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How the media turned Obama's foreign policy bungle into a Romney gaffe
The Examiner ^ | 12 Sep 2012 | Philip Klein

Posted on 09/12/2012 5:31:29 PM PDT by mandaladon

We're still learning more details about the events leading up to and surrounding the attacks by Islamic radicals on the U.S. consulate in Libya and embassy in Egypt, but the media has already agreed on one thing: Mitt Romney is the political loser.

"Unless the Romney campaign has gamed this crisis out in some manner completely invisible to the Gang of 500, his doubling down on criticism of the President for the statement coming out of Cairo is likely to be seen as one of the most craven and ill-advised tactical moves in this entire campaign," opined Time's Mark Halperin.

That instant conventional wisdom is a pretty fortunate turn of events for Obama, given that it diverted focus from his administration's bungled handling of the entire situation and the failure of his broader foreign policy posture.

When President Obama came into his office, he vowed to repair the damage to the U.S. image abroad that was done by the Bush administration. In April 2009, less than three months into his presidency, he boasted to the Turkish government of having ordered the closure of Guantanamo Bay and prohibited the use of torture. "The United States is still working through some of our own darker periods in our history," he went on, referring to the legacies of slavery, segregation and the treatment of Native Americans.

In June, Obama delivered a speech in Cairo in which he called for "a new beginning" between the U.S. and the Muslim world. Taken together, such instances became known in conservative circles as the "apology tour." Though fact checkers have pointed out that Obama never literally issued an apology, it's clear that Obama was trying to make a break with the past.

(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonexaminer.com ...


TOPICS: Extended News; Foreign Affairs; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: 911ii; enemedia; libya; lybia; markhalperin; morthalperin; mortonhalperin; obama; soros
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To: mandaladon

If a Leftist kills a girl scout, it’s naturally part of the GOP’s “war on women” so why is this surprising?


21 posted on 09/12/2012 5:51:33 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet (You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind every blade of grass.)
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To: mandaladon
They are trying to spin it that way but reports are that Americans are fuming at obama and each new detail confirms a man in over his head and a government made up of political appointees that are incompetent ideologues. Polls will show that obama lost this election with ALL of his failures during this attack. obama handled nothing correctly during this entire act of war.

LLS

22 posted on 09/12/2012 5:56:23 PM PDT by LibLieSlayer ("if it looks like you are not gonna make it you gotta get mean, I mean plumb mad-dog mean" J. Wales)
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To: Texas56

“I sent Mitt Romney’s campaign a thank you note via e-mail for how Romney spoke out against the Cairo statement (and by extension Obama’s administration.)”


Good for you! You don’t have to be a Romney supporter to support what he says or does when it’s right.

http://www.mittromney.com/forms/suggestions

https://www.facebook.com/mittromney?ref=ts

https://twitter.com/mittromney


23 posted on 09/12/2012 5:56:47 PM PDT by tsowellfan ("Real leaders don't follow polls. Real leaders change polls")
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To: Maceman
This is only the 6th Ambassador in our entire history to be assassinated... I think foreign policy will now be front and center. iran is now the prime focus of National Security.

LLS

24 posted on 09/12/2012 5:59:03 PM PDT by LibLieSlayer ("if it looks like you are not gonna make it you gotta get mean, I mean plumb mad-dog mean" J. Wales)
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To: jocon307

———Now it is really about getting rid of Obama———

Except on Free Republic where it is about Freeper vanity and sanctimonious purity


25 posted on 09/12/2012 5:59:31 PM PDT by bert ((K.E. N.P. N.C. +12 ..... Present failure and impending death yield irrational action))
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To: jessduntno
The press pods are brazenly leftist and they don't even try to hide it anymore. I hope Romney/Ryan have sore noses from getting punched and that they're now ready to let 'er rip.

R/R, learn from McCain that namby-pamby doesn't work. Go git 'em.

26 posted on 09/12/2012 6:00:07 PM PDT by JPG (Make it happen.)
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To: mandaladon; All

Piss on the media. It wasn’t a Romney gaffe. It was an Obama failure, and I don’t give a damn how many fake journalists get their knickers in a twist over it.

