Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash.
Posted on 12/23/2002 11:32:15 PM PST by JohnHuang2
SEATTLE – Washington Democratic Sen. Patty Murray's commendation of Osama bin Laden's nation-building tactics has generated an Internet and talk-radio firestorm since Friday but has garnered little notice in the mainstream media.
A Lexis-Nexis search turned up just 22 news stories on Murray's remarks. A similar search for stories on the controversy over Trent Lott's comments would not list the items because there were more than 1,000.
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash. |
The New York Times made no mention of Murray's speech, while the Washington Post gave it only brief notice in the middle of a political roundup column by Brian Faler.
The Post's Faler began with, "Republicans are screaming about comments by Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) that charitable works made Osama bin Laden popular in poor countries – and her challenge to the United States to do the same."
WorldNetDaily White House correspondent Les Kinsolving said he called the New York Times national desk to ask why the story had not been covered. Michael McElroy told Kinsolving he had not heard of Murray's remarks, although they were distributed via the Associated Press wire.
McElroy said he would surely bring it to the attention of the editors, but would not promise to call Kinsolving back with their response.
Media analyst Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media says simply that he believes the U.S. mainstream media have their own agenda.
"Unlike Trent Lott's remarks, this is not something that excites them," Irvine told WorldNetDaily. "They don't want to weaken Patty Murray. After all, the people who are running the media, except for a few, are committed to the liberal side, and this is how the liberals get away with it."
But Matthew Felling, media director for the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington, D.C., thinks Murray's remarks are not getting attention because they largely were correct.
"The conservative media is trying to find an equal to the Trent Lott mistatements and are trying to build this up into an equivalence," said Felling, whose group describes itself as a nonpartisan, nonprofit research organization. "After the Lott brouhaha, a lot of public statements are radioactive and public mistakes moreso. So, I think people are trying to fight fire with fire."
Felling said Murray's only mistake was saying that bin Laden built day-care facilities.
"She overstated the problem," he said.
Murray's remarks
Last Wednesday, at the conclusion of a session with students at Columbia River High School in Vancouver, Wash., Murray said she wanted to bring up a further point to add to their discussion about alternatives to war.
"We've got to ask, why is this man so popular around the world?" she said in reference to bin Laden, the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. "Why are people so supportive of him in many countries that are riddled with poverty?"
Murray said, according to the Vancouver Columbian newspaper, that bin Laden has been "out in these countries for decades, building schools, building roads, building infrastructure, building day care facilities, building health care facilities, and the people are extremely grateful. We haven't done that."
The second-term senator then asked the students to ponder: "How would they look at us today if we had been there helping them with some of that rather than just being the people who are going to bomb in Iraq and go to Afghanistan?"
WND's first story on Murray was picked up by a pro-bin Laden website called Taliban Online.
The posting includes the first part of the story, which recounts the senator's remarks about bin Laden, then inserts this note: "The rest of the story [tries] to put down Osama with the same old rubbish ... ."
'Bottom-up rebellion'
In an interview with WND, talk radio host and former Republican gubernatorial candidate John Carlson compared the Murray story to the memorial for Sen. Paul Wellstone. That event, just before the November election, turned into a raucous political rally that apparently damaged Democratic candidates at the polls.
"The mainstream news media, if you look at reports that came out immediately, didn't see anything inappropriate in that," Carlson said of the Wellstone memorial. "But if you heard talk radio and saw the Internet – especially C-SPAN, since they showed it – you saw a bottom-up rebellion, a tide of anger beginning to build, and the same thing is happening here" with the Murray story.
"The mainstream media are buying her explanation and are burying the story," Carlson said. "But talk radio and the Internet, which are closer to America at ground level, are blazing with it."
Carlson believes, nevertheless, that Murray's remarks likely will not damage her.
"I think the holidays are going to rescue her," he told WND. "Plus, she is keeping a very low profile, and the Democrats have lost their majority."
The one political fallout he sees is that Rep. George Nethercutt, R-Wash., who is considering running against Murray in 2004, has publicly challenged the senator, calling her remarks "bizarre" and "uninformed."
"That is unusual for George," said Carlson. "It's not his style."
Carlson said that on his KVI radio show he heard from educators around the state who said they have heard Murray make these comments before.
One was a high school teacher from the Navy port of Bremerton, "where soldiers happen to live," Carlson said.
"The kids argued back with Murray," he noted.
Another was a university professor in the Puget Sound area who wrote in to say, "please understand these were not isolated incidents; this is what she also said here," recounted Carlson, who believes the unidentified teacher was from the University of Washington.
"He said he was chagrined that [Murray] didn't know we were sending $3 billion a year to Egypt," recalled Carlson.
'Where was the outrage?'
