Posted on 01/01/2003 2:32:28 PM PST by moneyrunner
<Patty Murray – day 13
People, when they are not reading from a script, say what they think. By doing so they reveal their beliefs and attitudes.
There is a wonderfully revealing article in The Columbian; the newspaper that broke the story about Patty Murray’s praise of Osama bin Laden’s good works, by the reporter who was at the school, Gregg Herrington.
The article is interesting for what it reveals about both Patty and the politics of the mainstream media.
Herrington begins:
”Long after Sen. Patty Murray finishes serving time as a political piñata for her unbalanced account of Osama bin Laden's largess …”
Unbalanced? Piñata? While the mainstream media has spiked most references to this controversy – except in those cases where she has been defended - it has continued on the Internet and on talk radio. So, unlike Senator Lott, who became a real media piñata, Senator Murray has only received mainstream media support (e.g. in the Washington Post and The Newark Star Ledger).
”… will we look back and conclude that another nail has been driven into the coffin of political discourse?”
Well, no. Notice the hidden assumption here: criticism of Patty Murray equals the death of political discourse. Although the Left has tried to stifle debate on issues ranging from racial preferences, the gay agenda, the environment, climate change, abortion and countless other issues – primarily via name-calling - the Murray controversy IS political discourse. When someone speaks out against racial preferences – and is called a racist by Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Jack White and the other enforcers of political correctness – does the press swoon about the possibility that a nail has been driven in the coffin of political discourse? To ask the question is to get an answer.
Back to our author:
”Will our political leaders be even less inclined than they already are to engage in discussing odd or unpopular notions about serious subjects?
” You've heard the usual openers: "Let's think outside of the box." ... "I'm going to run this up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes." ... "Try this on for size." ... "I'm not saying I favor this approach, but ..."
”In that vein, Murray said on Dec. 18 at Columbia River High School that she was challenging the students to think about alternatives to war.”
Osama bin Laden is a serious subject, but suggesting we should follow his example is not just odd, but profoundly offensive. As for alternatives to war: has not Jim McDermott – another Far Left Washington State politico - gone to Baghdad to defend Saddam? Have there not been speeches on the floor of the House and Senate against military action? Hasn’t the National Council of Churches has not come out four-square against war?
It may be true that a majority of the American people support the war against terrorist, but opposition to wars of any kind is neither odd or nor so unpopular as to make someone stand out. Opposing this war is not “thinking outside the box.” The suggestion that it is is simply to make it appear that Patty Murray was exhibiting a special kind of heightened moral sensitivity.
The writer is obviously sympathetic to Patty, and feels that she has been wronged. Here’s why:
” As an observer in the room, one of my first thoughts was disappointment that she was wrapping up her appearance with the thought, rather than beginning that way and inviting the students to kick it around then and there. Had she done so, perhaps Murray would have added balance to her opening statement and thus managed to get herself off the hook on which she had impaled herself.
” Instead, as our elected representatives so often do in these public Q&A's with no follow-up questions, Murray used the bulk of the time to let the audience toss verbal marshmallows on a variety of topics.
” Then, in her 90-second closing monologue, bad history was the first sin. She sacrificed accuracy and balance as she quantified U.S. aid to Arab countries as zilch and said the world's most wanted terrorist had generously bestowed his riches on Arab nations for everything from highways to day care centers.
” You almost expected her list to include the Salvation Army pot outside the Kandahar Koffee Klatch.
She sacrificed accuracy? What a wonderful euphemism for saying she lied. Somewhere, someone told Patty about all the humanitarian projects Osama was engaged in. The day care centers, the roads, the schools, the hospitals. And these fictions found a fertile ground because deep in her heart, Patty believes Osama is a Liberal pol with a turban. He’s popular because he delivers goodies to his constituents.
Oh, Liberals may also hurl verbal slime balls at their opponents, calling them racists, homophobes, blood sucking capitalists who want to establish a theocracy so that they can deny grandma her drugs and force her to eat cat food. And, OK, Osama goes a little farther than just talking but she can understand the man’s frustration. He’s just a Liberal in a hurry.
Back to the article:” Sound-bite rule: Her second mistake was forgetting the sound-bite rule. It goes about like this:
” For any political speech, the audience will remember -- and the media will report -- just a few snippets. Some ungodly percentage will not be reported by the media and will not be remembered by some ungodly percentage of the people in the audience.
