic bridge. Only after betraying his fellow POWs' efforts to sabotage the project and causing several of their deaths, does he come to his senses and realizes the horror of his complicity.
Memo to all journalists and rabid politicians-this is not a movie.
JWR contributor Alicia Colon is a columnist for the New York Sun.
We Won! - excerpts
Greg Crosby
The last minute smear tactics of the Left Angeles Times failed pathetically. The gutter politics engaged in by that paper showed them for what they have always been - a political house organ for the left. A hack newspaper. As one commentator said shortly after the Times began their puke journalism, "if you go out this morning and find your LA Times in the gutter, leave it there - that's just where it belongs."
The problem I have with the Times is that it pretends to be fair to all sides and it clearly isn't. Its news reporting is consistently left-leaning. I'm talking about the front page, the place where news is supposed to be reported factually without commentary and viewpoint. Look, if the Times wants to run editorials and op-ed pieces day after day that are only liberal that's fine - it is their prerogative, and I'm okay with that. But, the Times doesn't stop with the editorial pages, their bias permeates the front section, the Metro, the Calendar section, the food section, and even the comics section (check out which comic strip is printed twice the size of all the others - hint: it's not BLONDIE). Hell, if they could figure out a way of getting a liberal slant into the classifieds, they'd do it.
And what the Times tried to do to Arnold Schwarzenegger on the Thursday before the Tuesday election stoops to a new low, even for them. No wonder they're being called "The Los Angeles Slimes." In the past they'd at least try to be subtle with their little biases, like always referring to Schwarzenegger as "the actor." But then, in the last few days of the campaign they must have gotten really scared - because they dropped all pretence and went totally blatant with their contempt for Arnold by attempting to make a sex scandal where none existed. Well, it didn't work. I guess "the paper of record" for California isn't as influential as they think they are. The Times not only lost the election, they lost thousands of subscribers. At the risk of repeating myself, HA,HA,HA,HA,HA,HA,HA,HA,HA,HA,HA,HA!
Media double standard couldn't stop Schwarzenegger
Larry Elder
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | The Los Angeles Times, only days before the Oct. 7 California recall election, published a front-page article alleging that Republican gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger groped six women. Only two women gave their names, with four refusing to disclose them. Of the anonymous women, three still work in the Hollywood industry, and refuse to give their names, fearing reprisals. The fourth, while not in the industry, nevertheless feared a mega-reaction if she revealed her name.
The Los Angeles Times admitted that they assigned several reporters who spent seven weeks investigating alleged instances of sexual misconduct by Schwarzenegger. They also admitted that none of the women came forward or that any of the incidents came to light as a result of information provided by any of Schwarzenegger's "rivals."
(Technically, this excludes Governor Gray Davis as the governor's name, by law, does not appear on the replacement ballot.)
No one excuses sexual misconduct -- groping, unsolicited touching or crude remarks and cad-like behavior. Indeed, Schwarzenegger, while not addressing the specific allegations, apologized for past improper behavior and apologized to women whom he offended. The next day, and the day after, the Times published allegations of yet more women who also accused Schwarzenegger of improper sexual behavior.
First, let's discuss timing. One day before the allegations were printed, the Los Angeles Times published a poll showing that the majority of Californians supported the recall and 40 percent intended to vote for Schwarzenegger for governor, putting him over 10 points ahead of his nearest rival. Then -- bam! -- come the allegations.
Also, the Los Angeles Times, on the first page on the same day, ran a headline accusing of Schwarzenegger of taking his election for granted, with a headline called, "Acting as if It's in the Bag." Note the "acting" reference, a dig at Schwarzenegger's presumed lack of qualifications for the office. The article suggested Schwarzenegger engaged in smugness by outlining a 10-step plan for his first hundred days in office. Yet, the same day, in an editorial, the L.A. Times chastised anyone for voting for empty-suit-Schwarzenegger because, according to the paper, he lacked a specific agenda or plan to bail California out of its fiscal jam. So which is it? The "actor" as unprepared to lead, or the "actor" as arrogantly preparing to do so?
The Los Angeles Times, understand, supported Gray Davis when he first ran, supported him again for re-election, and editorialized strongly against the recall.