Roger Hedgecock, filling in for talk radio host Rush Limbaugh yesterday, asked, after noting the story was picked up by only a few media sources, including WND: "Where was the shock? Where was the outrage?"
"Osama bin Laden hasn't been building schools and health-care facilities and infrastructure and roads," Hedgecock said. "He's been building terrorist training camps. He's been exploding bombs and murdering people. He hasn't building an infrastructure."
Hedgecock said he received a call on Friday from a man who has been to Afghanistan six times in the last year and "didn't see anything the Taliban or al-Qaida had done by way of building bridges and roads and schools."
"They've been shutting them down," Hedgecock said. "The only schools that opened up are these madrassas where they teach hatred and killing."
Hedgecock asked, where does Murray "get off characterizing the enemy, the sworn enemy of this country, the man who has declared war on every American, who would kill Patty Murray if he could, where does she get off praising him? This is like saying 'Hitler was a sensitive painter. You've got to be aware of why people like him. He was such a sensitive man. He was a painter.' Now no one would get away with that. How is Patty Murray getting away with this about Osama bin Laden?"
"How come they're completely ignored by the same national media that has the capability of blowing into the stratosphere comments by Trent Lott?" Hedgecock asked.
Struggle for freedom
A letter writer to the Washington Times yesterday, Henry Jacobsen of Fredericksburg, Va., said that he lived and worked in more than 50 countries with various foreign affairs agencies.
"So I was especially appalled by Washington Senator Patty Murray's comments regarding Osama bin Laden," Jacobsen wrote. "Her statements were a slap in the face to countless Peace Corps volunteers, U.S. Embassy employees, and specialists within the U.S. Agency for International Development who have dedicated their lives to a cause President John F. Kennedy called 'the long twilight struggle for freedom.'"
Jacobsen said that, "In her rush to blame America first, Mrs. Murray has forgotten the high price Americans have paid during this long twilight struggle."
"As I write this, I am fighting back tears, recalling the friends and colleagues I've lost over the years to senseless acts of terrorism while they tried helping others," Jacobsen wrote. "How could she be so ungrateful and insensitive? How could she be so ignorant? I would urge her and the high school students she addressed to visit the State Department building in Washington, D.C. Within the diplomatic entrance, they will find a granite wall inscribed with the names of those who died in the service of their country and of humanity itself. May Mrs. Murray never disregard their sacrifice again."
Former Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer said he believes Sen. Murray "will not face political death the way her colleague from Mississippi did."
"Her remarks only made the press Saturday morning and the story will be over by tonight," he wrote yesterday in his daily e-mail brief.
"Democratic Senators won't run to microphones to distance themselves from her," said Bauer, president of the lobby group American Values. "Her closest allies won't say she is an embarrassment to her party. The New York Times and Washington Post editorial boards will be silent. Liberals won't form a circular firing squad to destroy themselves over her gaffe. And I doubt the top political operatives of the GOP will spend any energy today on how to make this the national story it should be."
"Whatever one thinks about Trent Lott's gaffe," wrote Bauer, "no one would seriously argue his presence in the Senate would put our country at risk. But Senator Murray's mindset, shared by many on the radical left, is exactly the kind of blindness that could ultimately undermine our ability to win the war on terrorism."
Oh, no! Not another GOP Faux pas!
Oh no, not again.
Folks, if you thought the media firestorm over Trent Lott was overkill, well, you ain't seen nothing yet, my friends. Just wait till the media jackals, licking their chops, sink their teeth into this one.
Brace yourself: I predict the latest GOP foot-in-mouth/faux pas, once the network newsies get wind of it, will make you downright nostalgic for Lott. Jennings, Rather, Brokaw, Woodruff et al, right about now, are probably drooling.
What is it with Hill Republicans and bloopers these days, anyway? Sheesh, haven't we already been embarrassed enough? Seemingly, when it comes to gaffes/goofs/verbal boners, Congressional Republicans have, for reasons which baffle me, more than their fair share. Is there something in the water, or what?
One wag suggested, only half-jokingly, keeping a muzzle on GOP pieholes.
Talk about handing our enemies the ammo to shoot us, the blooper I'm about to tell you about, far and away, takes the cake.
No, it's not another 'racially tinged' remark, if that's any comfort, but it's verbal arson guaranteed to spark an even bigger media hullabaloo, all the same.
And, worse still, unlike the Lott spat -- which, despite weeks of negative publicity, ended with Republicans on top and Democrats on defense again -- this looming controversy has, I'm afraid, the potential for real, long-lasting damage to the Party.
It involves, at once, the GOP's greatest strength but the Democrats' greatest vulnerability: National Security.
