Free Republic

The Washington Post's David Broder, known as 'the dean of the Washington press corps, held a moderated online discussion last Thursday on the presidential campaign.Here is the question I posed and Broder's response. I was unable to answer his question back to me because I had submitted the question the night before and was at work when the online chat took place.Washington, D.C.: Sen. Kerry parades around former Sen. Max Cleland, who lost three limbs in an accident in Vietnam, like Jerry Lewis on a telethon so as to burnish his Vietnam combat credentials, yet he refuses to authorize the...

The Bush campaign may have $100 million to spend, but the Kerry team has the news media as part of its base, a reality demonstrated on Thursday, a day John Kerry took off and didn’t even campaign. Based on a single news story in the New York Daily News quoting a single firefighter and a few members of families with 9-11 victims, the morning and evening shows on ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC, as well as CNBC and MSNBC in prime time, picked up the charge that new Bush campaign TV ads, which very briefly show images from 9-11, somehow...

So, given the news media’s standard that any fleeting scenes of a day when 3,000 Americans were killed is inappropriate exploitation, can we expect the media to apply the same standard to John Kerry in the future about Vietnam where more than 50,000 Americans were killed? Kerry’s primary campaign has already showcased video of him in Vietnam, video a 1996 Boston Globe revelation suggests may have been from a staged re-enactment conducted by Kerry. On FNC’s Special Report with Brit Hume on Thursday, the Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes mockingly quipped about any Kerry use of Vietnam: “‘57,000 Americans died there....

Don't look now, folks, but the left-wing mainstream media are at it again, with one exception. On Thursday morning the media started a firestorm, blasting President Bush's TV campaign spot that includes a few seconds of images from Ground Zero. They immediately flocked to a small group of 9/11 families that accused the president of exploiting the tragedy for political gain. The New York Daily News went so far as to print a photo of President Bush standing at Ground Zero, bullhorn in hand and arm around a former firefighter, in its story. It gives one the impression that the...