I suspect many Americans feel the same way—the media is just soooo over the top with their ass-licking of Obama, that they’re not even listening to their cover stories for him.

Romney did just fine—we ARE in a contest right now, and Romney has every right to show how he is different from the massive JOKE currently occupying the Oval office.


27 posted on 09/12/2012 6:01:02 PM PDT by SoFloFreeper
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To: ozzymandus

don’t worry, only the converted pervs watch msnbc anyway. why the hell are you watching them??? :)


28 posted on 09/12/2012 6:02:02 PM PDT by SoFloFreeper
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To: mandaladon
 
 
Another lame spin attempt. Obami is pResident - Romney is not. All this is going down on Obami's watch. No traction, no sale.
 
 

29 posted on 09/12/2012 6:21:22 PM PDT by lapsus calami (What's that stink? Code Pink ! ! And their buddy Murtha, too!)
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To: mandaladon
How the media turned Obama's foreign policy bungle into a Romney gaffe

The media did no such thing. They made a feeble attempt to do so, but failed miserably and were exposed for the transparent 0bama shills that they are...

30 posted on 09/12/2012 6:25:45 PM PDT by sargon
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To: jessduntno

I agree with you. At this point I believe the Mainstream Media is preaching to a continuously diminishing choir. Nobody I know is listening to them. The Media in this country is a joke which is getting worse daily. Nothing but a govt. propaganda machine much like the news services in Communist countries. And they are going to go down with the Obama Administration and the Democratic Party.


31 posted on 09/12/2012 6:26:19 PM PDT by Desparado
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To: bert

Bravo.

Of course now your gonna get called a “Mittbot” and a “baby-killing homosexualist.”

Maybe this will knock some sense into these thickheaded “purists”, third-party morons, and silly socons. The same crew of misguided and unhinged evangelicals who want Zero to win because it might “bring about the end days.”

But I doubt it.


32 posted on 09/12/2012 6:29:18 PM PDT by Emperor Palpatine ("On the ascent of Olympus, what's a botched bar or two?" -Artur Schnabel)
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To: bert

“Except on Free Republic where it is about Freeper vanity and sanctimonious purity”

That needs to change today. Not because of Obama or even the jihadis, or even Mitt Romney. Because of the media.

We cannot let the media keep destroying our guys.

Because that is what the media seeks to do.

Because, I have now come to realize, they are morons. They are so freaking stupid they don’t think the Muslims will chop of their heads. They are so stupid they don’t think the occupiers will steal their stuff. They are brain-achingly stupid and they need to be defeated.

As Breitbart said: if the media did their jobs we wouldn’t have these problems.

Well, we might have some of them, but we wouldn’t have Chi-town teachers on strike because 70+K just isn’t enough to pay them for their 2 generations of failure, for just one example.

And we sure as hell wouldn’t have that SCFOAMF in the white house.


33 posted on 09/12/2012 6:29:20 PM PDT by jocon307
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To: kcvl

“Son of Morton Halperin”

More like son of communist traitor!

The ABC’s of Media Bias
By: Lowell Ponte
FrontPageMagazine.com | Thursday, October 14, 2004

IS THE ESTABLISHMENT MEDIA BIASED against conservatives? Dan Rather remains in the anchor chair at the CBS Evening News despite his involvement in recent news stories based on dishonest reporting, fabricated documents and even Internet gossip falsely alleging that President George W. Bush secretly intends to begin the military conscription of students. These stories were obviously designed to damage Mr. Bush in the final weeks before a national election.

And now ABC News has left in place its Political Director Mark Halperin. ABC has done this despite the network’s acknowledgement that Halperin wrote a memo that to many seems to direct ABC reporters, anchors and producers to slant its coverage by downplaying the misstatements of Democratic presidential candidate Senator John Kerry and by viewing negatively any misstatements by Republican candidate Bush.