Former Los Angeles Times reporter Jill Stewart worked with the paper for seven years, quitting because she felt that the paper frequently squashed important stories. Stewart recently wrote about her 1997 story, published in an alternative paper, the now-defunct New Times, "My article . . . detailed how (then Lieutenant Governor/gubernatorial candidate) Davis flew into a rage one day because female staffers had rearranged framed artwork on the walls of his office. He so violently shoved his loyal, 62-year-old secretary out of a doorway that she suffered a breakdown. . . . Another woman . . . had the unhappy chore in the mid-1990s of informing Davis that a fundraising source had dried up. . . . Davis began screaming the f-word at the top of his lungs. The woman stood to demand that he stop speaking to her that way, and, she says, Davis grabbed her by the shoulders and 'shook me until my teeth rattled. I was so stunned I said, 'Good G-d, Gray! Stop and look at what you are doing. Think what you are doing to me!'"
The Los Angeles Times, despite having this story -- Stewart says she "crossed paths" with their reporters while working on hers -- never published any allegations of Davis' physical and verbal abuse of his employees. Why? Stewart claims the paper cited its policy of refusing to run negative stories on major "public figures" while using anonymous sources.
Yet, in Schwarzenegger's case, the newspaper apparently abandoned its own policy by using allegations of four women who refused to disclose their names! Did the Los Angeles Times, for this recall election, send several reporters who spent seven weeks investigating allegations of verbal and physical misconduct against Governor Gray Davis? And why did the Los Angeles Times reveal the allegations only days before the October election? Stewart claims -- and the Times denies -- that the paper knew of the allegations at least two weeks ago, but sat on the story. Could it be that the Los Angeles Times waited to pull the trigger until a poll showed Schwarzenegger ahead in the race?
Who knows. But the whole thing reeks of a double standard. Bill Clinton remains popular despite women who came forth such as Paula Jones, Gennifer Flowers, Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick, alleging everything from groping to rape. But, as we all know, Republicans face a higher standard than do Democrats. In any case, this failed to stop The Terminator.
Cowardice costs - excerpt
By David Warren
http://www.jewishworldreview.com | Israel's weekend attack on the Islamic Jihad camp near Damascus was an act of cowardice, properly considered. The target was legitimate enough, and the best proof of this was the immediate Syrian effort to seal it from journalistic inspection; together with Hizbollah reprisals along the Lebanon frontier. Had the target been the mere hiking trails Syrian propaganda described -- and which liberal media immediately swallowed whole -- it would not have had the kind of fencing and gates around it that at least one enterprising journalist observed. Moreover, the Syrian authorities would have led a media parade through the bombsite.
The regime of Bashir Assad in Syria knows what I know about the Western media: you don't have to show them a thing, for they'll quote you uncritically. The only credential you need is animosity towards the U.S. and Israel. Whereas they will not even condescend to read David Kay's remarkably damning and elaborately proven report on Saddam Hussein's illegal weapons programs fully vindicating the Bush and Blair positions that led them into Iraq. Once again I must say -- without qualification -- that our mainstream media are, despite their protestations of innocence and "objectivity", objectively working for the enemy.
Great myths about the Great Depression
Thomas Sowell
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | They say "truth will out" but sometimes it takes a long time. For more than half a century, it has been a "well-known fact" that President Franklin D. Roosevelt got us out of the Great Depression of the 1930s. That view was never pervasive among economists, and even J.M. Keynes -- a liberal icon -- criticized some of FDR's policies as hindering recovery from the depression.
Only now has a book been written in language that non-economists can understand which argues persuasively that the policies of the Roosevelt administration actually prolonged the depression and made it worse. That book is "FDR's Folly" by Jim Powell. It is very readable, factual and insightful -- and is endorsed by two Nobel Prizewinning economists. (CLICK HERE to purchase. Sales help fund JWR)
If the word "folly" seems a little dismissive, read the book first. Someone described FDR's trust-busting Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold as being like one of the Marx brothers who went into government by mistake. That description would apply to many of the others around FDR, including his much-vaunted "brain-trust" of presumptuous and self-righteous people.
It is painfully obvious that President Roosevelt himself had no serious understanding of economics, any more than his Republican predecessor, Herbert Hoover, had. The difference was that Roosevelt had boundless self-confidence and essentially pushed some of the misconceptions of President Hoover to their logical extreme.
