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Wed 10 Mar, 2004 01:25 pm
Extremists Behind Attack on Bush Ads[/u]
Jay Bryant
March 10, 2004
The outrageous attack on President Bush's television commercials was the work of an extreme left-wing group that has been in the forefront of the battle against the War on Terrorism for years, but you'd never know it from the coverage it has received in the establishment news media.
By picking up the charge, rather than reporting on its dubious source, the media have done major damage to the President's campaign, which compounded the problem by "defending" the ads, rather than exposing the hateful anti-Americanism of those who attacked them.
The President's actions in the immediate wake of 9/11 were nothing short of heroic, and were so accepted by a great majority of the American people. But while John Kerry is allowed by the media to trumpet his alleged heroism in Vietnam more than thirty years ago, Bush is castigated for a much milder reference to the leadership he provided at what is arguably the most crucial moment in the country's history since World War II.
One would suppose, from reading the news, that the attacks on the ads represent the general views of the families of those killed in the Trade Center destruction. That is absurd, but the voices of those family members who think otherwise are nowhere reported.
The group that made the attack was not even identified in many news stories, and those that did give its name made no comment on its nature. CNN, for example, identified the organization, September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, simply as an "advocacy group," in one story, without ever saying what it was it advocated. This was not a difficult research task, as the organization has a website that fully identifies its aims and goals, and chronicles its activities.
What percentage of Americans would you say are extreme left-wingers? A good guess would be about four percent. September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows claims to represent some 120 families of victims of the tragedy. There were more than 3,000 such victims. Do the math.
This is the miniscule vocal minority. The silent majority is, of course, by definition, silent.
What has Peaceful Tomorrows been up to since its formation in the weeks following 9/11? They condemned the "invasion" of Afghanistan, supported Dennis Kucinich's bill to gut the Patriot Act, and sent a delegation to Iraq to meet with Tariq Assiz and participate in a peace demonstration organized by Saddam Hussein's government.
"Being kind is all the sad world needs," sang Kristina Olsen, one of the Peaceful Tomorrows members at the demonstration, under the watchful eyes of Saddam's goons, whose commitment to kindness is highly questionable.
Peaceful Tomorrows is an official project of the Tides Foundation, an umbrella organization formed in 1976 to launder money to what has grown to some 350 left-wing groups throughout the world. Among the chief financial backers of Tides is the Heinz Endowments, the foundation run by Teresa Heinz Kerry, wife of you-know-who. Mrs. Kerry set up a Tides franchise in Pittsburgh.
That pretty much completes the loop, doesn't it?
A right-wing organization that did what Tides does would long ago have been exposed by the media, but there are no Pulitzers for investigative reporting against liberals.
The Bush campaign, as a campaign, must respond to that fact by saying, "So what?" Their job is to win election running in the world that exists, not one where fairness rules. They are running against John Kerry, not the Tides Foundation.
But as we have seen in the furor over the Bush commercials, the liberal establishment has enormous resources, often clandestine, which have the ability to impact public opinion. In this election year, America faces a potential capitulation to these forces, whose vision of the future is truly frightening.
The Democratic Party has nominated for President the most liberal candidate in its history, and his campaign is marshalling to its banner sub-rosa forces whose agenda can only be described as anti-American.
Had the philosophy of Peaceful Tomorrows been in power fifty years ago, the Gulag would still be torturing and killing daily on the Siberian steppes. Had they been in power two years ago, Saddam would still be adding to his list of 300,000 victims.
If they truly cared about maximizing the number of people who can reasonably anticipate peaceful tomorrows, the extremists of Peaceful Tomorrows would join the cause of those who seek to stop murderous dictators from plying their hideous trade.
Instead, they make common cause with the dictators and attempt to surreptitiously influence the election of a man who has accused American soldiers of hideous crimes, while giving a pass to the truly hideous criminals who threaten our nation every day.
So unless you view Bush's actions after 9/11 as "nothing short of heroic" you must be considered "extreme left"?
That doesn't make much allowance for persons less easily impressed who do not consider someone a hero simply because something bad happened during his watch.
Bush is lauded for his "leadership" but IMO the emotional fragility of the nation simply set the stage for an unpopular president to gain support. His choices, words and actions were undwerwhelming and he's being called a hero on the blood of those who died.
In other words it's just "guilt by association" in reverse. The national trauma that put a halo on his head in the view of the extreme right (hey, if everyone who doesn't think he was "heroic" is "extreme left" I get to polarize too) has little to do with him and his acts and much to do with the national psyche at the time.