Halperin’s directive reached ABC people on October 8, the very day that ABC “Good Morning America” co-host Charlie Gibson would be selecting questions for and moderating the second presidential debate between Bush and Kerry. Did Halperin intend to influence Gibson’s decisions in this debate?

Who is Mark Halperin, and does his memo reflect leftwing bias in his shaping of the news at ABC? To find answers to these questions, we need to consider the details of this memo-gate controversy in the light of Halperin’s past and of the famous radical left-wing father who shaped his political values. As we shall discover, Halperin has veered Left and crossed the line of ethical journalism many times.

Mark Halperin “has been the Political Director of ABC News since 1997 and has covered politics and campaigns through four election cycles,” reads one of his 2004 biographies posted by the American Broadcasting Company (ABC). “As Political Director, Halperin is responsible for the planning and editorial content of all political news on the network.”

“Halperin manages the editorial coverage of politics throughout the ABC News universe,” says another official ABC biography, “and contributes frequently to ABC News broadcasts.”

Mark Halperin weeks before the 2004 presidential election issued his October 8 internal memo to the staff of ABC News that, when it became public, stirred controversy. Critics charged that Halperin was directing ABC reporters to tilt their coverage – telling them, in effect, to ignore or minimize misstatements by Democrat Senator John F. Kerry but to attack any misstatements by Republican President George W. Bush.

Halperin’s memo claimed that the Bush campaign was trying “to get away with as much as possible….” No comparable criticism was made of Democratic candidate Kerry.

“The New York Times (Nagourney/Stevenson) and Howard Fineman on the web both make the same point today: the current Bush attacks on Kerry involve distortions and taking things out of context in a way that goes beyond what Kerry has done,” wrote Halperin.

“Kerry distorts, takes out of context, and [makes] mistakes all the time, but these are not central to his efforts to win.

“We have a responsibility,” Halperin, then 39, continued, “to hold both sides accountable to the public interest, but that doesn’t mean we reflexively and artificially hold both sides ‘equally’ accountable when the facts don’t warrant that.

“I’m sure many of you have this week felt the stepped up Bush efforts to complain about our coverage. This is all part of their efforts to get away with as much as possible with the stepped up, renewed efforts to win the election by destroying Senator Kerry at least partly through distortions.

“It’s up to Kerry to defend himself, of course,” wrote Halperin. “But as one of the few news organizations with the skill and strength to help voters evaluate what the candidates are saying to serve the public interest. Now is the time for all of us to step up and do that right.”

Mark Halperin’s idea of what is right may be what is Left. He was born in 1965 in Bethesda, Maryland, the red-diaper baby of hard-Left-connected controversial foreign policy specialist Morton Halperin. This fact reveals an entire Left-spin universe in which Mark grew up exposed to his father’s comrades and radical ideas.

Morton Halperin today is Senior Vice President of the left-wing Center for American Progress (CAP) and Director of the Open Society Policy Center established by eccentric billionaire international financier George Soros.

Born in 1933 in Brooklyn, Morton Halperin graduated from Columbia University (1958) and earned a Ph.D. from Yale University (1961). He taught at Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs (1961-66). He worked in the Department of Defense 1966-69, then in 1969 became a staff member for the National Security Council (NSC) as senior assistant to Henry Kissinger, President Richard Nixon’s assistant for national security affairs.

In 1970, Halperin resigned to protest, he said, President Nixon’s decision to move American forces into Cambodia and to intensify the bombing of North Vietnam. Classified details of U.S. bombing in Cambodia had been leaked to the New York Times, and security officials, suspecting Halperin, had been tapping his telephones. Halperin sued the government over what he called this violation of his privacy, prompting public debate over how much privacy someone entrusted with classified military information should have.

Leaving government in 1970, Halperin became a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, a liberal think tank.

Since 1961, as in a study he did for the Institute of Defense Analysis, Halperin from inside the government had advocated U.S. nuclear disarmament, even if the Soviet Union did not likewise disarm. In any mutual arms reduction treaty with the Soviets, wrote Halperin in A Proposal for a Ban on the Use of Nuclear Weapons, “inspection was not absolutely necessary…The United States might, in fact, want to invite the Soviets to design the inspection procedures if they seem interested in them.”

