Considerettes

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.

What liberal media? The Pew Research folks have done a media poll, and one of the results is that Americans see a liberal bias, and although where you stand seems to affect what you see, even more Democrats see a liberal tilt than a conservative one.

Republicans see the press as more liberal than conservative by nearly three-to-one (65%- 22%). Among independents, the margin is two-to-one (50%-25%). And while a third of Democrats say there is a conservative tilt to the American press, a slight plurality (41%) says the press is more liberal than anything else.

Overall, by a 2-to-1 ratio, Americans see a liberal bias vs. a conservative bias. What’s more revealing is the percentage that think the press is truly unbiased: only 14%. That doesn’t speak well at all for journalists who supposedly do all they can to scrub their reports clean of bias. Yeah, we all see through our own lenses, but…14%?

Quote: “The most widely accepted study of sexual practices in the United States is the National Health and Social Life Survey (NHSLS). The NHSLS found that 2.8% of the male, and 1.4% of the female, population identify themselves as gay, lesbian, or bisexual.”

These numbers are, of course, far lower than gay rights activists have been quoting for decades (I’ve personally heard some people estimate as high as 20%). Anyone who’s ever said those numbers were 3% or less was considered homophobic at the very least. Therefore, where do you think the above quote is from:

A – Pat Robertson
B – Jerry Falwell
C – The Christian Coalition
D – A small footnote on page 16 of an amicus brief submitted to the Supreme Court in the recent “Lawrence v. Texas” sodomy case on behalf of 31 groups including Human Rights Campaign, National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, Parents, Families, & Friends of Lesbians and Gays, The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, and the People for the Way Foundation.

I’ll let you look it up.

Stanley Crouch, writing in the NY Daily News, points out the hypocrisy of the civil right establishment in how they are reacting to Bush’s Africa trip.

On his first day in Africa, he gave a speech in Senegal from Goree Island, where slaves were gathered and sold to Europeans after being captured by other Africans (something self-righteous Negro Americans ignore at every turn). The speech shocked many because no Republican President since Lincoln has ever seriously addressed slavery or its consequences with such direct eloquence and depth of vision.

In fact, had a Democrat given such a speech, the civil rights establishment and our domestic left would have flipped. He would have been praised for facing up to the dark slave voyages of our history. He would have been commended for acknowledging the horrors of the plantation experience and for rightfully celebrating the ongoing struggle of black Americans that so fundamentally brought our nation closer to the ideals laid down in the Declaration of Independence. A march might have been organized in his honor.

But Bush is a Republican, which means the partisan civil rights establishment cannot acknowledge the greatness of his speech because he is not supposed to have given it, and, if he gave it, the motives could only be crass. That is why that establishment needs to reiterate the nonpartisan stance of the old leadership, which never would have sold out to the Democrats – or the Republicans!

And coverage of all this in the major media is pitiful. When I watched ABC News last night, the only coverage on the Africa trip was a short mention of the AIDS relief package and video of the Bush entourage happening across a pair of mating elephants. Nothing about a ground-breaking speech, although they did spend about 5 full minutes on a single sentence in his State of the Union address from months ago that was based on possibly bad intelligence.

Eric Alterman (author of “What Liberal Media?”), call your office.

Update: You can find a copy of the text of the speech here.