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A narrow escape (Thomas Sowell)
Townhall.com ^ | November 4, 2004 | Thomas Sowell

Posted on 11/04/2004 7:20:49 AM PST by The Great Yazoo

Although more people voted for President Bush than for any other President in American history, it was still a narrow victory -- and a narrow escape for this great nation.

Can you imagine what it would be like to have a Massachusetts liberal filling the federal courts across the country, including the Supreme Court, with liberal judges who would be turning more criminals loose for decades to come, as well as repeatedly over-ruling the voting public's right to govern themselves on such things as gay marriage?

With so many elderly members on today's Supreme Court, the choices of their successors will be historic in their consequences. Those consequences could be tragic if they are replaced with more Justices who think their job is to impose their own pet notions or -- worse yet -- to be guided by what is in fashion in other countries, instead of what is set forth in the Constitution of the United States that they are sworn to uphold.

President Bush has made some excellent judicial nominations who have been stymied by Senate Democrats, led by Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota. Perhaps Dachle's defeat at the polls will send a message to other Senate Democrats that partisan obstruction is not what the voters sent them to Washington to do.

The implications of this election reach beyond the government. The election results demonstrate that the mainstream media has lost its power to control what the public will know and not know. If there were not alternative media like talk radio, Fox News and the Internet, the public would have heard nothing but pro-Kerry spin masquerading as news.

Dan Rather's forged documents were just the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Ted Koppel's contrived "ambush journalism" against John O'Neill of the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth was more clever, but no less sleazy. Chris Matthews' shouting down and browbeating Michelle Malkin on Hardball was not his finest hour either.

Other examples abound. Double standards in the media have long been applied to everything from reporting unemployment statistics to demanding to see the military records of the candidates.

When the unemployment rate was 5.4 percent during the Clinton administration, it was hailed as a great achievement but the very same unemployment rate has been treated as a disaster under President Bush.

Unsubstantiated charges that Republicans were trying to suppress voters who were likely to vote against them have been trumpeted through the media. But the documented fact that Democrats tried to stop the absentee ballots of people in the military serving overseas in 2000 from being counted in Florida, and tried to stop Ralph Nader from even being put on the ballot this year, received very little mention.

Unsubstantiated rumors were also enough to keep the media howling after President Bush for months, demanding more information about his military service, even after he signed the official form releasing all his military records to the public. Senator Kerry never signed that same form but this fact was passed over in utter silence.

No one even raised the obvious question as to why Lt. Kerry's honorable discharge from the Navy was issued during the Carter administration, even though his service ended earlier. Was his original discharge not honorable but only made "honorable" retroactively under the Democrats?

We don't know and we will never know, so long as the media think their job is to filter and spin for their own causes and candidates, rather than to inform the public and let them decide.

Some are saying that the Democrats are going to have to go back to the drawing board and figure out what they are doing wrong, if they want to regain the support of the public. The time is long overdue for the mainstream media to do the same.

Perhaps as the aging anchor men on network news programs retire, and are replaced by younger people who were not steeped in the heady sense of power that the media acquired during the Vietnam war and Watergate, maybe there will be more emphasis on news in the news rooms.

The election results have spared us the worst but it will take some rethinking in a lot of places for us to achieve the best.


TOPICS: Editorial; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: kerrydefeat; thomassowell
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It is only the grace of God that He chose to spare us from a bad king.
1 posted on 11/04/2004 7:20:49 AM PST by The Great Yazoo
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To: The Great Yazoo

An excellent post.


2 posted on 11/04/2004 7:25:26 AM PST by pickrell (Old dog, new trick...sort of)
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To: The Great Yazoo
Too close for comfort, we ducked a close one. I take from Sowell, and Steyn and Coulter and others that yes some hard thinking is needed, we don't want to be in the this position (pre-election) again.

Even the winning side (Thank God) needs to draw the right lessons from the 2004 election. (Sowell is great as usual.)

3 posted on 11/04/2004 7:27:01 AM PST by beckaz
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To: stockpirate

Thomas Sowell Ping!


4 posted on 11/04/2004 7:29:07 AM PST by LakeLady ("I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat." - Will Rogers)
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To: The Great Yazoo
In all the euphoria over this election, Sowell's reflections reinforce a point I've been making for the last 24 hours.

This administration has played with fire in Iraq and in the Federal budget, and it damn near got burned in the process. Were it not for the ongoing troubles overseas and these poor fiscal decisions, Bush would likely have won re-election by a landslide of historic proportions.

5 posted on 11/04/2004 7:29:18 AM PST by Alberta's Child (I made enough money to buy Miami -- but I pissed it away on the Alternative Minimum Tax.)
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To: The Great Yazoo

Sowell is nothing short of brilliant. He is recognizing the true battle is now with the MSM... we have defeated the Democrats... their ideas have been discredited... and their candidates relegated to history...

We must now turn our attention to the propaganda wing of the Democrat party... the continued attention to their false claims, their snide comments, their misleading statements....

Can you imagine a world without Dan Rather, Katie Couric, Peter Jennings, et. al. spilling their partisanship in the form of "news"?