” Therefore, it pays to be a bit redundant about key points.
” Most politicians with Murray's experience don't have to be reminded never to talk about the war on terrorism without at least starting, middle-ing and ending with reminders that Osama and/or Saddam and/or al-Qaida are evil.
”For example, back in October when Murray announced she was voting against authorization for President Bush to go to war in Iraq, she nevertheless peppered her remarks with references to bad man Saddam Hussein:
"There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein poses a serious threat. ... Iraq has worked to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. ... We know from history and experience that Iraq poses a danger to the region. ... Saddam's madness . . . "
” But she had a staffer help prepare those remarks. At Columbia River High School, she was winging it.
Which brings me back to the point I made at the beginning: unscripted, Patty Murray revealed herself. She revealed her views of the world and the people in it, including the ones who were responsible for the attack on 9/11 that took 3000 lives. She believes we have not done enough to buy the love of the Moslems that celebrated when pictures of the fall of the World Trade Center were flashed around the world. That is why she will never learn the lesson taught just this week by the murder of the Baptist missionary doctors in Yemen. That is why she is so dangerous as a member of the Senate.
But Patty Murray - Piñata – is a reminder that she represents the thinking of the Democratic Party. The party of KKK Kleagle Robert Byrd, Bull Connor, Lester Maddox and all the rest of the segregationist South. The party that kept Blacks in actual slavery before the Civil War, formed the Ku Klux Klan after that war and has herded them into crime ridden ghettos while keeping them in poverty in the 20th century. The party that has cynically consigned generations of poor black children to lives of illiterate despair because of the political debt it owes to the teacher’s union. The party that celebrates Communist dictators like Fidel Castro. The party that holds Osama Bin Laden up as an example to America. The party of Democrat kingmaker, black racist and anti-Semite Al Sharpton. The party of presidents that lie under oath, suborn perjury, rape women and sell pardons to the highest bidder. The party that votes early, late … and often. The party that divides rather than unifies.
Patty Murray has let slip the mask of compassion that hides the true face of the modern, corrupt, racist, bigoted, divisive, blame-America-first Democrat Party. We cannot allow the mask to slip back over the face of hate.
The time has come to prove that the old media is no longer the gatekeeper of information to the American people. The Internet, talk radio and one lone fair and balanced TV network have finally come into their own.
And in case anyone missed it, here's a link to the FR thread on Murray that starts with that letter to the editor of the Washington Times, the letter that mentions all the Americans who've died helping others.
The newspaper is just a left-wing piece of trash not to be taken seriously. The editors know Patty Murray was an idiot to compliment Osama bin Laden. They are desperately trying to defend her by trying to dismiss the justified, universal outrage at her treasonous remarks.
They actually must feel somewhat responsible in this situation, since it was their reporter who first broke the story of Murray's blatherings. This is their attempt to "make up for it."
"Columbian"---conincidentally also Herrington's preference when smoking out.
David HorowitzAs we approach the year's end, and look toward a future filled with the clouds of war, it is sobering (and saddening) to consider how many Americans are ready to betray their country.
Wednesday, Jan. 1, 2003
The other day I was on a panel with Frank Mankiewicz, former Bobby Kennedy press secretary, former National Public Radio chief, and the man who persuaded George McGovern to run for president in 1972 on a platform of "America Come Home." This was a thinly disguised translation of the left's slogan "Bring the Troops Home," which the radicals who staffed McGovern's campaign had designed to help the Communists win in Vietnam.
This is not to say that everybody who endorsed that slogan or the McGovern candidacy also embraced the goal of enabling the Communists to win. It is just that that was the foreseeable practical effect of the policy, and those who endorsed it should learn from their mistakes. Two and a half million Indochinese peasants were slaughtered by the Communist victors just as presidents Nixon and Johnson had warned.
Mankiewicz's position on the current looming war with Iraq was that it is George W. Bush's fault. "We are going to have a war," he said, "because our president won't take yes for an answer." Think about that.
We have been technically at war with Iraq for more than a decade. The war persists because Saddam Hussein violated every stipulaton of the truce that ended hostilities in the Gulf War. The intervening years have shown he is a pathological liar who can't be trusted to keep any agreements and a psychopath who tortures and murders the children of his own diplomats to keep them in check.
