The End of Journalism

Sometime in 2008, journalism as we knew it died, and advocacy media took its place.

Victor Davis Hanson

There have always been media biases and prejudices. Everyone knew that Walter Cronkite, from his gilded throne at CBS news, helped to alter the course of the Vietnam War, when, in the post-Tet depression, he prematurely declared the war unwinnible. Dan Rather's career imploded when he knowingly promulgated a forged document that impugned the service record of George W. Bush. We've known for a long time — from various polling, and records of political donations of journalists themselves, as well as surveys of public perceptions — that the vast majority of journalists identify themselves as Democratic, and liberal in particular.

Yet we have never quite seen anything like the current media infatuation with Barack Obama, and its collective desire not to raise key issues of concern to the American people. Here were four areas of national interest that were largely ignored.

CAMPAIGN FINANCING
For years an axiom of the liberal establishment was the need for public campaign financing — and the corrosive role of private money in poisoning the election process. The most prominent Republican who crossed party lines to ensure the passage of national public campaign financing was John McCain — a maverick stance that cost him dearly among conservatives who resented bitterly federal interference in political expression.

In contrast, Barack Obama, remember, promised that he would accept both public funding and the limitations that went along with it, and would "aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election." Then in June 2008, Obama abruptly reneged, bowing out entirely from government financing, the first presidential nominee in the general election to do that since the system was created in 1976.

Obama has now raised over $600 million, by far the largest campaign chest in American political history. In many states he enjoys a four-to-one advantage in campaign funding — most telling in his scheduled eleventh-hour, 30-minute specials that will not be answered by the publicly financed and poorer McCain campaign.

The story that the media chose to ignore was not merely the Obama about-face on public financing, or even the enormous amounts of money that he has raised — some of it under dubious circumstances involving foreign donors, prepaid credit cards, and false names. Instead, they were absolutely quiet about a historic end to liberal support for public financing.

For all practical purposes, public financing of the presidential general election is now dead. No Republican will ever agree to it again. No Democrat can ever again dare to defend a system destroyed by Obama. All future worries about the dangers of big money and big politics will fall on deaf ears.

Surely, there will come a time when the Democratic Party, whether for ethical or practical reasons, will sorely regret dismantling the very safeguards that for over three decades it had insisted were critical for the survival of the republic.

Imagine the reaction of the New York Times or the Washington Post had John McCain renounced his promise to participate in public campaign financing, proceeded instead to amass $600 million and outraise the publicly financed Barack Obama four-to-one, and begun airing special 30-minute unanswered infomercials during the last week of the campaign.

THE VP CANDIDATES
We know now almost all the details of Sarah Palin's pregnancies, whether the trooper who tasered her nephew went to stun or half stun, the cost of her clothes, and her personal expenses — indeed, almost everything except how a mother of so many children gets elected councilwoman, mayor, and governor, routs an entrenched old-boy cadre, while maintaining near record levels of public support.

Yet the American public knows almost nothing of what it should about the extraordinary career of Joe Biden, the 36-year veteran of the Senate. In unprecedented fashion, Biden has simply avoided the press for most of the last two months, confident that the media instead would deconstruct almost every word of "good looking" Sarah Palin's numerous interviews with mostly hostile interrogators.


By accepted standards of behavior, Biden has sadly proven wanting. He has committed almost every classical sin of character — plagiarism, false biography, racial insensitivity, and serial fabrication. And because of media silence, we don't know whether he was kidding when he said America would not need to burn coal, or that Hezbollah was out of Lebanon, or that FDR addressed the nation on television as president in 1929 (surely a record for historical fictions in a single thought), or that the public would turn sour on Obama once he was challenged by our enemies abroad. In response, the media reported that the very public Sarah Palin was avoiding the press while the very private Joe Biden shunned interviews and was chained to the teleprompter.

For two months now, the media reaction to Biden's inanity has been simply "that's just ol' Joe, now let's turn to Palin," who, in the space of two months, has been reduced from a popular successful governor to a backwoods creationist, who will ban books and champion white secessionist causes. The respective coverage of the two candidates is ironic in a variety of ways, but in one especially — almost every charge against Palin (that she is under wraps, untruthful, and inept) was applicable only to Biden.

So we are about to elect a vice president about whom we know only that he has been around a long time, but little else — and nothing at all why exactly Joe Biden says the most astounding and often lunatic things.

Imagine the reaction of Newsweek or Time had moose-hunting mom Sarah Palin claimed FDR went on television to address the nation as President in 1929, or warned America that our enemies abroad would test John McCain and that his response would result in a radical loss of his popularity at home.

THE PAST AS PRESENT
In 2004, few Americans knew Barack Obama. In 2008, they may elect him. Surely his past was of more interest than his present serial denials of it. Whatever the media's feelings about the current Barack Obama, there should have been some story that the Obama of 2008 is radically different from the Obama who was largely consistent and predictable for the prior 30 years.

Each Obama metamorphosis in itself might be attributed to the normal evolution to the middle, as a candidate shifts from the primary to the general election. But in the case of Obama, we witnessed not a shift, but a complete transformation to an entirely new persona — in almost every imaginable sense of the word. Name an issue — FISA, NAFTA, guns, abortion, capital punishment, coal, nuclear power, drilling, Iran, Jerusalem, the surge — and Obama's position today is not that of just a year ago.

Until 2005, Obama was in communication with Bill Ayers by e-mail and phone, despite Ayers reprehensible braggadocio in 2001 that he remained an unrepentant terrorist. Rev. Wright was an invaluable spiritual advisor — until spring of 2008. Father Pfleger was praised as an intimate friend in 2004 — and vanished off the radar in 2008. The media might have asked not just why these rather dubious figures were once so close to, and then so distant from, Obama; but why were there so many people like Rashid Khalidi and Tony Rezko in Obama's past in the first place?

Behind the Olympian calm of Obama, there was always a rather disturbing record of extra-electoral politics completely ignored by the media. If one were disturbed by the present shenanigans of ACORN or the bizarre national call for Americans simply to skip work on election day to help elect Obama (who would pay for that?), one would only have to remember that in 1996 Obama took the extraordinary step of suing to eliminate all his primary rivals by challenging their petition signatures of mostly African-American voters.

In 2004, there was an even more remarkable chain of events in which the sealed divorce records of both his principle primary rival Blair Hull and general election foe, Jack Ryan, were mysteriously leaked, effectively ensuring Obama a Senate seat without serious opposition. These were not artifacts of a typical political career, but extraordinary events in themselves that might well have shed light on present campaign tactics — and yet largely remain unknown to the American people.

Imagine the reaction of CNN or NBC had John McCain's pastor and spiritual advisor of 20 years been revealed as a white supremacist who damned a multiracial United States, or had he been a close acquaintance until 2005 of an unrepentant terrorist bomber of abortion clinics, or had McCain himself sued to eliminate congressional opponents by challenging the validity of African-American voters who signed petitions, or had both his primary and general election senatorial rivals imploded once their sealed divorce records were mysteriously leaked.



SOCIALISM?
The eleventh-hour McCain allegations of Obama's advocacy for a share-the-wealth socialism were generally ignored by the media, or if covered, written off as neo-McCarthyism. But there were two legitimate, but again neglected, issues.

The first was the nature of the Obama tax plan. The problem was not merely upping the income tax rates on those who made $250,000 (or was it $200,000, or was it $150,000, or both, or none?), but its aggregate effect in combination with lifting the FICA ceilings on high incomes on top of existing Medicare contributions and often high state income taxes.

In other words, Americans who live in high-tax, expensive states like a New York or California could in theory face collective confiscatory tax rates of 65 percent or so on much of their income. And, depending on the nature of Obama's proposed tax exemptions, on the other end of the spectrum we might well see almost half the nation's wage earners pay no federal income tax at all.

Questions arise, but were again not explored: How wise is it to exempt one out of every two income earners from any worry over how the nation gathers its federal income tax revenue? And when credits are added to the plan, are we now essentially not cutting or raising taxes, but simply diverting wealth from those who pay into the system to those who do not?

A practical effect of socialism is often defined as curbing productive incentives by ensuring the poorer need not endanger their exemptions and credits by seeking greater income; and discouraging the wealthy from seeking greater income, given that nearly two-thirds of additional wealth would be lost to taxes. Surely that discussion might have been of interest to the American people.

Second, the real story was not John McCain's characterization of such plans, but both inadvertent, and serial descriptions of them, past and present, by Barack Obama himself. "Spreading the wealth around" gains currency when collated to past interviews in which Obama talked at length about, and in regret at, judicial impracticalities in accomplishing his own desire to redistribute income. "Tragedy" is frequent in the Obama vocabulary, but largely confined to two contexts: the tragic history of the United States (e.g., deemed analogous to that of Nazi Germany during World War II), and the tragic unwillingness or inability to use judicial means to correct economic inequality in non-democratic fashion.

In this regard, remember Obama's revealing comment that he was interested only in "fairness" in increasing capital-gains taxes, despite the bothersome fact that past moderate reductions in rates had, in fact, brought in greater revenue to government. Again, fossilized ideology trumps empiricism.

Imagine the reaction of NPR and PBS had John McCain advocated something like abolishing all capital gains taxes, or repealing incomes taxes in favor of a national retail sales tax.

