What liberal media? According to Bob Kohn, it’s all in the name.

When the news was good, they [the New York Times] were sure to identify President Clinton by name. When the news was bad, you couldn’t find Clinton’s name in the story.

Since Bush showed up, of course, the pattern has worked in reverse; blame on “Bush” but credit to “administration officials”. Kohn’s case study is the recent release of the 9/11 report. Bush is mentioned by name, but Clinton’s moniker is nowhere to be found, even when dates in the report clearly fall within his administration.

When can we expect to see a Times news analysis on how much our intelligence capabilities have improved since Bush took office? Or how much these improvements will benefit Bush’s re-election bid? Or how much this “scathing” congressional report will weigh on the much-vaunted Clinton legacy? The questions are rhetorical – we all know the answers.

Hold not thy breath.

WORLD magazine has a great article detailing the whole California governor recall petition drive. From the use of talk radio and the Internet, to the unconstitutional shenanigans that the Davis administration kept pulling, it’s an intriguing read.

Attacking Iraq to prevent the further development of their weapons of mass destruction, going it alone if we have to, and using more than just a few cruise missiles, but making Saddam pay a grave price in currency he understands and values are ideas you’d expect you have heard from George W. Bush before the war. Except that they were said in 1997 by current Democrat presidential candidate John Kerry, who is now saying that the evidence for going after Saddam is all suspect and should have been more carefully pored over.

What a difference an administration makes.

A significant number of Germans (about 1/3 under 30 years old, about 20% overall) think it possible that the United States ordered the Sept. 11 attacks itself.

With friends like these, who needs Yemenis?

What liberal media? Take this NY Times headline, please. “In Ohio, Iraq Questions Shake Even Some of Bush’s Faithful“. (Requires free registration to read.) And now here’s report James Dao’s summary:

In conversations here with nearly three dozen voters, the vast majority said they generally like President Bush and believe he is doing a good job. Many people said they remained convinced that Iraq posed a threat, even though no chemical or biological weapons have been found. And there was a broad consensus that the result of the war — the ousting of a brutal dictator — was good for Iraq as well as the United States.

Disconnect? Bias? (Yup.)

(Pointer from Taranto, again. His daily E-mail is a must-read.)

Mark Steyn, as quote by James Taranto’s “Best of the Web Today”:

One reason why the President . . . is all but certain to win re-election is the descent into madness of his opponents. They’ve let post-impeachment, post-chad-dangling bitterness unhinge them to the point where, given a choice between investigating the intelligence lapses that led to 9/11 and the intelligence lapses that led to a victorious war in Iraq, they stampede for the latter. Iraq was a brilliant campaign fought with minimal casualties, 11 September was a humiliating failure by government to fulfill its primary role of national defence. But Democrats who complained that Bush was too slow to act on doubtful intelligence re 9/11 now profess to be horrified that he was too quick to act on doubtful intelligence re Iraq. This is not a serious party.

Mark’s second-to-last sentence is all that needs to be said on liberal hypocrisy with respect to national security. As much as they whine about other people playing politics with the war/foreign policy/taxes/etc., they certainly practice it extremely well themselves.

Hopefully this lie can be put to bed for good. Palestinian sources have confirmed to the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs that only 52 (not hundreds or thousands) Palestinians died in the battle with Israelis at the refugee camp there, and that most were fighters (not civilians).

However, while the lie can be put to bed, let’s not forget who put forth that lie, and who can (or can’t) be trusted in the whole Middle East situation.

This will be my one and only post that will be dedicated to this “tempest in a teapot” issue; the Iraq-Niger uranium intelligence, and whether or not Bush lied in his State of the Union address about it. Here’s the line causing all the nattering:

“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

Points to note:

• The British government, to this day, stands by their intelligence.
• The forged documents that have been widely discussed are not how the British determined this. Bush’s sentence does not refer to those documents

At some point in the future, if the British intelligence turns out to be bogus, only then would it be worth questioning if Bush & his staff knew that it was prior to the SOTU address. Until then, what he said is true on its face and does not require the parsing of individual words. In spite of what many news pundits are trying to do to the sentence, it does not depend on what the meaning of the word “British” is.

If you really want to go after Bush for lying, call him on his promise about only being in Bosnia for 12 months. Oh…wait. That was Clinton (and his Secretary of Defense William Perry, and his Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, and his Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Peter Tamoff).

At the NAACP convention’s presidential candidates forum, Bob Graham was asked if Bush lied when he said Iraq had been trying to purchase uranium from Africa.

“I would not use the three-letter word,” the Florida senator told reporters. “I would use the five-letter word: deceit. That he deceived the American people by allowing into a State of the Union speech at a critical point when he was making the case for war with Iraq, a statement that he either knew was wrong or should have known was wrong.”

Except that “deceit” has six letters. No big deal? Yeah, it’s a yawner. Except that had it been George W. Bush or Dan Quayle, a story like that would’ve hit the ground running and liberal pundits would be all over it for weeks.

Let’s see what sort of legs the press & pundits put on this story.

What liberal media? Well, how about CBS news, that repeatedly, over the course of years, interviews the same liberal activists, implying that they’re some “man/woman-on-the-street” interviews. They interviewed one woman, Eva Baer-Schenkein, 3 times since 1999 (the most recent in May of this year) complaining about different ailments and that the Republican prescription drug program wouldn’t work. The website “www.RatherBiased.com” also found that they have gone to the same seven in this debate 23 different times over the course of the debate. And again, nary a label of or reference to their liberal activism.

Remember, bias is found in both what is covered and how it’s covered. In this case, it’s presenting one side of the story, told by the same people, over and over.