In 1966, a year after his son Mark was born, Halperin during testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee urged that the United States should diplomatically recognize the Communist People’s Republic of China and seek its admission to the United Nations.

After leaving government, Halperin was feted and embraced by many “progressive” groups that promoted similar views, such as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

“The Soviet Union apparently never contemplated the overt use of military force against Western Europe,” wrote Halperin in 1971 in Defense Strategies for the Seventies. “The Soviet posture…has been, and continues to be, a defensive and deterrent one…against a Western attack.”

During President Lyndon Johnson’s administration Halperin had been in charge of compiling a classified history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. As David Horowitz and Richard Poe reported:

This secret history later emerged [in June 1971] into public view as the so-called “Pentagon Papers.” Halperin and his deputy Leslie Gelb assigned much of the writing to leftwing opponents of the war, such as Daniel Ellsberg who, despite his background as a former Marine and a military analyst for the Rand Corporation, was already evolving into a New Left radical…With Halperin’s tacit encouragement – and perhaps active collusion – Ellsberg stole the secret history and released it to The New York Times…Not surprisingly, “The Pentagon Papers” echoed Halperin’s long-standing position that the Vietnam War was unwinnable, and ridiculed Presidents Kennedy and Johnson for stubbornly refusing to heed those of their advisors who shared this opinion.

In 1975, when Mark Halperin was 10, his father became director of the Center for National Security Studies (CNSS), bankrolled by the Field Foundation and the Fund for Peace (FFP). Much of CNSS’s staff came from the ultra-leftist Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and from the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), identified in past congressional investigations as a Communist front group. One ubiquitous figure on the Left who helped run CNSS with Halperin was IPS director Robert Borosage. Halperin remained CNSS Director until 1992, when the election of President Bill Clinton brought him back into government.

In February 1993, President Bill Clinton’s administration announced the appointment of Morton Halperin to the new position of Assistant Secretary of Defense for Democracy and Peacekeeping. Halperin withdrew his name from consideration in January 1994, his nomination stalled by both Republican and Democrat U.S. Senators who refused to consent to so radical a nominee.

Halperin was for many reasons too controversial to win Senate confirmation. He had advocated unilateral nuclear disarmament of the United States, publication of most U.S. military secrets, and an end of all clandestine activities by the U.S. against the Soviet Union and its colony in Communist Cuba.

Concerning the Soviet-Cuban military intervention in Angola, Halperin in the June 9, 1979, issue of The Nation magazine had written, “Every action which the Soviet Union and Cuba have taken in Africa has been consistent with the principles of international law.”

Morton Halperin during the mid-1970s befriended Philip Agee, a former-CIA-agent-turned-Communist who publicly identified hundreds of purported American Central Intelligence Agency agents. At least one of these agents, Athens station chief Richard Welch, was murdered shortly thereafter. Halperin flew to Europe to help Agee find safe haven after Great Britain expelled him. In the U.S., Halperin opposed legislation to punish the outing of U.S. undercover agents as Agee had done. Halperin has described the CIA as “the subverter of everybody else’s freedom.”

Halperin, as Director of the Washington, D.C. office of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), in this era also defended the right of The Progressive magazine to publish secret details it had obtained of how to make an atomic bomb.

In 1976, Halperin accused the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of “murdering” Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. In 1977 Halperin joined with the National Lawyers Guild to form a legal resources center to oppose “police spying” and became chairman of the Campaign to Stop Government Spying (CSGS). The conference that launched CSGS was co-convened and controlled by a steering committee of several left-wing organizations, among them the Institute for Policy Studies, the National Lawyers Guild, Halperin’s CNSS, Philip Agee’s Organizing Committee for a Fifth Estate (OC-5) and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). That same year Halperin co-authored the book The Lawless State: The Crimes of the U.S. Intelligence Agencies.