The media has succeeded in shielding Barack Obama from journalistic scrutiny. It thereby irrevocably destroyed its own reputation and forfeited the trust that generations of others had so carefully acquired. And it will never again be trusted to offer candid and nonpartisan coverage of presidential candidates.

Worse still, the suicide of both print and electronic journalism has ensured that, should Barack Obama be elected president, the public will only then learn what they should have known far earlier about their commander-in-chief — but in circumstances and from sources they may well regret.

— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Media's Presidential Bias and Decline

Columnist Michael Malone Looks at Slanted Election Coverage and the Reasons Why

MICHAEL S. MALONE

The traditional media are playing a very, very dangerous game -- with their readers, with the Constitution and with their own fates.

The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling. And over the last few months I've found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my television and my laptop computer.

But worst of all, for the last couple weeks, I've begun -- for the first time in my adult life -- to be embarrassed to admit what I do for a living. A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was "a writer," because I couldn't bring myself to admit to a stranger that I'm a journalist.

You need to understand how painful this is for me. I am one of those people who truly bleeds ink when I'm cut. I am a fourth-generation newspaperman. As family history tells it, my great-grandfather was a newspaper editor in Abilene, Kan., during the last of the cowboy days, then moved to Oregon to help start the Oregon Journal (now the Oregonian).

My hard-living -- and when I knew her, scary -- grandmother was one of the first women reporters for the Los Angeles Times. And my father, though profoundly dyslexic, followed a long career in intelligence to finish his life (thanks to word processors and spellcheckers) as a very successful freelance writer. I've spent 30 years in every part of journalism, from beat reporter to magazine editor. And my oldest son, following in the family business, so to speak, earned his first national byline before he earned his drivers license.

So, when I say I'm deeply ashamed right now to be called a "journalist," you can imagine just how deep that cuts into my soul.

Now, of course, there's always been bias in the media. Human beings are biased, so the work they do, including reporting, is inevitably colored. Hell, I can show you 10 different ways to color variations of the word "said" -- muttered, shouted, announced, reluctantly replied, responded, etc. -- to influence the way a reader will apprehend exactly the same quote. We all learn that in Reporting 101, or at least in the first few weeks working in a newsroom.

But what we are also supposed to learn during that same apprenticeship is to recognize the dangerous power of that technique, and many others, and develop built-in alarms against them.

But even more important, we are also supposed to be taught that even though there is no such thing as pure, Platonic objectivity in reporting, we are to spend our careers struggling to approach that ideal as closely as possible.

That means constantly challenging our own prejudices, systematically presenting opposing views and never, ever burying stories that contradict our own world views or challenge people or institutions we admire. If we can't achieve Olympian detachment, than at least we can recognize human frailty -- especially in ourselves.

Reporting Bias

For many years, spotting bias in reporting was a little parlor game of mine, watching TV news or reading a newspaper article and spotting how the reporter had inserted, often unconsciously, his or her own preconceptions. But I always wrote it off as bad judgment and lack of professionalism, rather than bad faith and conscious advocacy.

Sure, being a child of the '60s I saw a lot of subjective "New" Journalism, and did a fair amount of it myself, but that kind of writing, like columns and editorials, was supposed to be segregated from "real" reporting, and, at least in mainstream media, usually was. The same was true for the emerging blogosphere, which by its very nature was opinionated and biased.

But my complacent faith in my peers first began to be shaken when some of the most admired journalists in the country were exposed as plagiarists, or worse, accused of making up stories from whole cloth.

I'd spent my entire professional career scrupulously pounding out endless dreary footnotes and double-checking sources to make sure that I never got accused of lying or stealing someone else's work -- not out of any native honesty, but out of fear: I'd always been told to fake or steal a story was a firing offense - indeed, it meant being blackballed out of the profession.

And yet, few of those worthies ever seemed to get fired for their crimes -- and if they did they were soon rehired into even more prestigious jobs. It seemed as if there were two sets of rules: one for us workaday journalists toiling out in the sticks, and another for folks who'd managed, through talent or deceit, to make it to the national level.

Meanwhile, I watched with disbelief as the nation's leading newspapers, many of whom I'd written for in the past, slowly let opinion pieces creep into the news section, and from there onto the front page. Personal opinions and comments that, had they appeared in my stories in 1979, would have gotten my butt kicked by the nearest copy editor, were now standard operating procedure at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and soon after in almost every small town paper in the U.S.

But what really shattered my faith -- and I know the day and place where it happened -- was the war in Lebanon three summers ago. The hotel I was staying at in Windhoek, Namibia, only carried CNN, a network I'd already learned to approach with skepticism. But this was CNN International, which is even worse.

I sat there, first with my jaw hanging down, then actually shouting at the TV, as one field reporter after another reported the carnage of the Israeli attacks on Beirut, with almost no corresponding coverage of the Hezbollah missiles raining down on northern Israel. The reporting was so utterly and shamelessly biased that I sat there for hours watching, assuming that eventually CNNi would get around to telling the rest of the story -- but it never happened.

The Presidential Campaign

But nothing, nothing I've seen has matched the media bias on display in the current presidential campaign.

Republicans are justifiably foaming at the mouth over the sheer one-sidedness of the press coverage of the two candidates and their running mates. But in the last few days, even Democrats, who have been gloating over the pass -- no, make that shameless support -- they've gotten from the press, are starting to get uncomfortable as they realize that no one wins in the long run when we don't have a free and fair press.

I was one of the first people in the traditional media to call for the firing of Dan Rather -- not because of his phony story, but because he refused to admit his mistake -- but, bless him, even Gunga Dan thinks the media is one-sided in this election.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not one of those people who think the media has been too hard on, say, Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin, by rushing reportorial SWAT teams to her home state of Alaska to rifle through her garbage. This is the big leagues, and if she wants to suit up and take the field, then Gov. Palin better be ready to play.

The few instances where I think the press has gone too far -- such as the Times reporter talking to prospective first lady Cindy McCain's daughter's MySpace friends -- can easily be solved with a few newsroom smackdowns and temporary repostings to the Omaha bureau.

No, what I object to (and I think most other Americans do as well) is the lack of equivalent hardball coverage of the other side -- or worse, actively serving as attack dogs for the presidential ticket of Sens. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Joe Biden, D-Del.

If the current polls are correct, we are about to elect as president of the United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that at least will talk) and has entire years missing out of his biography.

That isn't Sen. Obama's fault: His job is to put his best face forward. No, it is the traditional media's fault, for it alone (unlike the alternative media) has had the resources to cover this story properly, and has systematically refused to do so.

Why, for example to quote the lawyer for Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., haven't we seen an interview with Sen. Obama's grad school drug dealer -- when we know all about Mrs. McCain's addiction? Are Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko that hard to interview? All those phony voter registrations that hard to scrutinize? And why are Sen. Biden's endless gaffes almost always covered up, or rationalized, by the traditional media?

Joe the Plumber

The absolute nadir (though I hate to commit to that, as we still have two weeks before the election) came with Joe the Plumber.

Middle America, even when they didn't agree with Joe, looked on in horror as the press took apart the private life of an average person who had the temerity to ask a tough question of a presidential candidate. So much for the standing up for the little man. So much for speaking truth to power. So much for comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, and all of those other catchphrases we journalists used to believe we lived by.

I learned a long time ago that when people or institutions begin to behave in a matter that seems to be entirely against their own interests, it's because we don't understand what their motives really are. It would seem that by so exposing their biases and betting everything on one candidate over another, the traditional media is trying to commit suicide -- especially when, given our currently volatile world and economy, the chances of a successful Obama presidency, indeed any presidency, is probably less than 50/50.

Furthermore, I also happen to believe that most reporters, whatever their political bias, are human torpedoes and, had they been unleashed, would have raced in and roughed up the Obama campaign as much as they did McCain's. That's what reporters do. I was proud to have been one, and I'm still drawn to a good story, any good story, like a shark to blood in the water.

So why weren't those legions of hungry reporters set loose on the Obama campaign? Who are the real villains in this story of mainstream media betrayal?

The editors. The men and women you don't see; the people who not only decide what goes in the paper, but what doesn't; the managers who give the reporters their assignments and lay out the editorial pages. They are the real culprits.

Bad Editors

Why? I think I know, because had my life taken a different path, I could have been one: Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where you've spent 30 years working your way to the top, to the cockpit of power only to discover that you're presiding over a dying industry. The Internet and alternative media are stealing your readers, your advertisers and your top young talent. Many of your peers shrewdly took golden parachutes and disappeared. Your job doesn't have anywhere near the power and influence it did when your started your climb. The Newspaper Guild is too weak to protect you any more, and there is a very good chance you'll lose your job before you cross that finish line, 10 years hence, of retirement and a pension.

In other words, you are facing career catastrophe -- and desperate times call for desperate measures. Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play. Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here. After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway -- all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire.

And then the opportunity presents itself -- an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career.

With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived fairness doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.

And besides, you tell yourself, it's all for the good of the country.

This is the opinion of the columnist and in no way reflects the opinion of ABC News.