Democrats, chafing after midterm elections dominated by questions of security and defense, will, no doubt, go to town on this latest GOP gaffe. Republicans, from Presidents Dwight Eisenhower to Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, have, on foreign and defense matters, amassed considerable political capital. Then along comes this stupid GOP Senator whose slip-of-the-tongue threatens to throw it all away. Incredibly, this Senator is, to boot, up for reelection in '04!
What Senator, you ask? What slip-of-the-tongue?
Well, you're not going to believe this (actually, when I heard about it, I could barely believe it myself) but, here goes:
First of all, this GOP Senator, to be fair, claims she was only trying to be "intentionally provocative" in an effort to elicit a thoughtful discussion, you see. Speaking last week to students at a high school honors class in Vancouver, Wash., GOP Senator Patty Murray (R-Wa.) touched off a furor after telling attendees that America has a lot to learn from terror mastermind Osama bin Laden -- no, not the terrorism, but what she called his tireless work to "help" the sick and the poor of this world.
"We've got to ask: Why is this man [Osama] so popular around the world?" the GOP Senator Thursday told dumbfounded students at Columbia River High School. "Why are people so supportive of him in many countries that are riddled with poverty?"
He's also got, I would add, a huge fan base at Harvard and Berkeley and Hollywood and CNN and Democrat National Committee headquarters, but that's besides the point.
So, why is Osama so popular? Because, 'splains Sen. Murray, Osama is not as bad as evil Bush makes him out to be, after all; in fact, he's a pretty swell dude -- more like a missionary whose vocation in life is doing good works, works of charity, serving the poor -- a kinda Mother Teresa with nails-and-bolts-packed explosives strapped to her body.
Sure, his 'noble deeds' include leveling a couple of skyscrapers one September morning, and, sure, thousands of innocent men, women and children perished, but, hey, can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, right?
Forget 9/11 for a moment, Sen. Murray seems to suggest, instead wrap your mind around all the wonderful altruism Osama, the virtuous terrorist, er, philanthropist, has provided:
"He's been out in these countries [serving the poor] for decades," Sen. Murray gushed, "building schools, building roads, building infrastructure, building day-care facilities, building health care facilities, and the people are extremely grateful."
So, how does warmonger Bush stack up against big-hearted Osama and his unselfish devotion to the downtrodden and powerless? Has Bush shown as much good-will and concern for the well-being of the poor and oppressed as Osama has?
No way, says Sen. Murray. "We haven't done that."
Why, Osama's loving and caring, kinder and gentler, 'compassionate terrorism' beats Bush's 'compassionate conservatism' hands-down, says Sen. Murray!
"How would [the poor] look at us today," Sen. Murray mused, "if we had, [like Osama], been there helping them . . . rather than just being the people who are going to bomb in Iraq and go to Afghanistan?"
Her fellow Republicans, to their credit, immediately pounced.
"It is absolutely outrageous and despicable to imply," said state GOP chairman Chris Vance, "that the American government should learn a lesson from the madman who murdered thousands of American citizens."
Mr. Vance added angrily that he knows "Sen. Murray has a habit of sticking her foot in her mouth, but this goes way beyond a simple gaffe," it "sent the message to these students that the United States somehow deserved or brought on the September 11 terrorists attacks. I think all decent people can agree that we most certainly did not, that this was an unprovoked attack of terrorism."
Strong words, yes, but the real test, as I see it, is whether Republicans take it a step further, beyond demanding retraction, and call on one of their own to resign, making the Senate 50-50 again, putting the Democrats within striking distance of retaking the gavel in January.
One thing about this episode I do find strange, very strange though: This happened last Thursday, right? That's 5 days ago; here we are, five full news cycles later, yet, the networks have yet to pick up this story...
I just can't figure that out...
Unless . . . UNLESS . . . WAIT A MINUTE!
AH-HA! I should've known! Patty Murray's a DEMOCRAT, NOT A REPUBLICAN!
What was I thinking?! Sheesh!
Small wonder we haven't heard a peep from Tom Brokaw, nor Dan Rather, nor Peter Jennings about any of this. The media would rake a Republican Patty Murray over the coals by now. We'd see endless 'Will-Patty-Murray-Be-Forced-To-Resign?, or, 'Is-This-The-End-Of-The-Republican-Party?' media panel discussions/symposiums. Shows titled, 'GOP melt-down: Countdown to bankruptcy" would breed like rabbits. Apologies? To heck with apologies -- nothing short of her hand on a platter would satisfy the press. Even censure wouldn't suffice.
Will we ever even see a network blurb on this?
Ha! Don't hold your breath.
By the way, her office defends her comments this way: Look, Osama's no darling, but, hey, he's not some white southerner running as a Dixiecrat, either! So there!