“Morton Halperin is dangerous,” said Senator Strom Thurmond of this man, nominated to shape national security policy and to again have access to America’s most highly classified military secrets. After the U.S. Senate refused to confirm Halperin, President Clinton appointed the controversial left-wing activist to several positions that required no Senate confirmation: Special Assistant to the President, Senior Director for Democracy at the National Security Council and consultant to the Secretary of Defense and to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy.

In 1998, Halperin became director of policy planning for the U.S. State Department. During his tenure 15 State Department laptop computers containing highly classified intelligence information disappeared, one of them checked out to Halperin’s office. Others were punished for this serious security breach, but Halperin was not.

Morton Halperin in February 2002 became Director of the Open Society Policy Center and has worked closely ever since with its creator, eccentric billionaire international financier George Soros, who committed tens of millions of dollars in 2004 to a variety of efforts to defeat President Bush. One of these Soros-funded political efforts is the Center for American Progress (CAP), launched in summer 2003, one of the “Seven Sisters” pillars of the left’s “Shadow Government.”

CAP is also known as “the official Hillary Clinton think tank,” described by Horowitz and Poe as “a platform designed to highlight Hillary’s policies and to enhance her prestige as a potential presidential candidate.”

According to a March 1, 2004 report by Robert Dreyfuss in The Nation, Halperin and Soros handpicked the President of CAP, former Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta. Morton Halperin today is Senior Vice President, second-in-command at CAP, where his son David is a Special Adviser on Campus Outreach. During the years 1997-2000, David Halperin worked as a speechwriter for President Clinton and the National Security Council. Among the Clinton White House email records that mysteriously disappeared when sought by investigators were ones to and from David Halperin, some of which might have involved his father.

This is the family and subculture in which Mark Halperin was raised and his political views were shaped. These are the roots from which his career has grown. In 1987, he graduated from Harvard University, where he was Associate Managing Editor of the Harvard Crimson campus newspaper.

This son of a famous and influential left-wing father joined ABC News in January 1988 as a desk assistant, then soon became researcher for “World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.” For the next four years he worked with the investigative unit of “World News Tonight” and as a general assignment reporter in Washington. His father’s friends and contacts doubtless gave the rising young star advantages few others could match.

In 1992, Mark Halperin became a full-time off-air reporter traveling with then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton’s campaign. Liberal media insiders have seen Halperin’s confidential 1992 home movie Elvis and Us, which showed Clinton’s backstage clowning and antics during the campaign.

During the 1992 campaign, Halperin violated journalistic ethics by providing to Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos a copy ABC had obtained of Mr. Clinton’s youthful “I loathe the military” letter written to his ROTC commander, according to Tom Rosenstiel’s book about ABC Strange Bedfellows. Halperin thereby gave candidate Clinton days of advance warning to prepare his response before facing reporters’ questions about this letter Clinton had no reason to believe still existed.

Having helped Clinton win, Mark Halperin then covered the President-elect’s transition to power and “was assigned to White House coverage for the first two years of the Clinton administration.”

Apparently it bothered neither ABC nor Halperin that this network’s White House reporter was the son of high-level Clinton appointee and controversial presidential advisor Morton Halperin. In 1997, the same year Mark Halperin was promoted to Political Director of ABC News, his brother David began a four-year stint as speechwriter to President Clinton.

If ABC News discovered that the public watchdog over a corporation was the son of one high official in that corporation and the brother of another, ABC rightly would report this as a scandalous conflict of interest and a betrayal of public trust. ABC never notified its audience that its reporter Mark Halperin was covering a Clinton White House that employed two members of his immediate family.

The same ought to be said today as Halperin controls ABC’s coverage of a presidential campaign in which his father helps control organizations hard at work for the election of Democrat John Kerry. If ABC will not fire Halperin, it should at least practice truth in labeling by disclosing to its audience Halperin’s partisan paternal political connection to the Kerry election effort.

In the fall of 1994, Halperin became a producer with ABC’s Special Events unit in New York. He created the daily ABC News online commentary and notebook “The Note” that covers each day’s political events. The liberal Washington Post described “The Note” as having “a core audience of fanatics who swear by its political analysis.”