The grand myth for decades was that Hoover was unwilling to use the powers of government to come to the aid of the people during the Great Depression but that Roosevelt was more caring and did. In reality, both presidents represented a major break with the past by casting the federal government in the role of rescuer of the economy in its distress.
Scholarly studies of the history of these two administrations have in recent years come to see FDR's New Deal as Herbert Hoover's policies writ large and in bolder strokes.
Those who judge by intentions may say that this was a good thing. But those who judge by results point out that none of the previous depressions -- during which the federal government essentially did nothing -- lasted anywhere near as long as the depression in which the federal government decided that it had to "do something."
In "FDR's Folly," author Jim Powell spells out just what the Roosevelt administration did and what consequences followed. It tried to raise farm prices by destroying vast amounts of produce -- at a time when hunger was a serious problem in the United States. It imposed minimum wage rates that priced unskilled labor out of jobs, at a time of massive unemployment.
Behind both policies was the belief that what was needed was more purchasing power and that this could be achieved by government policies to raise the prices received by farmers and workers. But prices do not automatically translate into greater purchasing power, unless people buy as much at higher prices as they would at lower prices -- which they seldom do.
Then there were the monetary authorities contracting the money supply in the midst of the biggest depression in history -- when the economy was showing some signs of revival, until their monetary contraction touched off another big downturn.
With policy after policy and program after program, "FDR's Folly" traces the high hopes and disastrous consequences. It would be funny, like the Keystone cops running into one another and falling down, except that millions of people were in economic desperation while this farce was being played out in Washington.
Perhaps worse than any specific policy under FDR was the atmosphere of uncertainty generated by incessant new experiments. Billions of dollars of investment were needed to create millions of jobs for the unemployed. But investors were reluctant to risk their money while the rules of the game were constantly being changed in Washington, amid strident anti-business rhetoric.
Some of the people who most admired and almost worshipped FDR -- poor people and blacks, for example -- were hurt the most by amateurish tinkering with the economy by Roosevelt's New Deal administration. This book is an education in itself, both in history and in economics. It is also a warning of what can happen when leaders are chosen for their charm, charisma and rhetoric.
Weapons of mass distraction
Cal Thomas
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | One of the reasons people hate politics is that truth is rarely a politician's objective. Election and power are.
In the matter of the interim report prepared by David Kay and the Iraq Survey Group on whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, opponents of the war and President Bush have been trying to make it say things it does not. In a Washington Post op-ed column (10/7/03), Secretary of State Colin Powell summarized Kay's case: "Two things are abundantly clear: Saddam Hussein's Iraq was in material breach of its United Nations obligations before the Security Council passed Resolution 1441 last November, and Iraq went further into breach after the resolution was passed."
Most of the critics who want to use Kay's report to defeat the president's reelection also ignore some of the report's key findings. Among them are these little gems:
-- "We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002."
-- "The testimony we have obtained from Iraqi scientists and senior government officials" makes clear that "Saddam Hussein remained firmly committed to acquiring nuclear weapons."
A Wall Street Journal editorial (10/6/03) said that critics have been talking about the failure to discover "stockpiles" of WMD. "But the Stockpile Standard," notes the Journal, "wasn't anyone's measure in agreeing to 1441 . and what Mr. Kay has already found is . enough proof that Saddam was attempting to deceive the world one more time about his dangerous intentions."
If Powell, Kay and the Wall Street Journal aren't enough to persuade the skeptics, what about Democrats? These aren't today's Democrats, who question everything the administration does. These are the Democrats of just a few months ago who saw evil intent everywhere in Iraq. The Web page frontpagemag.com has conveniently chronicled the clear vision of some Democrats as recently as last December, before politics blinded them.
-- "The threat of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction is real ." - Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), (12/8/02)
-- "We are in possession of what I think to be compelling evidence that Saddam Hussein has, and has had for a number of years, a developing capacity for the production and storage of weapons of mass destruction." - Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), (10/10/02)
-- "In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members .. It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons." - Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), (10/10/02)
My personal favorite comes from Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), who now says the war was a "fraud." That's not what he said on Sept. 27, 2002: "We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical and biological warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons .."
So, which is it? Was Saddam Hussein obtaining weapons of mass destruction that could have brought violence and death to large numbers of people? Or did the Bush administration overstate the case for political reasons?
Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), one of the president's harshest post-war critics, said: "I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in (Saddam Hussein's) hands is a real and grave threat to our security." (10/03/02)
The Democrats' patron saint, Bill Clinton, asserted: "If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction." (2/4/98)
It appears some Democrats have developed amnesia as the next election gets closer. But how can they be right then and wrong now? They would have to be incompetent, liars or political opportunists. Or career politicians.
Will advocacy disguised as journalism succeed?
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | Many in the "mainstream" news media have decided that their principal job is to elect Democrats. If some facts must be ignored, and others distorted in order to bring this about, so be it.
The Los Angeles Times discarded what shreds remained of its reputation for journalistic integrity in its efforts to keep Gov. Gray Davis from being recalled. The electioneering efforts of the LA Times consisted principally, but by no means exclusively, of its front page story, the Thursday before the election, in which six women - four of them anonymously - accused Republican frontrunner Arnold Schwarzenegger of having groped them.
The story was criticized less for its content than for its timing, and for the clear double standard the LA Times employed. California's largest newspaper had downplayed much more serious - and better factually grounded - allegations of sexual misconduct by President Clinton, and had ignored altogether credible charges of (nonsexual) abuse of female staff members by Davis.
The groping story wasn't the lowest blow delivered by the news media in the waning days of the campaign. The dubious distinction belongs to ABC News and the New York Times, which reported an unsupported allegation by a single source that, some 30 years, ago, Schwarzenegger had had some kind things to say about Adolph Hitler. The story was quickly rebutted and its source retracted it, but only after the bogus claim was given widespread publicity.
The "late hits" on Schwarzenegger failed. Davis was recalled handily, and Schwarzenegger crushed LtGov. Cruz Bustamante in the second part of the ballot. But what we saw in the recall election is merely a preview of what President Bush can expect next year. To be re-elected, Bush has to contend not only with whomever the Democrats nominate, but with most of the media as well.
Bush has a harder row to hoe than Schwarzenegger did. Efforts by the news media to influence the election in California failed chiefly because Californians live in California. They know what they are thinking, and pretty much what their neighbors are thinking. When the LA Times printed a bizarre alternative version of reality, Californians recognized the distortions, and discounted them. But few Americans know firsthand what is going on in Iraq. And it is media-influenced perceptions of what is going on in Iraq that largely will determine the president's fate.
The news media are reporting blatant falsehoods about Iraq as if they were true.
"Chief weapons searach David Kay reported he had found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, a finding that brough fresh congressional complaints about the Bush administration's prewar assertions of an imminent threat from Saddam Hussein," wrote the AP's John Lumpkin Oct. 4.
But Bush never said Saddam posed an "imminent" threat. In his address to the United Nations in September, 2002, and in this year's state of the union address, he said precisely the opposite. Because weapons of mass destruction are so dangerous, the U.S. cannot afford to wait to act until a threat becomes imminent.
In a story about the "outing" of CIA operative Valerie Plame, Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times refers to the "insupportable claim (in Bush's state of the union address) that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from Niger." But what Bush said was that the British had learned that Saddam was trying to uranium in Africa, of which Niger is only a small part. And since Kay has found evidence Saddam did try to buy uranium elsewhere in Africa, the claim is hardly "insupportable."
Other journalists write that Bush claimed that Saddam Hussein played a role in the Sept. 11 attacks, when Bush and his senior aides have always said precisely the opposite, that there is no evidence of such a linkage (though the Czechs think there is). What Bush has said is that there were ties between Saddam's regime and al Qaeda and other international terror groups, an assertion which Kay and others have proved to be indisputably true.
A falsehood is only a lie if the teller of the falsehood knows it to be false at the time he or she tells it. Lumpkin, Bumiller, et. al may merely be incompetent, incapable of so simple a task as looking up the state of the union address to see what it was that Bush actually said. But as the falsehoods mount, so does the likelihood that the falsehoods are deliberate.
Don't bother me with the facts
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | To hear a number of leading Democrats tell it, the report issued last week by David Kay, the chairman of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), was proof positive that President Bush had effectively committed a war crime: He launched a war of aggression on the pretext that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and now, thanks to Dr. Kay, we know that wasn't true.