So Strom Thurmond is, by this perversion of logic, worse than Osama bin Laden.
Go figure.
Some question Murray's sanity.
I say, what sanity?
Anyway, that's...
My Two Cents...
"JohnHuang2"
Tuesday, December 24, 2002
I reminded her she had praised someone who had killed 3,000 of our citizens.
I told her she had no business being in the senate.
I demanded she resign.
This, then, is Hillary's strategy for oh-four:
Let a thousand 9/11's bloom. We deserve to be attacked. Our enemies have the right idea.
Al Gore was in China, coordinating their attack on Taiwan, and getting his son's speeding tickets fixed.
Bill will continue trashing America.
Plans are being drawn up to put Osama in the number two slot on the ticket.
Murry will jump start his campaign by inviting him to her state to help her address the school audiences.
Wotta campaign: Murray smooching Osama; Hillary smooching Suha.
The Summer of Love II.
Hate-Assmurray.
Islamic Fascism:
Tennis Mom Scrambling To Cover Tracks
Patty Murray, in an attempt to cover-up her open display of affection for Osama Bin Laden, now has this to say about OBL:
How else can we bring America's values to those who do not understand us?
And while there are some whose hearts and minds may never be won, should we try to reach those who can?
The White House believes that we can do more, and has devoted an entire department to improving America's image in the Arab world.
Having a challenging and thoughtful discussion about America's future reflects the best values of a free democracy; to sensationalize and distort in an attempt to divide does not.
While there are some on the extreme fringes of society who try to exploit fear and uncertainty for political gain, there are many more who understand that the best value of our democracy is the freedom to think and to secure a better future."
Nice try Patty. I'm not buying her story, are you? Trent Lott is being crucified over a simple misunderstanding (not that I support the bum, I don't -- for realistic reasons.) Doesn't Murray deserve equal scrutiny in the media? Shouldn't the left be as outraged with her love for Osama, as the right was angered by Lott's remarks about Strom Thurmond? Murray refuses to recognize the facts:
1) There are approximately 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, with an estimated 10-15% being radical fundamentalists (terrorists and their supporters.) Do the math and you'll see what we're up against. A segment of the world population equal to half the population of America is jumping for joy over Senator Murrays support for "peace-loving" Arabs.
2) Arab world leaders hate our values and will never accept them. Blue jeans are not on their list of priorities, nor is free speech or human rights.
3) Murray fawned over OBL's building of Day-Care centers: Since when do Arab nations allow women out of the house alone to work or educate themselves? Day-Care centers?
Anyone who might even suggest that Bin Laden is anything less than a murderous terrorist -- funded in part by Saddam Hussein -- is either a closet sympathizer of Islamofascism, or in need of a mental-health examination. As a resident of Washington State, I do not want a Senator who falls into either of these categories. Step down Ms. Murray. We need leaders who will fight for the survival of America -- not Senators who praise the good works of terrorists.
For Moseley-Braun, It May Be Time for a Rematch
Washington Post - 5 hours ago
... Patty Murray (D-Wash.) that charitable works made Osama bin Laden popular in
poor countries -- and her challenge to the United States to do the same. ...
Senator cites bin Laden's 'popularity'
Chicago Sun Times, IL - 5 minutes ago
Perhaps, said Washington state's senior senator, Democrat Patty Murray, it's because
he and his supporters have spent years building goodwill in poor nations ...
Senator's explanation of bin Laden's popularity draws fire%)
WKYT, KY - 20 Dec 2002
Washington-AP -- Washington Senator Patty Murray is drawing a lot of heat for
her explanation of why Osama bin Laden is popular in poor countries. ...
Potomac Watch: Senators take a break, but office mail never stops
Seattle Post Intelligencer, WA - 20 Dec 2002
In the back offices of Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell where the
mail is collected and sorted, however, there's never a slow period. ...
Dems Already Attack Frist , Santorum , McConnell . . .
NewsMax.com - 20 Dec 2002
... Patty Murray. Republicans are the only ones stupid enough to feed on their own.
Nor were any national Republicans seen having news conferences about Murray. ...
Sound Transit hires lobbyists - By Jeff Switzer - Journal ...
King County Journal Newspapers, WA - 20 Dec 2002
... I don't think they're strong enough, and I don't think we need somebody to inform
Patty Murray.'' McIver added that County Executive Ron Sims himself kept Sen. ...
Immigration: Where is the OUTRAGE??
SierraTimes.com - 20 Dec 2002
... I can hardly wait for Sen. 'Chatty' Patty Murray of Washington to hold a press conference
exclaiming how Fox & Coyotes have built schools and all those same ...
Why, Saundra ... (blush) ... I didn't know you were like THAT! Don't offer ... she might just like it.
8')
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