Since 1994, and especially since his 1997 promotion to Political Director of ABC News, Halperin has played a major role in shaping, editing and aiming the network’s political coverage and on-air discussions.

Halperin’s 2004 Bush-criticizing memo was controversial not only in its content but also in its timing. It was delivered to ABC News personnel including “Good Morning America” co-host Charlie Gibson only hours before Gibson was to select audience questions for – and to moderate between – the participants of the second Presidential Debate: President Bush and Senator Kerry. It is hard not to see this as Halperin trying to have an anti-Bush influence on how Gibson framed the debate.

“Like every other institution, the Washington and political press corps operate with a good number of biases and predilections,” wrote Halperin in “The Note.” These journalists, he wrote, share “liberal political positions” on issues such as gun control, homosexuality, abortion and religion.

The liberal establishment press, wrote Halperin, “believes President Bush is ‘walking a fine line’ with regards to the gay marriage issue, choosing between ‘tolerance’ and his ‘right-wing base.’” [Halperin never mentioned that Democrat John Kerry, despite having approved homosexual marriage during an interview with a gay magazine, when in front of heterosexual audiences always asserted that he believed “marriage is between a man and a woman,” apparently siding with the nation’s “right-wing base.”]

These journalists, Halperin wrote, share “a belief that government is a mechanism to solve the nation’s problems; that more taxes on corporations and the wealthy are good ways to cut the deficit and raise money for social spending and don’t have a negative effect on economic growth; and that emotional examples of suffering (provided by unions or consumer groups) are good ways to illustrate economic statistic stories.”

The press, Halperin wrote, “by and large, does not accept President Bush’s justifications for the Iraq war in any of its WMD, imminent threat, or evil-doer formulations. It does not understand how educated, sensible people could possibly be wary of multilateral institutions or friendly, sophisticated European allies.” [Halperin apparently believes that Iraq coalition allies such as Great Britain, Italy, Denmark and Poland lack the European sophistication he admires. At the time he wrote this in March 2004, the complicity of the United Nations, France and Germany in Saddam’s Oil-for-Food scandal was already becoming recognized in the national media.]

When told that during an already-scheduled interview with Bill O’Reilly of Fox News Channel he would asked about his statements about liberal bias in the establishment media, Mark Halperin cancelled the interview.

Morton Halperin:
Senior Vice President of the Center for American Progress

Director of George Soros’ Open Society Policy Center

Long associated with the Institute for Policy Studies and the National Lawyers Guild

Foreign policy expert who proposed unilateral U.S. nuclear disarmament, the end of all American clandestine activities, and United Nations control over every international use of the U.S. military
Befriended CIA agent-turned-Communist Philip Agee

Morton Halperin is Senior Vice President of the Center for American Progress and Director of the Open Society Policy Center established by George Soros.

Born in 1933 in Brooklyn, New York, Halperin graduated from Columbia University in 1958 and earned a Ph.D. from Yale University three years later.

From 1961 to 1966 he taught at Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs. During this period, he advocated U.S. nuclear disarmament even if the Soviet Union did not likewise disarm. In any mutual arms reduction treaty with the Soviets, wrote Halperin in his 1961 treatise A Proposal for a Ban on the Use of Nuclear Weapons, “inspection was not absolutely necessary. … The United States might, in fact, want to invite the Soviets to design the inspection procedures if they seem interested in them.”

During his 1966 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Halperin stated that the United States should diplomatically recognize the Communist People’s Republic of China and seek its admission to the United Nations.

Halperin went on to work in the Department of Defense from 1966 to 1969, and in 1969 he was named senior assistant to Henry Kissinger, who was then President Nixon’s assistant for national security affairs.

In 1970 Halperin resigned that post to protest Nixon’s decision to move American forces into Cambodia and intensify the bombing of North Vietnam. It was later learned that classified details of U.S. bombing campaigns in Cambodia had been leaked to the New York Times. Security officials, suspecting Halperin, tapped his telephones. Halperin, in turn, sued the government over what he called this violation of his privacy.

After he left government in 1970, Halperin became a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He was feted and embraced by many leftist organizations that promoted similar views, such as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Council on Foreign Relations.