Michael S. Malone is one of the nation's best-known technology writers. He has covered Silicon Valley and high-tech for more than 25 years, beginning with the San Jose Mercury News as the nation's first daily high-tech reporter. His articles and editorials have appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, the Economist and Fortune, and for two years he was a columnist for The New York Times. He was editor of Forbes ASAP, the world's largest-circulation business-tech magazine, at the height of the dot-com boom. Malone is the author or co-author of a dozen books, notably the best-selling "Virtual Corporation." Malone has also hosted three public television interview series, and most recently co-produced the celebrated PBS miniseries on social entrepreneurs, "The New Heroes." He has been the ABCNews.com "Silicon Insider" columnist since 2000.

The "Impartial" Media

Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin interviewed with CNN's Drew Griffin this week and the subject of Biden's comments came up. Palin didn't hold any punches, asking, "Why does Joe Biden get a pass on such a thing? Can you imagine if I would have said such a thing?... I think that we would have been hounded and held accountable...[Y]ou guys would have clobbered me."

All Griffin could do was admit, "You're right." (Even Dan Rather conceded, "Certainly if Sarah Palin had said this it would be above the fold in most newspapers.")

Later in the interview, Griffin did try to clobber Palin, and he lied in order to do it. "The press has been pretty hard on you," he said. "The Democrats have been pretty hard on you, but also some conservatives have been pretty hard on you as well. The National Review had a story saying that, you know, 'I can't tell if Sarah Palin is incompetent, stupid, unqualified, corrupt, or all of the above'."

Palin repeatedly pressed Griffin for a name—"Who wrote that one?" —but Griffin refused to supply it. The author, it turns out, is Byron York, a National Review contributor, but what he said was quite different from the way Griffin portrayed. York wrote, "Watching press coverage of the Republican candidate for vice president, it's sometimes hard to decide whether Sarah Palin is incompetent, stupid, unqualified, corrupt, backward, or—or, well, all of the above. Palin, the governor of Alaska, has faced more criticism than any vice-presidential candidate since 1988, when Democrats and the press tore into Dan Quayle." Clearly, this was not his opinion, but the media's portrayal of her.

This is what now passes as journalism?

Biden's Bungles: A Blatant Bias

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Kirsten Powers

Barack Obama's choice of Joe Biden as his running mate prompted a small wave of warnings about Biden's propensity for gaffes. But no one imagined even in a worse-case scenario such a spectacular bomb as telling donors Sunday to "gird your loins" because a young president Obama will be tested by an international crisis just like young President John Kennedy was.

Scary? You betcha! But somehow, not front-page news.

Again the media showed their incredible bias by giving scattered coverage of Biden's statements.

There were a few exceptions. On MSNBC's "Morning Joe," co-host Mika Brzezinski flipped incredulously through the papers, expressing shock at the lack of coverage of Biden's remarks. Guest Dan Rather admitted that if Palin had said it, the media would be going nuts. 

Biden: Gets away with endless idiotic comments because his media-elite pals "know" he's no idiot

So what gives?

The stock answer is: "It's just Biden being Biden." We all know how smart he is about foreign policy, so it's not the same as when Sarah Palin says something that seems off.

Yet, when Biden asserted incorrectly in the vice-presidential debate that the United States "drove Hezbollah out of Lebanon," nobody in the US media shrieked. (It was, however, covered with derision in the Middle East.) Or when he confused his history by claiming FDR calmed the nation during the Depression by going on TV, the press didn't take it as evidence that he's clueless.

And Biden is the foreign-policy gravitas on the Democratic ticket, so his comments are actually even more disconcerting.

The outakes of his Sunday remarks don't begin to capture the magnitude of what he said. After warning the crowd that there would be some sort of international incident - Biden could think of four or five scenarios - he told the donors: "We're gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right."

What does that mean? Obama's election would provoke an international incident because of his inexperience and even Obama's biggest supporters won't be reassured by his response?

Then there were Biden's predictions on the economy: "I promise you, you all are gonna be sitting here a year from now going, 'Oh my God, why are they there in the polls? . . . Why is this thing so tough? . . . I'm asking you now, be prepared to stick with us. Remember the faith you had at this point, because you're going to have to reinforce us.

"There are gonna be a lot of you who want to go, 'Whoa, wait a minute, yo, whoa, whoa, I don't know about that decision.' "

Biden is teling us that, at a time when Americans need to feel confidence in their government, they will be going "Oh my God." Not a great message.

Needless to say, if Sarah Palin said this about a McCain administration, the media world would be exploding.

Whether you believe Biden is exaggerating, as he is known to do, or is providing real insight, the double standard in the media does even more damage to their lagging brand.

Part of the problem is their "Obama love," but we're also seeing the media elite's belief - prejudice - that anyone with an R behind their name is dumb. So, if they say something dumb, they must be dumb. A Democrat, like Biden, can make wildly inaccurate or outrageous comments and they are ignored because the TV and press insiders feel they "know who he really is."

On the stump recently, Sen. Biden declared he had "three words" for what the nation needs: "J-O-B-S."

Lucky for him, his name isn't Dan Quayle, or that would have followed him for the rest of his career.

John McCain and an Army of Joes

Byron York Woodbridge, Va. — Tito Munoz was ready to rock when John McCain showed here up at the Connaughton Community Plaza in Woodbridge, Virginia Saturday afternoon. Dressed in a yellow hard hat covered with McCain-Palin stickers, wearing an orange high-visibility vest, Munoz carried a hand-lettered sign that said CONSTRUCTION WORKER FOR McCAIN. He got a coveted spot in the bleachers directly behind McCain, where he could be seen in the camera shot along with the guy holding the sign that said PHIL THE BRICK LAYER and the woman with the ROSE THE TEACHER banner. He cheered a lot. Munoz and the others cheering. AP. Everybody was playing on the Joe-the-Plumber theme. McCain spent a lot of time on it in his stump speech, using the now-famous Joe Wurzelbacher of Toledo, Ohio, as a stand-in for "small businessmen and women all over America [who] want to keep their earnings and not give it to the government." McCain added that Obama's response to Wurzelbacher — the assertion that it would be best to "spread the wealth around" — made Joe the Plumber "the only person to get a real answer out of Sen. Obama." The crowd laughed and cheered. But for them, Joe the Plumber is much more than a zinger in McCain's stump speech. In recent days, the Joe the Plumber phenomenon has taken on a deeper meaning for McCain's audiences, for two reasons. First, he is a symbol of their belief that Barack Obama is going to raise their taxes, regardless of what Obama says about hitting up only those taxpayers who make more than $250,000 a year. They know Wurzelbacher doesn't make that much, and they know they don't make that much. And they're not suspicious because they believe that someday they will make $250,000, and thus face higher taxes. No, they just don't believe Obama right now. If he's elected, they say, he'll eventually come looking for taxpayers who make well below a quarter-million dollars, and that will include them. The second reason Joe the Plumber resonates with the crowds is what his experience says about the media. Everybody here seems acutely aware of the once-over Wurzelbacher received from the press after his chance encounter with Obama was reported, first on Fox News, and then mentioned by McCain at last week's presidential debate. Wurzelbacher found himself splashed across newspapers and cable shows, many of which reported that he didn't have a plumber's license, that he wasn't a member of the plumbers' union, that he had a lien against him for $1,182 in state taxes, and that he failed to comprehend what many commentators apparently felt was the indisputable fact that Barack Obama would lower his taxes, not raise them. As the people here in Woodbridge saw it, Joe was a guy who asked Barack Obama an inconvenient question — and for his troubles suddenly found himself under investigation by the media. In the audience Saturday, there were plenty of people who were mad about it. There was real anger at this rally, but it wasn't, as some erroneous press reports from other McCain rallies have suggested, aimed at Obama. It was aimed at the press. And that's where Tito Munoz came in. After McCain left, as the crowd filed out, Munoz made his way to an area near some loudspeakers. He attracted a few reporters when he started talking loudly, in heavily-accented English, about media mistreatment of Wurzelbacher. (It was clear that Spanish was Munoz's native language, and he later told me he was born in Colombia.) When I first made my way over to him, Munoz thought I was there to give him the third degree. "Are you going to check my license, too?" he asked me. "Are you going to check my immigration status? I'm ready, I have everything here. Whatever you want, I have it. I have my green card, I have my passport — " I was a little surprised. Did Munoz really bring his papers with him to a McCain rally? I asked. "Yeah, I have my papers right here," he said. "I'm an American citizen. Right here, right here." With that, he produced a U.S. passport, turned it to the page with his picture on it, and thrust it about an inch from my nose. "Right here," he said. "In your face." Munoz said he owned a small construction business. "I have a license, if you guys want to check," he said. Someone asked why Munoz had come to the rally. "I support McCain, but I've come to face you guys because I'm disgusted with you guys," he said. "Why the hell are you going after Joe the Plumber? Joe the Plumber has an idea. He has a future. He wants to be something else. Why is that wrong? Everything is possible in America. I made it. Joe the Plumber could make it even better than me. . . . I was born in Colombia, but I was made in the U.S.A." The scene turned into a mini-fracas when David Corn, of Mother Jones, defended press coverage. Munoz was having none of it. Why, he asked, would the press whack Joe the Plumber when it didn't want to report on Obama's relationship with William Ayers, the former Weather Underground bomber? "How come that's not in the news all the time?" Munoz said. "How come Joe the Plumber is every second? I'm talking about NBC, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and CNN." The Corn confrontation. Photo by Andrew Coyne. A black woman with a strong Caribbean accent jumped in the fray. "Tell me," she said to Corn, "why is it you can go and find out about Joe the Plumber's tax lien and when he divorced his wife and you can't tell me when Barack Obama met with William Ayers? Why? Why could you not tell us that? Joe the Plumber is me!" "I am Joe the Plumber!" Munoz chimed in. "You're attacking me." "Wait a second," Corn said. "Do you pay your taxes?" "Yes, I pay my taxes," the woman said. "Then you're better than Joe the Plumber," Corn said. That set off a general free-for-all. "I'm going to tell you something," Munoz yelled at Corn. "I'm better than Obama. Why? Because I'm not associated with terrorists!" And so it went. I walked away for a few minutes to strike up a conversation with the woman who had jumped into the debate. Her name was Connie, and she said she had been born and raised in Antigua, in the West Indies. "I immigrated to the United States over 20 years ago," she told me. "It's my home. America has become my home. I came here freely of my own free will because I loved it, and I loved what it had to offer, and I don't want to see it ruined." I asked her whether it was difficult, as a black person, to support McCain at a time when probably 90 to 95 percent of black voters support Obama. "I have always been a conservative," she told me. "I'm mad. I was extremely upset to see the way the media went after Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. . . . To see the drive-by media and the Obama campaign attack two ordinary Americans simply because one of them managed to get Barack Obama to tell the truth, it was shameful and disgraceful." Meanwhile, the great debate was continuing, with Tito the Construction Worker and David the Journalist trading points. Much of it wasn't terribly informative, but there was one lovely moment when a shouting match turned into a lesson on the fundamental meaning of American constitutional rights — and the immigrant was the teacher. "Let me talk," Munoz said to Corn. "I know the Constitution, and I know my First Amendment — " "I'm not the state," Corn said. "I can't take that right away from you." "No, no," Munoz shot back. "Even the state, the state cannot take that right away." "Right, right," Corn quickly agreed. "Nobody can take that away," Munoz said. And indeed they can't.

