Rush Limbaugh: Media Mandate: "Whatever It Takes" (Rush nails Dan Ratherbiased on Watergate)

Chic Crassness
By George Neumayr
Published 6/3/2005 12:08:54 AM
http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=8254

Mark Felt's emergence as Deep Throat has occasioned a prolonged Old Timer's Day of the American left, allowing various aging fakers to take one last, long victory lap. With relish they have renewed their intense moralizing about Richard Nixon even though their own ethics evaporated a long time ago. We overthrew a corrupt order, they in effect say by puffing themselves up -- an arrogance that would be more comprehensible if they hadn't proceeded to create a new corrupt order. The champions of Deep Throat built atop the ruins of Richard Nixon not a better culture but a base culture that would culminate in the Deep Throat presidency of Bill Clinton.

The glib use of the Deep Throat moniker by the establishment buoying Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein was itself a signal of the new corruption: one form of crassness had been replaced by a more chic crassness. And that crassness -- at once willing to wallow in scandal in the popular culture and conduct puritanical political purges against select reviled figures -- would masquerade as morality for years until it exploded in the liberals' complicity in the very lies, perjury, and obstruction of justice that they spent their youth decrying.

The destroyers of Nixon ended up his disciples. Disciples not of his ends but of his means. An accidental admission of this came when Bill Clinton offered an almost gaudy eulogy at Nixon's funeral. Of course, Nixon's critics furiously deny any resemblance to the low ethics they once opposed and insist that whatever low means they have employed can be chalked up to necessity. (Mark Felt had to break the law, they have said this week). How dare Chuck Colson and Pat Buchanan lecture Felt and his enablers on morality, Ben Bradlee practically thundered on Wednesday's Nightline to an ingratiating Ted Koppel.

Why can't they question the propriety of it? Ben Bradlee is hardly a credible scourge of corruption in the presidency. He was John F. Kennedy's see-no-evil boon companion, whose sister-in-law, a JFK mistress, was murdered mysteriously, a scandal Bradlee was willing to cover-up by helping to destroy her diary detailing the affair.

On Thursday morning in the newspaper of this friend of JFK, a president with ties to Mobsters, appeared a Bob Woodward story that contained a casual reference to Nixon's circle as "Nazis," according to Mark Felt's estimate. This was a revealing excess in Woodward's story: In the left's feverish, self-justifying nostalgia, Nixon has to be turned into a Nazi for its hysteria to make any sense.

Not mentioned, by the way, in any of the motive-measuring pieces on Deep Throat is discussion of any of the motives driving the Washington Post's coverage. Why did Ben Bradlee give two cub reporters investigative carte blanche against the Nixon White House? One motive was Bradlee's apoplexy over what he believed to be Nixon's attempt to put the kibosh on the Post company's application for broadcasting licenses. Just as Bradlee covered for Kennedy out of personal support, so he exposed Nixon out of personal hatred.

And to destroy Nixon required imitating him. The liberal posse would catch this lawbreaker by breaking laws themselves. They would expose his lies through their own. Somehow Nixon's ends-justify-the-means thinking was unfathomably evil, but their own perfectly justified. I recently asked Herb Meyer, an aide to former CIA director William Casey, about Bob Woodward's trustworthiness. Woodward had interviewed Meyer at length for his book on the CIA, Veil. Meyer's response to my question: "Everything Woodward put in his book about me is wrong."

The radical chic culture that upended Nixon encouraged making stuff up for the cause. The lies and lawbreaking the radicals would accuse Nixon of was always on display in their own conduct. The radicals, both high and low, in Georgetown with the Ben Bradlees and at protests with the bombthrowers, didn't object to Nixon's means; they shared them. What they objected to was his ends, and once they thwarted them they unveiled their own ends which proved calamitous, advancing a nihilistic culture in which the only approved oracles of wisdom go by such noble names as Deep Throat.

George Neumayr is executive editor of The American Spectator.