In Iraq we confront a nation living under unimaginable terror. But the appeasement chorus has forced us into the sick charade of forming "inspections" even though we know that Saddam has hidden his weapons of mass destruction and that his scientists and officials are too terrified - even if they have not been corrupted - to tell the truth. Yet Frank Mankiewicz is ready to trust Saddam Hussein before he will trust President Bush and the American government. Shame on him.
In this unseemly and dangerous attitude, he is like Jimmy Carter, now according to polls the second most admired American. Carter was recently rewarded with a Nobel Prize by the Norwegian supporters of Middle East terrorism and terrorism generally.
The Norwegian Nobel committee previously rewarded Guatemalan terrorist Rigoberta Menchu and of course Yasser Arafat for their "peace" efforts. In fact Carter's award was for second-hand support for terror - for trusting every international sociopath he has encountered in the last decade, most egregiously the North Korean dictators to whom he gave his personal imprimatur some years ago, allowing Bill Clinton and Al Gore to finance Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program under the cover of an atoms-for-peace deal.
"Liberal" appeasers such as Mankiewicz and Carter, who have so endangered our future, are but the tip of the iceberg of betrayal. After all, we have those out-of-control Democrats and overgrown Tinseltown adolescents who actually traveled to Baghdad to give Saddam moral support; we have legions of Middle East studies professors shilling for Hamas and al-Qaeda, college leftists parading their pro-Saddam banners around the quad and already nearly two dozen leftist college towns whose city councils have declared their own war on our domestic war on terror.
Tolerance for Evil
Whence comes this tolerance for evil and sympathy for our enemies? Some of it is earned. It comes from a radical left that has supported America's totalitarian enemies for generations and has now been enlarged by an unknown division of domestic Muslim radicals as well.
In his address to the nation after 9/11, President Bush identified the historical continuity in our present foes: "We are not deceived by their pretenses to piety. We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions - by abandoning every value except the will to power - they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history's unmarked grave of discarded lies."
But there is an element of betrayal that comes from self-deception as well, and I think that Frank Mankiewicz and the so-called liberals at the New York Times fall largely into this category.
Before doing so let me make this clear: A democracy such as ours lives on dissent. We have succeeded in vanquishing our foes because we are a free society in which principled critics provide a vital ingredient of our success. But saying that we are going to war because our president will not take yes for an answer from a psychopath does not fall under the category of principled criticism. It is based on a profound lie as to who we are. It is a betrayal of us.
This passion for betrayal by "liberals" such as Mankiewicz and Carter comes in part from having absorbed and then having been addled by leftist leveling passions that presume that evil does not exist but is the product of a misperception based on ignorance and misunderstanding, and the corruption of social institutions like private property and corporations. These leftist passions give rise to the illusion and that governments can fix the messes that individuals construct. This leads them on the one hand to think that Saddam Hussein can be appeased and on the other it leads them to distrust wealth and success and thus to blame wealthy and successful America first.
In the minds of brainsick liberals we are the root cause of all the root causes that inspire madmen to attack us. (Thus we hear now from Alan Colmes reading off talking points provided by the Democratic National Committee that the sick dictator Kim Jong Il, who has presided over the starvation of a million of his inhabitants, wouldn't be brandishing a nuclear threat if President Bush had not identified him as part of the Axis of Evil.) Us bad.
This preposterous accusation has the added benefit of deflecting attention from the fact that conservatives identified the North Korean nuclear threat during the Clinton administration and warned the president and his emissary Carter not to trust North Korea's dictator and finance his nuclear weapons program under the guise of making peace.
A second element in this betrayal comes from the innate human impulse to deny hard realities, to hope that thinking will make it so. Appeasement is in fact the most basic human response when confronted with evil.
The line-up in the 1930s when Hitler was marching through Europe was no different than the lineup is today. There was no multilateral response to Nazism. There was England. And then there was the United States. If the pacifist betrayers of the West had not been so powerful in the 1930s and Western governments had confronted Hitler early, 70 million lives would have been saved. Americans would do well to remember this now.
The heart of the self-deception of America's "liberal" establishment, however, comes from forgetting the lesson of 9/11 and thinking we are invulnerable. It is this complacency that leaps at the crumbs from dictators' tables and proposes leaving Saddam and Kim Jong Il and Hamas and Hizbollah alone under the promise that getting paper agreements will buy peace in our time. It won't.
Although he doesn't mention her by name, you'd think he was describing Patty bin Murray, eh?
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/12/31/174634.shtml
How are things in the desert?
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