"I think that the coverage [Barack Obama] is getting is beyond presidential. It’s papal. I mean, a president never has all three anchors on the way with him. If you needed any evidence of how much in the tank the mainstream media are, this is it."

— Charles Krauthammer

What you won't find by reading the NYTimes

This is the op-ed piece John McCain submitted to the New York Times in response to Barrack Obama's editorial a week ago on the Iraq war. According to the Drudge Report, the paper's decision to refuse McCain's direct rebuttal to Obama's 'My Plan for Iraq' has ignited explosive charges of media bias in top Republican circles.

'It would be terrific to have an article from Senator McCain that mirrors Senator Obama's piece,' NYT Op-Ed editor David Shipley explained in an email late Friday to McCain's staff. 'I'm not going to be able to accept this piece as currently written.'

In McCain's submission to the TIMES, he writes of Obama: 'I am dismayed that he never talks about winning the war—only of ending it... if we don't win the war, our enemies will. A triumph for the terrorists would be a disaster for us. That is something I will not allow to happen as president.'

NYT's Shipley advised McCain to try again: 'I'd be pleased, though, to look at another draft.'

[Shipley served in the Clinton Administration from 1995 until 1997 as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Presidential Speechwriter.]

A top McCain source claims the paper simply does not agree with the senator's Iraq policy, and wants him to change it, not "re-work the draft."

McCain writes in the rejected essay: 'Progress has been due primarily to an increase in the number of troops and a change in their strategy. I was an early advocate of the surge at a time when it had few supporters in Washington. Senator Barack Obama was an equally vocal opponent. 'I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there,' he said on January 10, 2007. 'In fact, I think it will do the reverse.'

Shipley, who is on vacation this week, explained his decision not to run the editorial.

'The Obama piece worked for me because it offered new information (it appeared before his speech); while Senator Obama discussed Senator McCain, he also went into detail about his own plans.'

Shipley continues: 'It would be terrific to have an article from Senator McCain that mirrors Senator Obama's piece. To that end, the article would have to articulate, in concrete terms, how Senator McCain defines victory in Iraq.'

Following is the rejected opinion piece from Senator McCain:

In January 2007, when General David Petraeus took command in Iraq, he called the situation “hard” but not “hopeless.” Today, 18 months later, violence has fallen by up to 80% to the lowest levels in four years, and Sunni and Shiite terrorists are reeling from a string of defeats. The situation now is full of hope, but considerable hard work remains to consolidate our fragile gains.

Progress has been due primarily to an increase in the number of troops and a change in their strategy. I was an early advocate of the surge at a time when it had few supporters in Washington. Senator Barack Obama was an equally vocal opponent. "I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there,” he said on January 10, 2007. “In fact, I think it will do the reverse."

Now Senator Obama has been forced to acknowledge that “our troops have performed brilliantly in lowering the level of violence.” But he still denies that any political progress has resulted.

Perhaps he is unaware that the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad has recently certified that, as one news article put it, “Iraq has met all but three of 18 original benchmarks set by Congress last year to measure security, political and economic progress.” Even more heartening has been progress that’s not measured by the benchmarks. More than 90,000 Iraqis, many of them Sunnis who once fought against the government, have signed up as Sons of Iraq to fight against the terrorists. Nor do they measure Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki’s new-found willingness to crack down on Shiite extremists in Basra and Sadr City—actions that have done much to dispel suspicions of sectarianism.

The success of the surge has not changed Senator Obama’s determination to pull out all of our combat troops. All that has changed is his rationale. In a New York Times op-ed and a speech this week, he offered his “plan for Iraq” in advance of his first “fact finding” trip to that country in more than three years. It consisted of the same old proposal to pull all of our troops out within 16 months. In 2007 he wanted to withdraw because he thought the war was lost. If we had taken his advice, it would have been. Now he wants to withdraw because he thinks Iraqis no longer need our assistance.

To make this point, he mangles the evidence. He makes it sound as if Prime Minister Maliki has endorsed the Obama timetable, when all he has said is that he would like a plan for the eventual withdrawal of U.S. troops at some unspecified point in the future.

Senator Obama is also misleading on the Iraqi military's readiness. The Iraqi Army will be equipped and trained by the middle of next year, but this does not, as Senator Obama suggests, mean that they will then be ready to secure their country without a good deal of help. The Iraqi Air Force, for one, still lags behind, and no modern army can operate without air cover. The Iraqis are also still learning how to conduct planning, logistics, command and control, communications, and other complicated functions needed to support frontline troops.

No one favors a permanent U.S. presence, as Senator Obama charges. A partial withdrawal has already occurred with the departure of five “surge” brigades, and more withdrawals can take place as the security situation improves. As we draw down in Iraq, we can beef up our presence on other battlefields, such as Afghanistan, without fear of leaving a failed state behind. I have said that I expect to welcome home most of our troops from Iraq by the end of my first term in office, in 2013.

But I have also said that any draw-downs must be based on a realistic assessment of conditions on the ground, not on an artificial timetable crafted for domestic political reasons. This is the crux of my disagreement with Senator Obama.

Senator Obama has said that he would consult our commanders on the ground and Iraqi leaders, but he did no such thing before releasing his “plan for Iraq.” Perhaps that’s because he doesn’t want to hear what they have to say. During the course of eight visits to Iraq, I have heard many times from our troops what Major General Jeffrey Hammond, commander of coalition forces in Baghdad, recently said: that leaving based on a timetable would be “very dangerous.”

The danger is that extremists supported by Al Qaeda and Iran could stage a comeback, as they have in the past when we’ve had too few troops in Iraq. Senator Obama seems to have learned nothing from recent history. I find it ironic that he is emulating the worst mistake of the Bush administration by waving the “Mission Accomplished” banner prematurely.

I am also dismayed that he never talks about winning the war—only of ending it. But if we don’t win the war, our enemies will. A triumph for the terrorists would be a disaster for us. That is something I will not allow to happen as president. Instead I will continue implementing a proven counterinsurgency strategy not only in Iraq but also in Afghanistan with the goal of creating stable, secure, self-sustaining democratic allies.

Tonight, Not on the News. . .

Patriot Report

A popular Leftist bumper sticker during the Vietnam War read: “What if they had a war, and no one came?” An appropriate sticker for today might ask: “What if the U.S. won a war, but the media didn’t report it?” Despite a plethora of good news about the Iraq war, news outlets are reporting everything except the coalition’s great success. The Iraq War no longer follows the narrative that Leftists and defeatists (but we repeat ourselves) believe it should, and so they have decided that our heroic efforts there are no longer newsworthy.

A case in point is the 18 benchmarks that Congress set last year for Iraqi progress. As of last week, Iraq had met 15 of those benchmarks, but only Fox News Channel saw fit to report it. Fox anchor Brit Hume even predicted as much, saying he doubted that “word of this progress is going to get through. I suspect that this broadcast tonight—and maybe some others on this channel—are the only ones who are going to make a headline out of this.” He was right. While Fox cited the progress in Iraq, most of the Leftmedia outlets were reporting that U.S. troop deaths in Afghanistan had risen.