Pardon me if I think that presiding over a time of trauma to national psyche is hardly heroic.
I hear a hacking sound. It can sound like thunk, twack, thruk, slap, thwark, thwack, thud, and more, but it barely bites the bark off the tree, never mind cut it down. The extremist liberal, now what is that? A communist maybe? And there are no extreme views from the right? I have to wonder, is belief at work here, or antagonism?
Besides that, states want out of the no child left behind lack of funding, more and more states are allowing gay marriages, Bush is on the wrong side of half in the polls, jobs are NOT recovering, the quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq aren't sinking back under the sands.
Some hero. Did they get you to trade your heros for ghosts? The real heros are the men and women who ran back into the WTC buildings to try and save people. Bush didn't even go back to DC, but flew around in Airforce 1 to avoid being assassinated.
Some hero.
As an aside, I had no opinion on Bush until 9/11. I was not stateside and had no alligiance to American political parties at all. I was not even follwoing American politics closely.
My dislike of Bush's policy started with 9/11. His choice of words, and actions are precisely why I dislike his policy.
No problem Fedral. Your boy has $200 million to spend on his "message".
Some example of extremist liberals:
Micheal Moore, Shawn Penn (Sean?), Pistoff, ILZ, Susan Sarandon. Now don't think these are all equal in intelligence, conviction, etc, just that they are all examples of being extremeist liberals.
Are there extremist views from the right? Is that a serious question? Like Anne Coulter, Rush Limbuagh, etc...
The real difference is that the extreme right uses the thruth and facts to be extreme while the left likes using lies and emotions to be extreme.
Umbagog wrote:Bush didn't even go back to DC, but flew around in Airforce 1 to avoid being assassinated.
Some hero.
I agree that his actions don't merit the "heroic" appelation but his retreat to Air Force One is both his job and his responsibility and I don't think it's fair for the left to fault him in any way for this.
I think that Bush had attempted to make political "hay" out of a national tragedy. It was ill considered, and his misstep ended up biting him in the butt.
No, he was NOT a hero. He was doing what was expected of a world leader. My cousin is a hero. He is a police surgeon, and was disabled due to being injured while helping at the WTC after the attack.
McGentrix wrote:Some example of extremist liberals:
There's no doubt in my mind that there are extreme liberals. There are extremes on both teh left and right.
But this article is trying to use a familiar ploy.
"100,000 lemmings can't be wrong."
The premise is that only the extremely partisan do not consider Bush's acts as "nothing short of heroic".
The article goes on to make sveral other appeals to popularity and in another familiar ploy tries to marginalize certain opinions.
Yes, the extreme left exists. But the author of this article has no basis upon which to declare that anyone who doesn't consider Bush downright heroic is part of that group.
It's just an appeal to popularity without even being able to establish said popularity except with the loosest criteria.
Nitpicking the 9-11 ads[/u]
Brent Bozell
March 10, 2004
John Kerry's Super Tuesday wins on March 2 marked the formal start of this year's presidential campaign. This might explain why the liberal media silliness began with the first Bush-Cheney ad buy on March 4. The Bush ads were positive, promotional, piano-plunking, the type that usually bores reporters to death. But this time, they were quickly slammed by the press.
The Democrats thought they had an angle to trip up the Bush campaign, and they pushed it. Say, didn't those ads flash about a second of pictures of September 11? Well, yes, and so what? After being attacked unmercifully by the Left for his handling of the war on terrorism before and after 9-11, shouldn't the president be allowed to defend himself?
Apparently not. Bush, we are told, is playing politics. Which is exactly what his hypocritical critics are doing.
Some relatives of the lost, like Debra Burlingame on MSNBC, said the images of 9-11 "belong to all of us. We were all attacked." But most of the relatives quoted were fierce critics of Bush. Many of those featured in early press reports were members of a little radical conclave called "September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows," founded by about 80 relatives of the more than 3,000 victims of that infamous al Qaeda attack. The Washington Post called them "nonpartisan," which is laughable. They are very active lobbyists of the far Left.
See their Web site at peacefultomorrows.org. Last year, they were hosting protest marches to condemn "the illegal, immoral and unjustified U.S.-led military action in Iraq." They opposed the war uprooting al Qaeda in Afghanistan and complained that 9-11 was "used to justify the deaths of thousands of Afghan men, women and children." Their members give speeches across the country with titles including "Exploiting 9-11 for Empire Building."