6 posted on 11/04/2004 7:31:10 AM PST by Noooooorm
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To: The Great Yazoo

Sowell is right about the media. One thing I think we've got to do is figure out how to get our own media front and center.

Furthermore, I think election reform is needed. The Dems were able to cheat because our national election law is a hodgepodge of different standards and requirements. Federal elections should be standardized, and we should have a central voter database for federal elections. I think this would make sure, if nothing else, that the playing field is at least a little more level in areas where there are high concentrations of Dems (who are more likely to cheat on a grand scale).


7 posted on 11/04/2004 7:34:37 AM PST by livius
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To: The Great Yazoo
Some are saying that the Democrats are going to have to go back to the drawing board and figure out what they are doing wrong, if they want to regain the support of the public. The time is long overdue for the mainstream media to do the same.
"Objective" journalism represents a guild mentality in which the one thing which cannot be said is that some other journalist is not objective. But in fact journalism is politics, and the conceit that it is anything else is a political smokescreen.

Journalism is superficial because of its deadlines, and journalism is negative because that attracts attention. Superficial negativity is cynicism. And cynicism is liberalism.


8 posted on 11/04/2004 7:39:25 AM PST by conservatism_IS_compassion (The idea around which liberalism coheres is that NOTHING actually matters but PR.)
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To: The Great Yazoo
Sowell's right.

The scariest thing about this election is the fact that men like Kerry and Edwards were even seriously considered for the presidency and vice-presidency.

9 posted on 11/04/2004 7:47:54 AM PST by Savage Beast (9/11 was never repeated--thanks to President Bush.)
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To: The Great Yazoo
On Tuesday at about 5PM Eastern time, I was in heady conversation a friend who happens to be a conservative political science professor. I was watching Bush take a nosedive in the futures market, and wondering what had happened. I said okay, worst case scenario, what happens if we are wrong about this election and are forced to inhabit the parallel universe where Kerry is President of the United States. What does it really mean?

We agreed that as conservatives it may not be all that bad as government spending would likely get reined in by a belligerent Congress and Kerry would have no capability to enact his liberal domestic agenda. But the one damning negative would have been excrutiatingly unbearable.

Hillary Clinton would have been the next Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

10 posted on 11/04/2004 7:58:44 AM PST by massadvj
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To: Savage Beast
Kerry had spent the last 20 years making television appearances. His senate record is ridiculous. He is neither liked nor likable (except, possibly, by Europeans).
11 posted on 11/04/2004 8:00:39 AM PST by The Great Yazoo (Why do penumbras not emanate from the Tenth Amendment as promiscuously as they do from the First?)
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To: Savage Beast
The establishment media and elitist billionaires did the biggest sales job in history for this guy. It almost worked, but in the end enough Americans saw through the charade and realized Kerry was just cotton candy - a little sugar spun to look great but no real substance.
12 posted on 11/04/2004 8:05:37 AM PST by CharacterCounts
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To: The Great Yazoo

FANTASTIC SOWELL!
By THE GRACE OF GOD AMERICA HAS ONCE AGAIN BEEN SAVED!


13 posted on 11/04/2004 8:11:04 AM PST by LibertyLight (I've got more hair than Kerry & Edwards together!)
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To: Noooooorm
Can you imagine the election results without Murdoch's Fox news (only a few years old now)?

If the Fox viewers had been forced to still go to the MSM? It would have been closer or we could have outright lost.

14 posted on 11/04/2004 8:26:16 AM PST by beckaz (Fight them THERE and NOW. HERE and LATER will only cost more lives.)
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To: The Great Yazoo

The differences though are striking. President Bush got more votes than any other prez in our history, because that many people love him. Kerry got the second largest, but not out of love, his voters were voting out of hatred of Bush.


15 posted on 11/04/2004 8:44:50 AM PST by weezel
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To: weezel

To bad the NAACP dont like him.


16 posted on 11/04/2004 8:56:14 AM PST by Lori675
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To: The Great Yazoo
From the article:
Double standards in the media have long been applied ...

I'm coming to the conclusion that this isn't correct. The media have only one standard which they apply to both parties: socialism = good.

17 posted on 11/04/2004 9:19:19 AM PST by PatrickHenry (Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.)
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To: The Great Yazoo

We have a 4 year lease on life, thanks to God. We need to do some serious work, and major a$$ kicking to get another.


18 posted on 11/04/2004 9:25:39 AM PST by Dead Dog
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To: beckaz
or -- worse yet -- to be guided by what is in fashion in other countries

The Specter of the bullet barely dodged!

Sowell gets it.   Will the rest of us?

HF

19 posted on 11/04/2004 9:47:29 AM PST by holden
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To: The Great Yazoo
Sowell gets it.

Aren't you all astounded that many busy, maybe apolitical people, THROUGH THE LYING HAZE OF MSM, still managed against all odds to figure out right from wrong and save us from a Kerry Presidency?

WHEW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

20 posted on 11/04/2004 9:50:47 AM PST by Yaelle
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