Posted on 07/01/2003 7:32:25 PM PDT by Lando Lincoln
How to find a Democrat and how to spot a liberal
By Bruce Walker
web posted June 30, 2003
Meg Phipps, the Agriculture Commissioner of North Carolina, resigned in disgrace in early June. Was this a big story? Big enough to make the Leftist establishment online news sources. MSNBC, for example, ran stories on May 6 "State Fair Commission, Campaign aides testify," May 12 "Former Aide Pleads Guilty," May 13 "Former Aide Resigns," and other stories, culminating on June 6 "Phipps to Resign."
Phipps Most of these stories do not mention that Meg Phipps is a Democrat. None of them advise that she is also statewide elected Democrat, the daughter of former Democrat Governor Bob Scott, who won her crooked election in November 2000.
What is surreal about the MSNBC coverage is that one of the principal charges against Phipps is that she rewarded McLamb when he ran against her in "the primary." The May 13 MSNBC story does not mention -- even though the two culprits ran against each other in a party primary -- which party was involved!
CNN, which was born in Atlanta, just south of North Carolina, ran one single story on June 5 with the title "N.C. agriculture commissioner resigns over campaign scandal." The entire fourteen paragraph story, which recounted "Last year, the state Board of Elections found that Phipps campaign violated state law by taking $84,202 in cash from donors it could not identify and more that $14,000 in illegal contributions" never even hints which political party claimed Phipps.
A few months earlier, another statewide elected official from another Southern state, had a similar problem. As CBS News reported on October 3, 2002 "Insurance Commissioner Jim Brown was also ordered to report to federal prison on October 15 to serve six months for lying to the FBI." But CBS News seems to have the same difficulty that other Leftist establishment media do in finding out much about the politics of these cases.
Was Brown nonpartisan? Was he an elected official or an appointed official? When I run across these stories of political corruption, which conspicuously lack any political identification, invariably the Leftist establishment media is blowing smoke for some corrupt Democrat.
Jim Brown, like Meg Phipps, was a state official who won election in a partisan race against a Republican opponent. So, does the media simply not consider the political party of these sorts of officials important? Phipps, after all, was not just a Democrat, but she was part of a Democrat political dynasty in North Carolina.
Let's think...is there any other woman who held statewide elective office in a Southern state who was rapped up in controversy surrounding the November 2000 elections? Well, there was Republican Katherine Harris who was a member of the Republican Party and who was part of the Republican administration of Republican Jeb Bush who certified, lawfully -- unlike Phipps -- election results which earned Republican George W. Bush, son of Republican...
All that mattered to CBS, MSNBC, CNN et al. was the party label. Whether it was a Democrat or a Republican decided whether the story was even newsworthy -- remember that Dan Rather would not even mention Gary Condit for months on CBS Evening News, even though the entire civilized world was speculating on a story filled with sex, lies and possibly much more.
Even when the Condit story was everywhere, it was typically about "Congressman Condit" and not "Democrat Congressman Condit" -- very different from the coverage given to "Republican Senator Bob Packwood" whose forced departure from the Senate would ultimately allow Tom Daschle to be Plurality Leader for a year or so.
But once the Leftist establishment press discovered that Gary Condit was, indeed, a Democrat what was the mantra after that? Condit was a "conservative." This was certainly news to the AFL-CIO, AFSCME, AFGE or NEA, each of which gave him very good voting records over his career. It was also news to such "conservative" organizations as Common Cause, the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence or the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence.
Condit voted right every time according to the ACLU and almost every time according to the Children's Defense Fund, NARAL, Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign (no, not tortured prisoners in Iran, Cuba or North Korea, but affluent gay and lesbians in America). The National Right to Life Committee found Condit on its side only fifteen percent of the time.
These numbers on particular issue organizations were not misleading. Americans for Democratic Action gives him a better rating than any Republican from California and the American Conservative Union gives him a lower rating than any Republican from California. His ADA rating is 50 per cent and his ACU rating is only 44 per cent.
How can one spot a Democrat in Leftist establishment media coverage? If the individual has done something really rotten, and yet the story says nothing about his political party, then the crook is a Democrat. How to spot a liberal? Well, remembering that there are no longer "liberals" but only "progressives" it is a bit harder, but if the rotten pol appears to be a tabula rasa, a "blank slate," then he is...liberal.
Bruce Walker is a senior writer with Enter Stage Right. He is also a frequent contributor to The Pragmatist and The Common Conservative.
Nice story, but wrong factoid. Bob Packwood's depature from the senate did nothing to elevate Daschle. The Republicans held a majority at the time. Daschle briefly claimed leadership during the fall of 1996 after Packwood resigned to avoid expulsion and when the Republicans were without a majority leader due to Bob Dole's honorable resignation to run for president.
I wouldn't give too much weight to this. After all, isn't it a well-known fact that a RAT politician in Louisiana is required to have at least 3 federal indictments on his record?
That is so true. I am referencing this one on the voter fraud thread.
Perzactly!
Oh geez, are they really that stupid?
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