Also ignored is the fact that al-Qa’ida in Iraq has been driven from its last stronghold in Mosul and that attacks by insurgents and militias are down 90 percent from one year ago. Conditions on the ground have improved to the point that the last of the “surge brigades” will leave Iraq by the end of this month, and more than 300 soldiers who were supposed to deploy last month were turned around. But it’s not likely that we will hear any of this on the nightly news. According to American Journalism Review, 23 percent of last year’s news coverage was about Iraq. This year, it has fallen to three percent. One could be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that, so far as the Leftmedia is concerned, winning isn’t news.

In the Senate, at least, winning means something. Gen. David Petraeus was confirmed almost unanimously Thursday as the new commander of U.S. Central Command, and Gen. Ray Odierno was confirmed as the new top U.S. commander in Iraq.

An open letter to readers of The New York Times

Daniel Finkelstein - TimesOnline

Dear Friends,

I understand that your newspaper of choice has asked William Kristol, the conservative commentator, to provide an opinion column for the paper.

Since I am the op-ed editor of what you Americans call The Times of London, I have followed the controversy that the appointment has caused with great interest.

And with my mouth wide open.

Apparently many of you are outraged to hear of this new columnist. You have been writing in.

And the Public Editor has written a column criticising the appointment.

Excuse me, but what on earth is going on?

A quality newspaper should have columns reflecting a wide variety of opinions, even those uncongenial to the majority of its readers. While the bulk of a paper's columnists may reflect the publication's character and view, there must always be space for an alternative opinion.

Thus, for instance, while my paper supported the decision to invade Iraq (which happened to be my view too), many of our columnists (in fact probably a majority) did not concur.

It would never occur to me when selecting an individual columnist to be concerned that some readers might not agree with some of his positions.

And considering that Kristol represents a large strand of American opinion (even if it is a smaller strand of NYT reader opinion) it is entirely unremarkable that his columns should be commissioned.

A great national newspaper is not a reality television show, subjecting its columnists to a telephone vote before running their columns. Nor is being hired to write a column equivalent to being appointed to the Supreme Court, requiring Senate confirmation.

Even when the column appears, drumroll, in the The New York Times.

The most remarkable aspect of this bizarre controversy has been the performance of the paper's ombudsman Clark Hoyt. Well, it was remarkable to me at least. Mr Hoyt argued that Kristol should not have been appointed (or at least that he, Hoyt, wouldn't have appointed him) because Kristol had been a fierce critic of the NYT, and had argued, at one point, that the paper should be prosecuted for an aspect of its coverage.

The job of a reader's editor, surely is to defend the rights of its readers, all of its readers. It is not to start picking a "Fantasy Columnist" team to reflect his own politics. What of people who agree with Kristol? Do they not deserve the protection of the reader's editor?

And as for Hoyt's statement that:

This is not a person I would have rewarded with a regular spot in front of arguably the most elite audience in the nation.

Isn't this the most pompous sentence you have ever read in your life?

Anyway, you are fortunate that The New York Times carries many great columns. If Kristol offends you I have a brilliant technological solution.

Turn the page.

I wish you well from this side of the Atlantic.

Daniel

Bum Rush

NY Post

Jonah Goldberg

In the parable of the million monkeys banging on typewriters for a million years, the reward is supposed to be the complete works of Shakespeare. But have you heard the parable of the million interns? Here, the prize is Rush Limbaugh's head, and Bill O'Reilly's, and Brit Hume's, and pretty much any other prominent conservative or non-leftist who doesn't kowtow to the Democratic Party and its “netroots" army of Lilliputian cannibals. This, in a nutshell, is the vision behind a group most people have never heard of, at least not until this week, Media Matters for America.

Nearly every day, I get e-mail spam from this alleged “media watchdog" group. It's slightly less formal than the usual son of a Nigerian oil minister with erectile dysfunction and a great stock tip giving me a head's-up about a problem with my eBay account. This spam comes from some earnest p.r. flack letting me know that I might be interested in the latest Very Serious Finding by Media Matters for America. When you actually check out the item, it's usually very stupid or silly or, sometimes, slanderous.

For example, on Sept. 25, Media Matters sent out a note announcing “Fox News panelist Mort Kondracke recently made several racist comments regarding the Jena 6.

Here are some examples of racism on Fox News." What were the racist comments? Simply this: Kondracke said in reference to the racial turmoil then brewing in Louisiana, “It looks as though the people of Jena can solve this on their own." It's a wonder Kondracke even bothered to take his Klan hood off while on camera.

You don't hear about most of this stuff because journalists on the receiving end of Media Matter's junk mail have this rare skill, highly prized in the profession: They can read. And so, most of what Media Matters does is ignored except by the echo chamber of the left-wing blogs and sympathetic pundits. But occasionally, either through luck or distortion, Media Matters hits paydirt.

They were the ones who made the initial stink about Don Imus' “nappy-headed hos" gaffe. Imus may have had that coming, but they also recently tried to paint Bill O'Reilly as a racist dunderhead by slanderously distorting his comments about having dinner in Harlem. O'Reilly's point was that the real middle-class black America is decent and normal, unlike the images found in gangsta rap and the like. Media Matters quoted him as saying he was shocked that none of the black people at a Harlem restaurant talked or acted like F-word-abusing thugs.

But what is Media Matters? Well, first of all, it's the brainchild of David Brock. You may recall that Brock was once a right-wing hatchet man, penning a book, “The Real Anita Hill," and some articles in the American Spectator on the Clintons that for a time earned him considerable notoriety on the right and hatred on the left. After the success of the Anita Hill book, Brock was given a contract to write a similar exposé on Hillary Clinton, “The Seduction of Hillary Rodham."

The book was a dud. But it had explosive effects on Brock. In the course of working on it, he came out of the closet and gained a crush on Mrs. Clinton at the same time. Some claimed that he became “pro-Hillary" as an excuse to hide his failure at cracking the cone of silence around Clinton. Others believe that his transformation was less mercenary and more principled. Whatever; wading deep into Brock's psyche requires taller hip boots than are currently available on the market.

For the rest of the 1990s, Brock launched something of a fire sale on his own credibility. In articles and interviews, Brock outed himself as a liar. He confessed to lying in the Anita Hill book, even though the lies he admitted to were peripheral to his exoneration of Justice Clarence Thomas but devastating in what they said about Brock himself; he admitted he'd been a hatchet man and borderline extortionist. In a piece for Esquire - in which he was depicted bound to a tree, nipple exposed - Brock apologized to Bill Clinton and expressed regret over his “Troopergate" stories for the American Spectator. He said they were all true, mind you, but that he shouldn't have written them.

But the problem was already obvious. As Jill Abramson told the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, “the problem with Brock's credibility" is that “once you admit you've knowingly written false things, how do you know when to believe what he writes?" Yet by the end of the Clinton years and the beginning of the Bush administration, Brock had become a darling of the pro-Clinton media establishment as a supposed truth-teller.

And in 2004, Brock decided to start Media Matters for America ostensibly to keep an eye on the sort of “conservative misinformation" he used to peddle.

But, the truth is that Media Matters is a cog in the larger Vast LeftWing Conspiracy chronicled in the aptly titled book “The Vast LeftWing Conspiracy" by my National Review colleague Byron York. In the 1990s, long before Hillary Clinton railed against a shadowy, vast right-wing conspiracy, the Clintonites were obsessed with conservative success at getting their message out.

In 1995, Mark Fabiani, one of the Clintonites tasked with beating down Clinton scandals in the media, even penned a 331-page taxpayer-funded report ominously titled “The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce," which worked from the presumption that negative stories about the president were illegitimate and foisted on the unwitting public by evildoers of the right.

Such paranoia has gone from being one of the more obscure jokes of the Clinton years to mainstream thought in Democratic circles. Driven mad by the Swift Boat Vets, Fox News, not to mention the humiliating failure of Air America and the continuing success of conservatives like Rush Limbaugh, liberals have convinced themselves they need a conspiracy machinery all of their own to do deliberately what they imagine conservatives have been doing all along.

And that's where Media Matters for America comes in. At a recent YearlyKos convention for left-wing bloggers, Hillary Clinton bragged about how she'd helped Brock create Media Matters - an inconvenient testimonial for a group that swears, unconvincingly, that it's not beholden to Clinton (nearly half the e-mails I get from them read like they were churned out by Clinton's rapid-response team).

Part of the complex of liberal activist groups linked to George Soros and dedicated to the success of Democratic candidates, Media Matters churns out polemic and spin gussied-up as media criticism. The strategy is an upgrade of the Clinton communication attack plan of the 1990s. First: Demonize critics as crazy people, ax-grinders, bigots and shills.

This was the tactic used by Clinton and Co. in the 1990s to try to marginalize critics like Limbaugh and whistleblowers like Travel Office director Billy Dale. Recall how Bill Clinton suggested Limbaugh incited the Oklahoma City bombing or how his cronies immediately claimed Dale was a criminal and Monica Lewinsky a stalker?

Second, use any weapon on hand. And that's where the figurative million interns come in. Like CIA drones listening to shortwave broadcasts in Irkusk, Media Matters monitors everything the right puts out, listening to hundreds of hours of programming and reading lord knows how many words every week.