Saturday, June 04, 2005

Gitmo: Do The Math [John Podhoretz]
http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/corner.asp

If the facility at Guantanamo Bay has a prisoner-to-prison-guard ratio anywhere near the ratio in the prison field in general, there is one guard for every five prisoners. That means, with some 600 prisoners, there are more than 100 prison guards, and that doesn't include however many interrogators there are. And surely, in the course of that time, there has been a guard rotation or two, which would suggest there have been several hundred guards and interrogators at work at Gitmo.

In the space of more than three years, according to the Pentagon, there are three confirmed incidents in which the Koran was desecrated, the worst being an occasion when it was kicked. The person who kicked the Koran was kicked out of Gitmo.

No Koran was stuffed in the toilet, as Newsweek had falsely alleged. Indeed, according to Pentagon investigators, there were 15 instances in which the Koran was defiled by Muslim prisoners.

What does this tell us? It tells us that, after these revelations, it would be profoundly dishonest for anyone to say that such conduct was either typical or condoned or part of the interrogation techniques used there. But many people will say precisely this, just as they will claim Newsweek was somehow vindicated because there was an incident in which urine splashed onto a Koran through an air vent. And you know why they will say it? Because, for various reasons -- from ideological hostility to the United States to a desire to keep themselves at a distance from the Bush administration -- they want to believe it.
Posted at 08:57 AM

Nixon gave us the EPA, public broadcasting, the 55 mph limit, and allowed the Soviets to board an American military ship to beat and remove a defector in the presence of our own sailors. Some of the things he did would have raised our hair from a liberal Democrat.

I've always been ambivalent about Nixon. But he was far closer to the Democrats than to us. Their hatred of him for Alger Hiss knew no bounds. They brought the country practically to ruin because of their fanaticism, a fanaticism the communist press shares today. There was nothing noble about Felt, the Dems, or the media. Rush nailed it.

I wish Rush would spend more time DEEPLY dissecting issues..even old ones like this....than just ripping and reading random idiotic doings of idiotic local governments and whatnot. He gets distracted easily. Sure a little of that now and then...but there is SOOO much to be exposed on so many issues that pertain to the past AND today simultaneously.

Morality does not come into play.

Exactly! If it were, Bill Clinton would have stepped down for the sole reason of how he and his whole administration made the office of POTUS a laughing stock!

I would think the abuse of power he and the wicked witch of NY displayed in the White House certainly trumps anything Nixon did. What Nixon did was certainly not unique to his administration. The Clintoons turned it into a criminal enterprise and cash cow for their own personal benefit. Yet the MSM continues to look the other way and actually put them on a pedestal for hero worship. Truly disgusting!

I had Rush for a year then six months ago just let my subscription slide. It's not that it wasn't a good deal but if you wanted to hear the show you had to be near your computer or record to your hard drive real time.

Now with high speed internet you can have the whole show in three minutes. I promptly rejoined. With the old mp3 player I can hear it wherever. Also great to archive primarily because of Rush's insights/jokes but also for all the great wacko liberal soundbites both foeign and domestic. Imagine in the near future one will hear an announcement, "And it was a year ago today that..." and, like a time machine, you get Rush's past take(s).

This will change Rush's show because now he will have not just his own top-notch research team but will have added 20 million more. Most will email to give tips on who said what, when, great lines, freakazoid leftie callers, soundbites from the past that match or contradict the current one. The response will be overwhelming but, as I am sure Rush has now, a system will be put in place where the more credible, insightful emailers will get upgraded to an upper-tier email. Not discrimination (duh) but a recognition of substance.

In a certain way it is a two-edged sword giving Rush enemies a chance to go back, dissect followed by a barrage of harranguing, denouncing...yada yada yada. 'Course these dolts couldn't speak three hours coherently let alone a half-hour. Can anyone say "Air America?"

The effect is to create a radio blog relationship due to the archival nature. The next step will be full listener created transcripts quickly followed by official full scripts put out by Rush and Co. due to well-intentioned but sloppy transcribers. Then fans will create audio indexes with the mark-in mark-out times for key phrases, weirdest call, best call, best soundbite etc. Rush nuggets of commentary gold.

Other show are doing the pod-cast thing but Rush is still, with all the other great hosts out there considered, the cream of the crop. This will only improve the show in ways both enumerated here and those yet to be seen.