“The Soviet Union apparently never contemplated the overt use of military force against Western Europe,” wrote Halperin in his 1971 Defense Strategies for the Seventies. “The Soviet posture … has been, and continues to be, a defensive and deterrent one … against a Western attack.”

During President Lyndon Johnson’s administration (1964-1968), Halperin had been put in charge of compiling a classified history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. As David Horowitz and Richard Poe report: “This secret history later emerged [in June 1971] into public view as the so-called ‘Pentagon Papers.’ Halperin and his deputy Leslie Gelb assigned much of the writing to leftwing opponents of the war, such as Daniel Ellsberg who ... was already evolving into a New Left radical. … With Halperin’s tacit encouragement — and perhaps active collusion — Ellsberg stole the secret history and released it to The New York Times. … Not surprisingly, ‘The Pentagon Papers’ echoed Halperin’s longstanding position that the Vietnam War was unwinnable, and ridiculed Presidents Kennedy and Johnson for stubbornly refusing to heed those of their advisors who shared this opinion.”

In 1975 Halperin became Director of the Center for National Security Studies (CNSS), a spinoff of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). CNSS also is aligned with the National Lawyers Guild. Much of CNSS’s staff was derived from these two organizations. IPS Director Robert Borosage helped Halperin run CNSS.

In the mid-1970s Halperin befriended Philip Agee, a former CIA agent-turned-Communist who publicly identified hundreds of American CIA agents. At least one of these agents, Athens station chief Richard Welch, was murdered shortly thereafter. Halperin flew to Europe to help Agee find safe haven after Great Britain had expelled him. In the U.S., Halperin, who has described the CIA as “the subverter of everybody else’s freedom,” opposed legislation to punish the outing of U.S. undercover agents as Agee had done.

During that era, Halperin also served as Director of the Washington, DC office of the American Civil Liberties Union, under whose auspices he defended the right of The Progressive magazine to publish secret details it had obtained of how to make an atomic bomb.

In 1976 Halperin accused the FBI of “murdering” Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. In 1977 Halperin joined forces with the National Lawyers Guild to form a legal resources center to oppose “police spying” and became Chairman of the Campaign to Stop Government Spying (CSGS). The conference that launched CSGS was co-convened and controlled by a steering committee of several leftist organizations, among them the Institute for Policy Studies, the National Lawyers Guild, Halperin’s CNSS, Philip Agee’s Organizing Committee for a Fifth Estate, and the Socialist Workers Party. That same year Halperin co-authored the book The Lawless State: The Crimes of the U.S. Intelligence Agencies.

In the June 9, 1979 issue of The Nation magazine, Halperin wrote the following with regard to the Soviet-Cuban military intervention in Angola: “Every action which the Soviet Union and Cuba have taken in Africa has been consistent with the principles of international law.”

In Target America — James L. Tyson’s 1981 expose of the Soviet Union’s massive “propaganda campaign designed to weaken and demoralize America from the inside”[1] — the author stated:

“Halperin has emerged as probably the leading ‘expert’ on intelligence matters among the Far Left Lobby groups. He and his organizations have had a constant record of advocating the weakening of U.S. intelligence capabilities. His organizations are also notable for ignoring the activities of the KGB or any other foreign intelligence organization. His criticism of American intelligence misdeeds would give the impression that our agencies have been committing these crimes simply for their own villainous reasons in a world where the U.S. faces no external enemies whatever. A balance sheet analysis of Halperin’s writings and testimonies ... gives Halperin a score of 100% on the side of output favorable to the Communist line and 0% on any output opposed to the Communist line.”[2]

According to a May 2000 World Net Daily report, “Halperin, according to a well-respected former State official, was suspected of working for the communists in the ‘60s and ‘70s. ‘He was a person we knew to be pro-Soviet and not a person to be trusted,’ said the official, who worked in intelligence during the height of the Cold War. ‘Halperin has been known on embassy [briefing] cards as a Soviet or communist agent.’”