And, then, working from the assumption that all's fair in war, they score whatever points they can and then browbeat mainstream journalists with their findings.

Because these journalists are overwhelmingly liberal themselves, they sometimes find receptive ears. But nowhere near as receptive as among Democrats themselves. Because Media Matters is more like the opposition- research team of left-wing activists than a media watchdog, Democrats score all sorts of points by taking up its cause.

The press didn't care much about the Limbaugh “phony soldiers" story in which Limbaugh was referring to one anti-war activist who pretended to be a military veteran. Journalists for the most part saw it for what it was: a phony story.

But the Democrats have been interested in demonizing and defanging right-wing critics for years. It's a doctrine of preemption the Democrats can finally endorse. And so Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid doesn't care that Limbaugh - a wildly generous supporter of the military - never criticized American soldiers. What they care about is taking Limbaugh down a peg or two and throwing a bone to their increasingly demoralized anti-war base.

It's shameless, but they think they're justified to do or say anything if it takes down the enemy. Which is why Brock is the perfect man for the job.

The In-Kindest Cut

Opinionjournal.com

By now everyone knows that the New York Times published a full-page ad Monday from the MoveOn.org political action committee attacking Gen. David Petraeus in McCarthyite terms. Now the New York Post has confirmed what blogger Bob Owens suspected. Reports the Post:

A spokesman for MoveOn.org confirmed to The Post that the liberal activist group had paid only $65,000 for the ad. . . .

A Post reporter who called the Times advertising department yesterday without identifying himself was quoted a price of $167,000 for a full-page black-and-white ad on a Monday.

[Times PR director Abbe] Serphos declined to confirm the price and refused to offer any inkling for why the paper would give MoveOn.org such a discounted price.

The Times advertising rate card (see page 5) lists a full-page weekday political ad as costing $167,000 and change. An unidentified "Republican aide on Capitol Hill" quipped that MoveOn got the "family discount." But this got us to wondering: Would that be legal?

We consulted the Federal Elections Commission's Campaign Guide for Corporations and Labor Organizations, updated in January, and here's what it has to say about in-kind contributions (see page 14):

Services (such as advertising, printing or consulting) are valued at the prevailing commercial rate at the time the services are rendered (i.e., the amount that was paid or would have been paid for the services).

Discounts are valued at the amount discounted (i.e., the difference between the usual and normal charge and the amount paid by the committee).

If a company sells an ad worth $167,000 for $65,000, then, that would be an in-kind contribution of $102,000. Corporate contributions to PACs are illegal under the campaign finance laws the Times itself has long championed: "Corporations and labor organizations are prohibited from making contributions in connection with federal elections," according to the FEC. (A corporation may set up and administer a "separate segregated fund," or a corporate PAC, which receives contributions from people associated with the company, but it may not contribute to its own SSF or any other federally registered PAC.)

There may be an explanation here that does not implicate campaign finance laws. Perhaps the "prevailing commercial rate" for an ad in the Times is lower than that in the rate card; maybe such deep "discounts" are routine and thus not really discounts for the FEC's purposes. In either case, we can understand why the Times's spokesmen are not eager to discuss the matter.

VDH: The New York Times Surrenders

Victor Davis Hanson

A monument to defeatism on the editorial page

On July 8, the New York Times ran an historic editorial entitled “The Road Home,” demanding an immediate American withdrawal from Iraq. It is rare that an editorial gets almost everything wrong, but “The Road Home” pulls it off. Consider, point by point, its confused—and immoral—defeatism.

1. “It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit.”

Rarely in military history has an “orderly” withdrawal followed a theater-sized defeat and the flight of several divisions. Abruptly leaving Iraq would be a logistical and humanitarian catastrophe. And when scenes of carnage begin appearing on TV screens here about latte time, will the Times then call for “humanitarian” action?

2. “Like many Americans, we have put off that conclusion, waiting for a sign that President Bush was seriously trying to dig the United States out of the disaster he created by invading Iraq without sufficient cause, in the face of global opposition, and without a plan to stabilize the country afterward.”

We’ll get to the war’s “sufficient cause,” but first let’s address the other two charges that the Times levels here against President Bush. Both houses of Congress voted for 23 writs authorizing the war with Iraq—a post-9/11 confirmation of the official policy of regime change in Iraq that President Clinton originated. Supporters of the war included 70 percent of the American public in April 2003; the majority of NATO members; a coalition with more participants than the United Nations alliance had in the Korean War; and a host of politicians and pundits as diverse as Joe Biden, William F. Buckley, Wesley Clark, Hillary Clinton, Francis Fukuyama, Kenneth Pollack, Harry Reid, Andrew Sullivan, Thomas Friedman, and George Will.

And there was a Pentagon postwar plan to stabilize the country, but it assumed a decisive defeat and elimination of enemy forces, not a three-week war in which the majority of Baathists and their terrorist allies fled into the shadows to await a more opportune time to reemerge, under quite different rules of engagement.

3. “While Mr. Bush scorns deadlines, he kept promising breakthroughs—after elections, after a constitution, after sending in thousands more troops. But those milestones came and went without any progress toward a stable, democratic Iraq or a path for withdrawal. It is frighteningly clear that Mr. Bush’s plan is to stay the course as long as he is president and dump the mess on his successor. Whatever his cause was, it is lost.”

Of course there were breakthroughs: most notably, millions of Iraqis’ risking their lives to vote. An elected government remains in power, under a constitution far more liberal than any other in the Arab Middle East. In the region at large, Libya, following the war, gave up its advanced arsenal of weapons of mass destruction; Syria fled Lebanon; A.Q. Khan’s nuclear ring was shut down. And despite the efforts of Iran, Syria, and Sunni extremists in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, a plurality of Iraqis still prefer the chaotic and dangerous present to the sure methodical slaughter of their recent Saddamite past.

The Times wonders what Bush’s cause was. Easy to explain, if not easy to achieve: to help foster a constitutional government in the place of a genocidal regime that had engaged in a de facto war with the United States since 1991, and harbored or subsidized terrorists like Abu Nidal, Abu Abbas, at least one plotter of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaida affiliates in Kurdistan, and suicide bombers in Gaza and the West Bank. It was a bold attempt to break with the West’s previous practices, both liberal (appeasement of terrorists) and conservative (doing business with Saddam, selling arms to Iran, and overlooking the House of Saud’s funding of terrorists).

Is that cause in fact “lost”? The vast majority of 160,000 troops in harm’s way don’t think so—despite a home front where U.S. senators have publicly compared them with Nazis, Stalinists, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, and Saddam Hussein’s jailers, and where the media’s Iraqi narrative has focused obsessively on Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, and serial leaks of classified information, with little interest in the horrific nature of the Islamists in Iraq or the courageous efforts of many Iraqis to stop them.

4. “Continuing to sacrifice the lives and limbs of American soldiers is wrong. The war is sapping the strength of the nation’s alliances and its military forces. It is a dangerous diversion from the life-and-death struggle against terrorists. It is an increasing burden on American taxpayers, and it is a betrayal of a world that needs the wise application of American power and principles.”

The military is stretched, but hardly broken, despite having tens of thousands of troops stationed in Japan, Korea, the Balkans, Germany, and Italy, years—and decades—after we removed dictatorships by force and began efforts to establish democracies in those once-frightening places. As for whether Iraq is a diversion from the war on terror: al-Qaida bigwig Ayman al-Zawahiri, like George W. Bush, has said that Iraq is the primary front in his efforts to attack the United States and its interests—and he often despairs about the progress of jihad there. Our enemies, like al-Qaida, Iran, and Syria, as well as opportunistic neutrals like China and Russia, are watching closely to see whether America will betray its principles in Iraq.

5. “Americans must be clear that Iraq, and the region around it, could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave. There could be reprisals against those who worked with American forces, further ethnic cleansing, even genocide. Potentially destabilizing refugee flows could hit Jordan and Syria. Iran and Turkey could be tempted to make power grabs.”

The Times should abandon the subjunctive mood. The catastrophes that it matter-of-factly suggests have ample precedents in Vietnam. Apparently, we should abandon millions of Iraqis to the jihadists (whether Wahhabis or Khomeinites), expect mass murders in the wake of our flight—“even genocide”—and then chalk up the slaughter to Bush’s folly. And if that seems crazy, consider what follows, an Orwellian account of the mechanics of our flight:

6. “The main road south to Kuwait is notoriously vulnerable to roadside bomb attacks. Soldiers, weapons and vehicles will need to be deployed to secure bases while airlift and sealift operations are organized. Withdrawal routes will have to be guarded. The exit must be everything the invasion was not: based on reality and backed by adequate resources.

“The United States should explore using Kurdish territory in the north of Iraq as a secure staging area. Being able to use bases and ports in Turkey would also make withdrawal faster and safer. Turkey has been an inconsistent ally in this war, but like other nations, it should realize that shouldering part of the burden of the aftermath is in its own interest.”

