Posted on 10/13/2004 1:57:52 AM PDT by GiovannaNicoletta
David Horowitz wrote the following editorial at the invitation of The Philadelphia Inquirer. The Inquirer is running 21 anti-Bush editorials between now and election day as part of its "21 Reasons to Elect Kerry" series. The Inquirer has invited conservative op-eds like this (the first) for the sake of balance. FrontPage Magazine believes in political balance and is happy to see a different viewpoint added to the liberal media. -- The Editors.
In 200 years of this nations political history, there has never been a hate campaign as massive, as nasty, and as personally vicious as the one directed against President George Bush. Part of this hate is a product of the generic politics of destruction practiced by Democratic Party leaders in every election cycle as a matter of course. In the 2000 campaign the Democrats placed ads in black communities across the country accusing the President of killing a black lynch victim a second time. They even got the daughter of the lynch victim to do the dirty work voice over for them.
This year the Democrat who would be President is touring the country telling black audiences that George Bush won the election in Florida by stealing one million black votes an ugly, racially divisive and mendacious charge which, if Republicans were behind it would elicit howls of foul play from the nations (leftwing) press, instead of their present discreet silence on the subject. Not a single actual victim of such theft has been identified by civil rights organizations or the Kerry campaign because none exists. The Civil Rights Commission and the press investigated these charges at the time and found them baseless. As of course they would, since all the contested precincts in the Florida recount were in Democratic counties.
But it is the specifically personal attacks on Bush that reveal the ferocious insanity of liberal hate in this political season. For two years, George Bush has been derided as a moron, a dummy, and a Cheney puppet by liberal elites, even though his college test scores rank him in the top 10 percent of the nation, and even though newspapers such as The Philadelphia Inquirer give him full credit for orchestrating his own alleged vendettas. He has been accused of being a military deserter despite the failure of the media to prove this charge in four election campaigns, despite his logging 574 air hours in a plane dangerous enough to be referred to as the widow-maker, and despite his honorable discharge from the service.
As President, he has been denounced as a traitor who has betrayed Americans, a liar, a corrupt manipulator who misled America and sent its young and innocent to battle in full knowledge that their mission was fraudulent and their deaths needless. It has been charged that the sole reason he sent the young to die was to line the pockets of his corporate Texas cronies. He has been accused in advance of being responsible for any dirty nuclear bomb that terrorists detonate in the United States. And these are merely the attacks originating with Al Gore and Ted Kennedy to be spread then through the Democratic ranks. Not a single Democrat, by the way, has stood up to deplore the recklessness of these smears, or to speculate on how such attacks might affect the fortunes of the troops under the Presidents command. Instead of fulfilling their role as neutral arbiters of the facts, the media have regularly given these destructive and despicable accusations a free pass.
The personal attacks on Bush began even before the war in Iraq started -- a war which was authorized and justified by Bill Clinton and Al Gore and ratified by the majority of congressional Democrats in the Iraqi Liberation Act of 1998; then ratified again in the congressional Authorization of Force Act of October 2002. John Kerry signed on to both resolutions before he turned his back on them because Howard Dean was passing him in the polls. These attacks on a President carrying out a bipartisan policy began with an unconscionable personal strike by Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle on the very eve of the war. Even as our troops moved into harms way to enforce United Nations Resolution 1441 an ultimatum that called on Saddam to disarm or else -- Daschle claimed that Bushs failed diplomacy, not Saddams intransigence, was responsible for the war.
I have been invited to respond to todays Inquirer editorial, which takes aim not at the Democrat hate mongers, but at their target, describing him as a vindictive politician with an enemies list. Hows that for a fair-minded press! Inquirer editors have every right to be partisan, but what kind of judgment would make a man more sinned against than sinning, and responsible for the security of us all, the butt of an editorial like this?
The Inquirer editorial rehashes a discredited canard about Joseph Wilson and his wife who, it claims, were punished by Bush for revealing that he had lied about Saddams attempt to get nuclear materials from Niger. Yet a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee investigated Wilsons charges and rejected them, concluding that the Presidents statement was well-founded. Wilsons story was evidently a political dirty trick to undermine the rationale for the war, but the media are so consumed by their own anti-Bush passions that they cant even play fair a year and a half later, when the accusation they endorsed turns out to be false.
If George Bush loses this election to a man who has been on all sides of the issue of war and peace, and has shifted his positions according to which way the political winds blow, Americans will surely suffer consequences in the coming months of the war on terror. But then they will have only themselves to blame, along with media that did not meet their most fundamental obligation to stay above the political fray and tell the American people the truth.
But how do we fight? We are so fragmented and separated. I will vote, but it is like my pathetic little rifle arrayed against the big guns of the democrat/media machine. Even though I'm fortunate to live in conservative Texas, my district has been democrat. It isn't now due to redistricting, but the architect of that, Tom Delay, is being persecuted for those changes.
To top it all off, we believe in the rule of law where the left doesn't believe in anything but winning.
I'm very frustrated.
I'm 57 and I was ASA in the Vietnam scene.
I wish you well trying to tolerate all of this. I am disgusted...............especially at the people in government who have allowed "old media" to be so influential and destructive.............and WRONG!!!!
................. he has been raised by good people --- you!
:-)
Thanks for the compliment, dear. We raised our children with a genuine, classic liberal arts education -- at home. And after trying pub ed, and getting shocked to the roots of our rational beings.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.