Halperin remained CNSS Director until 1992, when the election of President Bill Clinton brought him back into government. In February 1993 Clinton’s administration announced the appointment of Halperin to the new position of Assistant Secretary of Defense for Democracy and Peacekeeping. Halperin withdrew his name from consideration in January 1994, however, when his nomination was stalled by both Republican and Democrat U.S. Senators who refused to consent to a nominee with so radical a history.

President Clinton thereafter appointed Halperin to several positions that required no Senate confirmation: Special Assistant to the President, Senior Director for Democracy at the National Security Council, consultant to the Secretary of Defense, and consultant to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy.

In 1998 Halperin became Director of Policy Planning for the U.S. State Department. During his tenure there, 15 State Department laptop computers containing highly classified intelligence information disappeared; one of them was checked out to Halperin’s office. A number of people were punished for this serious security breach, but Halperin was not.

In February 2002 Halperin became Director of the Open Society Policy Center and has worked closely ever since with its creator, George Soros.

According to a March 1, 2004 report by Robert Dreyfuss in The Nation, Halperin and Soros together hand-picked the President of the Center for American Progress (CAP), former Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta. Halperin today is Senior Vice President at CAP, where his son David is a Special Adviser on Campus Outreach. Another of Morton Halperin’s sons, Mark Halperin, is the Political Director of ABC News.

As of March 2011, Morton Halperin was an advisory council member of J Street.

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1682


34 posted on 09/12/2012 6:34:40 PM PDT by DaveTesla (You can fool some of the people some of the time......)
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To: kcvl

I thought the name Halperin was familiar...
His dad is/was a card carrying commie that Klinton put in the Pentagon to initiate policies to specifically weaken our military...including the first attempt at rescinding DADT...
Dad’s a POS, the son is too.


35 posted on 09/12/2012 6:45:44 PM PDT by matginzac
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To: SoFloFreeper

Exactly right...
And what you don’t hear very often is how well the press polls with Americans...
Their poll numbers make Obamacare’s look like a winner!


36 posted on 09/12/2012 6:56:01 PM PDT by matginzac
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To: mandaladon

This sounds a lot like that manufactured convention bump a few days ago that had all but buried Romney. It’s beyond spin, it’s now just total fabrication in some weird MSM alternate reality.


37 posted on 09/12/2012 6:56:48 PM PDT by bereanway
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To: DaveTesla

Thanks for that...I thought I had remembered who he is...
And the commie a** lives in Bethesda, MD...only the 1% can live in Bethesda...so he’s a commie who got his dacha for being a good comrade working for the Politboro...POS.


38 posted on 09/12/2012 7:02:02 PM PDT by matginzac
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To: mandaladon

“How the media turned Obama’s foreign policy bungle into a Romney gaffe”

It should be:

“How the media TRIED TO TURN Obama’s foreign policy bungle into a Romney gaffe”

There is no Romney gaffe. Romney is kicking ass on this and looks Presidential. Plus the live mic revelation today exposed the media. Proof Romney is effective is the libs are going absolutely ape shit over his remarks.

Mitt needs to keep landing the blows now. He should certainly surge after this.


39 posted on 09/12/2012 7:09:34 PM PDT by GR_Jr. ("On Nov.6 I guess I will swallow that bitter pill called Mitt Romney...only to stop 0bama")
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To: mandaladon
link

...reporters were caught on tape coordinating their line of questioning.

The reporters caught on tape were identified by NewsBusters as CBS’ Jan Crawford and NPR’s Ari Shapiro.

Crawford: Yeah that’s the question. I would just say do you regret your question.
Shapiro: Your question? Your statement?
Crawford: I mean your statement. Not even the tone, because then he can go off on…
Shapiro: And then if he does, if we can just follow up and say ‘but this morning your answer is continuing to sound…’ –*becomes unintelligble*
Crawford: You can’t say that.. **Later**
Crawford: I’m just trying to make sure that we’re just talking about, no matter who he calls on we’re covered on the one question.
Shapiro: Do you stand by your statement or regret your statement?

40 posted on 09/12/2012 7:14:01 PM PDT by opentalk
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