This insistence on planned defeat, following incessant criticism of potential victory, is lunatic. The Times’s frustration with Turkey and other “inconsistent” allies won’t end with our withdrawal and defeat. Like everyone in the region, the Turks want to ally with winners and distance themselves from losers—and care little about sermons from the likes of the Times editors. The ideas about Kurdish territory and Turkey are simply cover for the likely consequences of defeat: once we are gone and a federated Iraq is finished, Kurdistan’s democratic success is fair game for Turkey, which—with the assent of opportunistic allies—will move to end it by crushing our Kurdish friends.

7. “Despite President Bush’s repeated claims, Al Qaeda had no significant foothold in Iraq before the invasion, which gave it new base camps, new recruits and new prestige.

“This war diverted Pentagon resources from Afghanistan, where the military had a real chance to hunt down Al Qaeda’s leaders. It alienated essential allies in the war against terrorism. It drained the strength and readiness of American troops.”

The Times raises the old charge that if we weren’t in Iraq, neither would be al-Qaida—more of whose members we have killed in Iraq than anywhere else. In 1944, Japan had relatively few soldiers in Okinawa; when the Japanese learned that we planned to invade in 1945, they increased their forces there. Did the subsequent carnage—four times the number of U.S. dead as in Iraq, by the way, in one-sixteenth the time—prove our actions ill considered? Likewise, no Soviets were in Eastern Europe until we moved to attack and destroy Hitler, who had kept communists out. Did the resulting Iron Curtain mean that it was a mistake to deter German aggression?

And if the Times sees the war in Afghanistan as so important, why didn’t it support an all-out war against the Taliban and al-Qaida, as it apparently does now, when we were solely in Afghanistan?

8. “Iraq may fragment into separate Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite republics, and American troops are not going to stop that from happening. . . . To start, Washington must turn to the United Nations, which Mr. Bush spurned and ridiculed as a preface to war.”

But Bush did go to the United Nations, which, had it enforced its own resolutions, might have prevented the war. In fact, the Bush administration’s engagement with the UN contrasts sharply with President Clinton’s snub of that organization during the U.S.-led bombing of the Balkans—unleashed, unlike Iraq, without Congressional approval. The Times also neglects to mention that the UN was knee-deep in the mess of its cash cow Iraq, from its appeasement of the genocidal Hussein regime to its graft-ridden, $50 billion oil-for-food scandal, reaching the highest echelons of Kofi Annan’s UN administration.

9. “Washington also has to mend fences with allies. There are new governments in Britain, France and Germany that did not participate in the fight over starting this war and are eager to get beyond it. But that will still require a measure of humility and a commitment to multilateral action that this administration has never shown. And, however angry they were with President Bush for creating this mess, those nations should see that they cannot walk away from the consequences.”

New governments in France and Germany are more pro-American than those of the past that tried to thwart us in Iraq. The Times surely knows of the Chirac administration’s lucrative relationships with Saddam Hussein, and of the German contracts to supply sophisticated tools and expertise that enabled the Baathist nightmare. Tony Blair will enjoy a far more principled and reputable retirement than will Jacques Chirac or Gerhard Schroeder, who did their best to destroy the Atlantic Alliance for cheap partisan advantage at home and global benefit abroad.

Nations like France and Germany won’t “walk away” from Iraq, since they were never there in the first place. They never involve themselves in such dangerous situations—just look at the rules of engagement of French and German troops in Afghanistan. Their foreign policy centers instead on commerce, suitably dressed up with fashionable elite outrage against the United States.

10. “For this effort to have any remote chance, Mr. Bush must drop his resistance to talking with both Iran and Syria. Britain, France, Russia, China and other nations with influence have a responsibility to help. Civil war in Iraq is a threat to everyone, especially if it spills across Iraq’s borders.”

China and Russia, seeing only oil and petrodollars, will take no responsibility to help. Both will welcome a U.S. retreat. Yes, “civil war” will spill over the borders, but not until the U.S. precipitously withdraws. Iran and Syria—serial assassins of democrats from Lebanon to Iraq—are hoping for realization of the Times’s scenario, and would be willing to talk with us only to facilitate our flight, with the expectation that Iraq would become wide open for their ambitions. In their view, a U.S. that fails in Iraq surely cannot thwart an Iranian bomb, the Syrian reabsorption of Lebanese democracy, attacks on Israel, or increased funding and sanctuary for global terrorism.

11. “President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have used demagoguery and fear to quell Americans’ demands for an end to this war. They say withdrawing will create bloodshed and chaos and encourage terrorists. Actually, all of that has already happened—the result of this unnecessary invasion and the incompetent management of this war.”

But as the Times itself acknowledges, what has happened in the past only previews what is in store if we precipitously withdraw. And this will prove the case not only in Iraq, but elsewhere in the Persian Gulf, the Middle East, Taiwan, and Korea. Once the U.S. demonstrates that it cannot honor its commitments, those dependent upon it must make the necessary adjustments. Ironically, while the Times urges acceptance of defeat, Sunni tribesmen at last are coming forward to fight terrorists, and regional neighbors are gradually accepting the truth that their opportunistic assistance to jihadists is only threatening their own regimes.

We promised General Petraeus a hearing in September; it would be the height of folly to preempt that agreement by giving in to our summer of panic and despair. Critics called for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, a change in command in Iraq and at Centcom, new strategies, and more troops. But now that we have a new secretary, a new command in Iraq and at Centcom, new strategies, and more troops, suddenly we have a renewed demand for withdrawal before the agreed-upon September accounting—suggesting that the only constant in such harping was the assumption that Iraq was either hopeless or not worth the effort.

The truth is that Iraq has upped the ante in the war against terrorists. Our enemies’ worst nightmare is a constitutional government in the heart of the ancient caliphate, surrounded by consensual rule in Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Turkey; ours is a new terror heaven, but with oil, a strategic location, and the zeal born of a humiliating defeat of the United States on a theater scale. The Islamists believe we can’t win; so does the New York Times. But it falls to the American people to decide the issue.

Worry About the Right Things

John Stossel

For the past two weeks I've written about how the media -- part of the Fear Industrial Complex -- profit by scaring us to death about things that rarely happen, like terrorism, child abductions, and shark attacks.

We do it because we get caught up in the excitement of the story. And for ratings.

Worse, because many reporters are statistically illiterate, personal-injury lawyers get us to hype risks that barely threaten people, like secondhand smoke, or getting cancer from trace amounts of chemicals. Sometimes they even con us into scaring you about risks that don't exist at all, like contracting anti-immune disease from breast implants.

Newsrooms are full of English majors who acknowledge that they are not good at math, but still rush to make confident pronouncements about a global-warming "crisis" and the coming of bird flu.

Bird flu was called the No. 1 threat to the world. But bird flu has killed no one in America, while regular flu -- the boring kind -- kills tens of thousands. New York City internist Marc Siegel says that after the media hype, his patients didn't want to hear that.

"I say, 'You need a flu shot.' You know the regular flu is killing 36,000 per year. They say, 'Don't talk to me about regular flu. What about bird flu?'"

Here's another example. What do you think is more dangerous, a house with a pool or a house with a gun? When, for "20/20," I asked some kids, all said the house with the gun is more dangerous. I'm sure their parents would agree. Yet a child is 100 times more likely to die in a swimming pool than in a gun accident.

Parents don't know that partly because the media hate guns and gun accidents make bigger headlines. Ask yourself which incident would be more likely to be covered on TV.

Media exposure clouds our judgment about real-life odds. Of course, it doesn't help that viewers are as ignorant about probability as reporters are.

To demonstrate that, "20/20" ran an experiment. We asked people to put on blindfolds and then to pick up a red jellybean from one of two plates that held a mixture of red and white jellybeans. We offered $1 to anyone who could pick up a red bean.

Here's the catch: While one plate held 20 jellybeans and the other 100, the plate with 20 beans had a higher percentage of red ones. We put up signs that told people this clearly: "10 percent red" of the small plate and just "7 percent red" of the big plate.

Surprisingly, even with the percentage signs in front of them, a third of the people picked the plate with 100 beans.

What people saw overwhelmed their ability to think abstractly about probability. They saw more red on the big plate. It's one reason people obsess about things that have a small chance of hurting them but ignore real threats.

Another is the illusion of control. People who fear flying are comfortable driving because they think they're "in control." Yet driving is probably the riskiest thing most of us do. Think about it: We drive at 65 mph, a few feet from other cars -- some of which are driven by 16-year olds! And our cameras have caught people curling their eyelashes and reading while driving.

A hundred people die on the road every day. But the media are much more likely to do scare stories about plane crashes than car accidents.

So take our reporting with heavy skepticism. Ignore us when we hyperventilate about mad cow disease and the danger of asbestos hidden behind a wall.

Instead, worry about what's worth worrying about: driving, acting reckless, smoking cigarettes, drinking too much, and eating too much. "What is your blood pressure, what are you eating; are you exercising?" is what patients should think about, says internist Marc Siegel. "But obesity is boring. Heart disease is boring. So we tend to not think of the things that can really get us."

The media make it worse. Instead of educating people to real dangers, we scare them about things that hardly matter.

The U.S. Attorney Scandal, Explained!