There is only one problem with this highly partisan attack, and the parallel media reporting that has taken a similarly pollyannish line about the Kay report: No responsible reader could take any comfort from its findings, let alone construe them as an indictment of the Bush Administration and its decision to liberate Iraq.
While the President's critics may not wish to be bothered by the facts, they are, as the saying goes, "stubborn things." And those laid out by Dr. Kay and his colleagues paint a picture of Saddam Hussein as despot relentlessly engaged in the pursuit of the most devastating weapons known to man. The Iraq Survey Group's inability to date to locate the weapons the UN previously determined were in Saddam's hands should be a matter of grave concern - and redoubled effort. Its report certainly is not cause for, as some have suggested, shutting down the ISG and reallocating its resources elsewhere.
Consider, for example, the following facts that belie the conclusion Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction:
The Kay team has thus far been able to examine only 10 of the 130 known ammo depots in Iraq, some of which are as large as fifty square miles. It would be folly to say on the basis of a less-than-ten-percent sample whether WMD are to be found in the remainder.
These depots are filled with immense quantities of ordinance. Since the regime made no appreciable effort to distinguish which contained high explosives and which were loaded with chemical or biological agents, establishing exactly what is in such facilities is a time-consuming and dangerous task.
In addition to the known depots, there are untold numbers of covert weapons caches around the country. These caches have been the source of much of the ordinance used in improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to attack American and coalition forces. Whether any of these contain WMD remains unknown at this juncture. But if they do, IEDs could, in the future, be vastly more devastating - especially to unprotected Iraqis in proximity to the attack.
The task is further complicated by the relatively small size of the objects of the search. Dr. Kay has noted that all of Saddam Hussein's as yet unaccounted for WMD could be stored in a space the size of a two-car garage. According to former Clinton CIA Director R. James Woolsey, his entire suspected inventory of the biological agent anthrax would fill roughly half a standard semi's tractor trailer.
Taken together with the assiduous efforts Saddam made to conceal and otherwise to obscure his weapons of mass destruction program (also documented by Dr. Kay and his team), these factors give rise to an ineluctable reality: If the ISG is having a hard time ferreting out the truth about Iraq's WMD, UN inspectors would likely never have found dispositive evidence of Iraqi WMD given the additional constraints they labored under that no longer apply (notably, those imposed on freedom of travel and inquiry by Saddam's totalitarian system and the attendant lack of cooperation from Iraqi scientists).
The really bad news in the Kay report are its revelations about the role being played in WMD-related activities by Saddam's dreaded Iraqi Intelligence Service (known as the IIS, or Mukhabarat). According to Dr. Kay, the Mukhabarat had over two-dozen secret laboratories - and more are still being found - that "at a minimum kept alive Iraq's capability to produce both biological and chemical weapons."
In addition to discovering work aimed at weaponizing various deadly diseases, the Iraq Survey Group received from an Iraqi scientist "reference strains" for one of the most lethal substances known to man: Botulinum toxin. In short order, with the right equipment and growth material - items Saddam was able to acquire and retain since they were inherently "dual use" and could also be used for commercial purposes -- such strains could translate into large quantities of biological agents.
Lest we forget, it was this sort of capability that President Bush cited as grounds for war. He warned of the possibility that weapons of mass destruction could be made available to terrorists. It would not take large quantities to inflict immense damage. And it would likely be the Iraqi Intelligence Services, rather than the regular army or even the Republican Guard, who would be responsible for providing such support to the regime's terrorist proxies. In a little-noted aspect of his recent "Meet the Press" interview, Vice President Richard Cheney for the first time offered official confirmation that Iraqi agents appeared to have played such a catalytic role in the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.
It is one thing to ignore the facts available, and their ominous implications. It is, however, another thing altogether to pretend that David Kay has shown that there is no danger from Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, when the facts are otherwise, and bothersome indeed.
Rush Limbaugh: Part I
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | I hate sports. I even wait outside when my children go to Sports Authority. But PC gibberish keeps creeping into sports, thus demanding my attention. As they say in sportscasting, let me recap on social commentary rearing its ugly head in sports.
I've written about Jimmy the Greek, Fuzzy the Zoeller, and Howard the Cosell, who had comments about monkeys, chickens, and breeding. Oh, my! I addressed John Rocker's comments on subway occupants. He induced snits by commentators for his description of the "D" train in NYC. He was accurate; they preferred the rose-colored glasses description.