Their fundraisers starred Amy Goodman, the host of Pacifica Radio's morning show "Democracy Now," the taxpayer-funded public radio show that replays long speeches by radicals like Michael Moore and Arundhati Roy spewing hate at Team Bush in the ugliest language. "Nonpartisan" is a rotten label for this group because it assumes they have no agenda, that they're quietly apolitical or perhaps soggy centrists.
By the way, please note that the "Peaceful Tomorrows" gang has been funded by a liberal philanthropy called the Tides Center, as their first newsletter in 2002 explains. The Capital Research Center notes that the Tides Center received at least $650,000 in 2001 from the Howard Heinz Endowment, led by none other than Mrs. Teresa Heinz Kerry. Keep waiting for the media to report any of this.
Some anti-Bush critics were so nonpartisan they could not recall whether they voted for Bush or Gore. On MSNBC's "Hardball," Monica Gabrielle, who gained prominence for slashing the Bush ads as "a slap in the face of the murders of 3,000 people," was asked how she voted in 2000. She said, "Politics don't have anything to do with it." Chris Matthews pressed again. She claimed: "You know what? To be honest with you, I don't even recall."
Uh-huh. Maybe Mrs. Gabrielle can recall her political position last summer, when she complained to the left-wing Web site Salon.com: "We've been fighting for nearly 21 months -- fighting the administration, the White House." She told Matthews that Bush spent September 11 in a schoolroom and then on his airplane, so he wasn't a leader. So she is uncommitted on Bush's re-election? She has no agenda? Her activism can be seen as a laudable response to losing her husband, but she should not be presented as having no axe to grind.
Our sensitivity to every image in a Bush ad is not matched by any sensitivity to the tone of Bush's critics. One widow, Kristin Breitweiser, even claimed, "Three thousand people were murdered on Bush's watch." Can you imagine a widow ever getting national media exposure by throwing hardballs about murders on President Clinton's "watch" in Oklahoma City, or the Khobar Towers, or our embassies in Kenya or Tanzania? That would be seen as a low blow, not worthy of broadcast. But not in this election year.
The media are at their most hypocritical when they suggest Bush is unfairly benefiting from 9-11 in his ads. But who has piled on the profits with hours and hours of specials, and newspaper and magazine special editions, devoted to 9-11? Because Bush has done a good enough job in preventing attacks on the homeland, the media can go back to profiting from the usual sludge on Martha Stewart and Kobe Bryant and Michael Jackson.
Imagine how the media will react when the Bush people go negative!
I agree that extremists are behind these attacks...extremist patriots who want the country returned from the bush inc. criminals who have hijacked and sullied it......
I agree that extremists are behind these attacks...extremist patriots who want the country returned from the bush inc. criminals who have hijacked and sullied it......
Fedral, what is the point here? These are finger-pointing articles about people who are pointing fingers. Some people on the left are hypocritical. So what? So are some on the right! Where's the issue here?
kickycan wrote:Fedral, what is the point here? These are finger-pointing articles about people who are pointing fingers. Some people on the left are hypocritical. So what? So are some on the right! Where's the issue here?
Point, all the hot air this forum produces has to have a point?
<looks over his shoulder>
You never told me I had to have a point
The best I can come up with Kick is to show the hypocrisy that exists on both sides of the aisle.
Other than that, as always , I post one of these right wing articles for each left wing article I see posted to try and keep the world karmically balanced.
Okay, I can live with that, and I actually
appreciate it.
I always appreciate the balance here...
Bush is the CIC. Shouldn't he be in the War Room when war breaks out? Or even some anxilliary branch of it? They were targeting planes and Bush gets into one? If he was so afraid of being a target, why did he stay at the elementary school to make all those kids targets too? It was publically known where he was going to be that day. Bush's inaction is suspicious at least, don't you think? Like he knew it was coming, and everything was in place for the stage event...maybe...I'm not saying this is the case, but all the stonewalling over 9/11 isn't helping his case out. People with nothing to hide come clean, not stonewall.
gross generalizations do not a balance make. No link to see where the article is coming from does nothing to create balance. The idea that half the country tells the truth while the other half lies is, well, how can I say what it is and still be nice? Simplistic seems to be the proper word. Sorry. No matter how much lipstick you put on a pig, a pig is never pretty.
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