Jim Taranto: OpinionJournal.com

We haven't written much about the foofaraw over the Bush administration's firings of eight U.S. attorneys, because we don't understand the issues involved. But a reader calls our attention to a transcript of "Washington Week," which explicates some of the issues:

Gwen Ifill: One more question for you, Doyle, on this point, which is there has been much back and forth about whether this is something which is unprecedented--this firing. Whether it is okay for the president to do it, because after all, as Tony Snow said repeatedly today, these people serve at the pleasure of the president. Is there a precedent for it?

Doyle McManus: Well, there is and there isn't. This one of those awful things where you go back into the history and everybody is still arguing about what the history means. Look, it's always been a bit of a tradition that when the White House changes in party, when Richard Nixon was succeeded by--who was that? No, that was Gerald Ford. When Gerald Ford was succeeded by Jimmy Carter, when Bill Clinton was succeeded by--when Clinton took over, and when President Bush took over from Clinton, at that point it's pretty much customary for the U.S. attorneys in place to submit their resignations. Now, Republicans are arguing that Janet Reno under Bill Clinton went farther and demanded the resignations, but even then Bill Clinton didn't fire everybody.

This is different. It's in the middle of a term. It's within the president's right to do it. That's technically true. But what even some conservative Republican legal specialists are worried about is this: are we sliding toward a politicization of that job of U.S. attorney? There's always been politics involved. Senators get involved. But are we sliding towards--and that was what was, of course, ugly in those e-mails.

Alexis Simendinger: Yes. And I think we should add, too, that we're talking about eight individuals who were appointed--politically appointed by the president of the United States. They were chosen by this president, so we're not talking about him being concerned about Democratic holdovers or some other president's choices. We're talking about his own choices.

To sum up:

1. It was OK for Bill Clinton to fire 93 U.S. attorneys, because he "didn't fire everybody." But it was not OK for Bush to fire eight of them.

2. Firing U.S. attorneys of the opposite party is fine, but firing U.S. attorneys of your own party is evidence of "politicization."

Makes sense, doesn't it?

Air America Fire Sale

Bankrupt liberal radio network to sell for $4.25 million



Bankrupt and about to lose Al Franken, its marquee star, Air America Radio is set to change hands for the bargain price of $4.25 million, according to new court documents. The sales figure was disclosed in a purchase agreement filed yesterday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York.

According to the agreement, the deal between Air America's owner, Piquant LLC, and a firm controlled by Stephen L. Green, a New York realtor, calls for Green's firm to repay up to $3.25 million in loans provided to Air America after the liberal radio network filed for Chapter 11 protection last October (the company listed debts of $20.2 million). Green's company will also give Piquant LLC $500,000 and pay off up to $500,000 in network debts (the bulk of which, $349,000, is owed to the network's Manhattan landlord). Green's bid topped by more than $1.25 million the nearest offer received by Air America, according to a motion filed along with the purchase agreement.

Court documents do not specify how many bids were received for the network, though a filing notes that "more than ten interested parties" signed nondisclosure agreements and were allowed to review confidential network financial and corporate records. While Green controls the corporation purchasing Air America, two of the firms that were pre-bankruptcy investors in the radio network will "collectively own a minority interest" in the Green company. The Air America purchase is expected to be finalized at a court hearing in the next week. Franken, who is planning to run next year for a U.S. Senate seat from Minnesota, is scheduled to do his final Air America show on February 14.

Press Writing Off "Lame Duck" President Bush

Six months after his party lost both houses of Congress, Bill Clinton was reduced to declaring at a news conference that he was still relevant.

The next day, the Oklahoma City federal building was bombed. Clinton regained his footing and cruised to reelection the following year, his relevance never again in doubt -- even after his impeachment.

These days, many in the media seem to be writing off President Bush.

"The American people basically fired George Bush in the last election," writes New York Times columnist Tom Friedman. "We're now just watching him clean out his desk."

"A lot of Americans consider this presidency over," says CNN's Bill Schneider.

"If America were a parliamentary democracy, we would have a no-confidence vote and a new prime minister by spring," writes New York Daily News columnist Michael Goodwin.

Are these and other pundits giving us the unvarnished truth, that we are witnessing the historic collapse of a presidency? Or is this the triumph of quick-draw, poll-driven journalism?

"It's a predictable bit of conventional wisdom," White House spokesman Tony Snow says in an interview. He insists that Bush can make progress on such issues as energy and immigration, "and he still has the bully pulpit. A lot of these narratives about 'the president is a lame duck' assume nothing is going to change politically, anywhere in the world, in the next two years."

But the gibes keep on coming. "If we had a straight dictatorship," writes the New Republic's Jonathan Chait, "Bush would long ago have been dragged out of the White House either by an angry mob or by disgruntled generals." (Not that he's in favor of either.)

Chait agrees in an interview that the president still has power, but notes: "Psychologically, it does feel that people are starting to move past Bush. No one has changed his mind about Bush in the last two years. It's kind of boring to write about him anymore because he's so unchanging."

Fred Barnes, the Weekly Standard's executive editor, says Bush will concentrate on such areas as tightening control of regulatory policy to end-run a Democratic Congress. "The Republicans learned in the '90s -- and the press should have learned as well -- that presidents have great inherent powers," he says. But "Nancy Pelosi at the moment is a more interesting story than George Bush. She's new, she's attractive and she has an agenda."

The media, as always, are mesmerized by polls. When Bush was riding high in the "Mission Accomplished" days of 2003, some of the coverage was almost giddy. If Bush's current approval ratings were at 50 percent, his media portrayal would look very different. With the president having sunk as low as 28 percent in a CBS News survey, it is all too easy to dismiss him, even as he mounts an escalation of the war in Iraq.

That war, of course, is the reason why the mainstream media see no possibility of Bush bouncing back. Things are a mess in Iraq; the country has turned against the war; and few journalists think the "surge" is going to work. Therefore, the reasoning goes, Bush will continue to sink into the quagmire of the war he chose to wage.

There's little question that Bush has never been weaker politically. He got no traction from the State of the Union (as measured by the almighty polls). His domestic proposals seem to have sparked little interest, at least from the press. Here he is talking about income inequality, global warming and tougher auto mileage standards -- all typically Democratic themes -- and the journalistic reaction is a barely suppressed yawn. He's yesterday's news.

But with Bush constitutionally entitled to two more years in the White House, it is risky for journalists to declare him a marginal figure, even if they are far more absorbed in covering the race to succeed him.

Other unpopular war presidents have staggered to the ends of their terms -- Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson come to mind -- and Bush may do the same. But because Iraq is now widely viewed as having been an unnecessary personal crusade on Bush's part, there seems to be an extra element of derision in the political commentary, especially from the left.

Bush's father recently vented his frustrations with the coverage. "It's one thing to have an adversarial . . . relationship -- hard-hitting journalism. It's another when the journalists' rhetoric goes beyond skepticism and goes over the line into overt, unrelenting hostility and personal animosity," the former president said.

Actually, even some of the journalists who are especially aggressive in their coverage of Bush like him in private settings, where the president has a joshing manner and enjoys handing out nicknames. But professional resentment may still be behind some of the increasingly negative coverage. "In the press corps," Chait says, "there's a little bit of a realization that they had been played."

From Iraq, where the media fell down on the WMD debate, to Bush's 2000 campaign persona as a compassionate conservative, many journalists now believe they were led astray. That has given an extra edge to their stories and columns on Bush being out of touch and has fueled an effort to vindicate their darker picture of the war. In short, the mainstream media no longer give this president the benefit of the doubt.

Media is Liberal; Also, Water is Wet.

USATODAY.com

Network news coverage has favored Democratic candidates in the midterm election, and the page scandal involving former congressman Mark Foley has been the main story line, drawing almost as much coverage as Iraq and terrorism combined, a new study finds.

An analysis by the Center for Media and Public Affairs of midterm election stories aired on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts Sept. 5-Oct. 22 found that 2006's coverage has been almost five times as heavy as in the 2002 midterm elections: 167 stories, compared with 35 four years ago.

The study found that three out of four evaluations of Democratic candidates' chances of winning — such as sound bites — were positive, compared with one out of eight for Republicans. Coverage has been dominated by two major themes: the effects of the Foley scandal, and the impact the Bush presidency is having on the party's congressional candidates.

NYT -- Don't Piss Us Off.

James Taranto - Best of the Web

In a long--no, make that looooong--profile of Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, New York magazine reveals his response to the Bush administration's criticism of his paper for publicizing a program for tracking terror finances:

"They pissed me off," he says. "I think the administration is genuinely distressed that we ran the story over their objections. I think they were embarrassed by it, by the fact that this most secretive of administrations has so much trouble keeping its secrets. I think they were probably sincere in their anxiety that publicizing this program might jeopardize it. And, you know, that's all fair, but when they stir up a partisan hatefest and impugn your integrity and patriotism, that is, to borrow a word from the White House list of talking points, disgraceful."

So Keller acknowledges that concern about jeopardizing the program--and thus increasing the risk of terrorist attacks--is "fair," but apparently does not acknowledge that the Times has any responsibility to withhold information that would jeopardize Americans.

Further, it's amazing how thin-skinned people in the media can be. The Times criticizes the administration all the time. Why shouldn't the administration fire back? If the press assumes for itself an "adversarial" role vis-à-vis the government, it seems only natural that the government would act like an adversary.