Now Rush Limbaugh has theorized on ESPN that the media held back on their critiques of black quarterback, Donovan McNabb, who, Mr. Limbaugh feels, is not all that good.
Them's fightin' words. Is Mr. Limbaugh is on drugs? Oops! That's next week's topic, after the mainstream media confirm the National Enquirer reports.
Reaction was swift, histrionic and gleeful. Crooked fingers jabbed at the most popular radio show host in America. The media, Kweisi Mfume of the NAACP, two presidential candidates, and sports writers in a collective moralistic tizzy all clucked, "Off with his head!" For a bunch of moral relativists, liberals are Puritanical.
Race obsession paralyzes society. Make race a factor in college and graduate school admissions, government hiring, government contractor retention (including mandatory affirmative action programs), and election contests, and you get a one-track racial society.
In a racial society, lines are drawn, literally and figuratively, along black and white. When the law mandates race-based decisions, people think and speak in racial terms.
Mr. Limbaugh is right in his assessment of the racially restrained media.
The NFL has been consumed with fear since September 30, 2002 when Cyrus Mehri and Johnnie Cochran released their report, "Black Coaches in the National Football League: Superior Performance, Inferior Opportunities," and threatened class action discrimination lawsuits. Mr. Cochran can, of course, get a murderer acquitted using race. Mr. Mehri has shaken down corporate America's finest for racial discrimination, including Coke ($192.5 mil) and Texaco ($176 mil).
If you want to view obsequious sports writers, check out the editorials in reaction to the Mehri/Cochran report in the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times,and San Francisco Chronicle. Nothing but outrage over the NFL's failure to hire black executives when 2/3 of NFL players are black. One writer demands that the NCAA be the next target.
So, the NFL formed a special committee that imposed the Rooney Rule, one that requires NFL teams to interview a least one minority candidate for head coach positions. Detroit Lions' president Matt Millen was fined $200,000 in July for his failure to bring in a minority candidate before hiring white guy, Steve Mariucci.
Pointing out the folly of this quota program, black Cornell MBA John Hackney, a Holy Cross math major and football player, has offered to come and interview with any NFL team for $100,000. He doesn't want to be a head coach, but he pockets $100,000, and the NFL team has net savings of $100,000 by complying with the Rooney Rule thereby avoiding the Tagliabue fine.
With this backdrop, Mr. Limbaugh's comment on the attack of media race consciousness rings true. In fact, Alex Barra, sports writer for Slate, hardly a bastion of conservative thought, offered the following, "Rush Limbaugh Was Right: Donovan McNabb isn't a great quarterback, and the media do overrate him because he is black." Mr. Limbaugh is many things, but he not a racist. His right hand on his radio program, Mr. Snerdley, is black, as is the editor of his newsletter. His ESPN commentary is what a racial society breeds.
In a racial society, everyone is accountable along racial lines, but cannot discuss racial impact.
Race has been made part of every equation, not a variable, but a given. Race is the basis for critical decisions in human capital advancement. In a racial society, race controls advancement in jobs and education. And in the NFL. But, we dare not say so.
Race even controls reaction to racial comments. Dusty Baker, the Chicago Cubs manager, commented this summer on the superior genetic ability of minority players to take the heat. Mr. Baker had a few bad days in the media, but he's also black and still employed.
Cruz Bustamante, lieutenant governor of California, touts his membership in MEChA (Movimienti Estudiantil de Aztlan). Motto: "For the race, everything. For those outside the race, nothing." Mr. Bustamante also used the "n" word in a speech in February 2001. He got a free pass from the same groups who tossed Mark Fuhrman from LA. Mr. Fuhrman was the detective who testified in the O.J. Simpson trial. He failed to disclose using the "n" word 11 years prior.
Mr. Limbaugh suggested the media were reluctant in their candor on McNabb because of his race. When push comes to shove, on the NFL field or in any other line of work, race matters. It defines us, it determines our fate, and, on occasion, deprives us. Mr. Limbaugh's observations are not the problem. His thoughts are what a racial society hath wrought.
Posted by trafael
at 4:05 AM EDT
Updated: Monday, 13 October 2003 4:30 AM EDT
