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FOOL
ME TWICE: ANTI-BUSH BIAS FROM NEW ORLEANS TO BAGHDAD
By Rod D. Martin
"Fool me once,
shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."
-- Old adage
"Well,
there you go again."
-- Ronald Reagan
There they
go indeed. And shame on anyone for believing them anymore.
I mean, of
course, the elite liberal media, who will stop at nothing to topple the Bush
presidency.
Not even if it
means manipulating the news about war and natural disasters.
Remember all those
New Orleans horror stories, the ones that could've given Attila the Hun
goosebumps?
An
Editor & Publisher headline that screamed, "Mortuary Director Tells Local
Paper 40,000 Could Be Lost in Hurricane"?
CNN
reporting shots being fired at rescue helicopters?
CNN's Paul
Zahn decrying "bands of rapists, going block to block?"
Oprah
Winfrey telling her wide-eyed audience that "gangs banded together and had more
ammunition, at times, than the police?"
Eager-beaver media scribes dutifully reporting Randall Robinson's lunatic claims
of people "eating corpses to survive?"
It turns
out they were all just that: stories. Lies. Lies which could have been shown
false had Shepherd Smith just bothered to walk into the Superdome.
And when
this hysteria was found to be just lies, that should have become the biggest
story of all.
But it
didn’t.
So most
Americans are left with the initial story -- the false one. The one which
tanked George Bush’s poll numbers.
So it is
with Iraq.
From the
day America moved to oust Saddam, the usual suspects -- from CBS to the New
York Times -- eagerly predicted calamity and searched fervently for any
signs of it.
Yet
virtually all their prognostications failed to materialize.
Casualties?
Minimal. Oil fields? Protected. Saddam attacking Israel? Never happened.
Post-war refugee problems? Nope. Iraqis weren't leaving; they were returning
in droves to their Saddam-free homeland.
And since
Saddam's removal, guess which part of Iraq has garnered virtually all of the
Bush-bashing media’s attention?
Why, the
Sunni Triangle, of course, Saddam's home turf.
Never mind
that nearly everywhere else, there is no "insurgency."
Never mind
that the "insurgency" is doomed so long as virtually everybody but a handful of
Sunnis opposes it.
Never mind
that across Iraq, the progress is overwhelming, as Americans and Iraqis together
build schools, enhance security, empower civil society, and ensure a brighter
economic and political future.
Never mind that
most of the fighting -- and dying -- for the new, free Iraq is being done by
patriotic Iraqis. And never mind that the endlessly-reported U.S. death toll is
half the rate even of U.S. training deaths each year.
Never mind
that literally millions of Iraqis -- alone in the Arab world -- have twice stood
up to terrorist bullies, voting first to elect new leaders and just recently to
ratify their new constitution.
And that
includes 105,000 Iraqis in Fallujah, once the heart of the insurgency, who
turned out last month to vote on the new constitution.
Oh, and never mind
that before each of these elections, al Qaeda proclaimed loudly that merely
holding the election -- regardless of outcome -- would be a “crushing defeat”
for their cause.
To the
left-leaning media moguls and those in their employ, none of this matters,
because all of it vindicates President Bush.
Which is
partly why so little of it gets reported.
How bad is
the Bush-bashing bias?
In a survey
of 1,388 Iraq stories on the evening news programs of ABC, CBS, and NBC from
January through September of this year, the Media Research Center found that 61%
were negative or pessimistic, while only 15% were positive or optimistic, a
four-to-one ratio.
Fully two
out of every five stories featured specific terrorist attacks.
But it gets
worse.
There were
79 stories about alleged wrongdoing by our soldiers, while only eight stories
highlighted their obvious heroism and only nine featured their unending acts of
compassion and generosity.
And even
when the topic was Iraqi democracy -- which al Qaeda itself defines as victory
for us and “crushing” for them -- negative stories outnumbered positive ones by
a 124-92 margin.
In other
words, heads we win, tails you lose.
And
speaking of loss, there's no question that this grossly biased reporting has
helped embolden the foreign terrorists and homegrown Saddamites, and caused
needless loss of American and Iraqi lives.
One need
not be cynical to ask whether that wasn't the idea in the first place.
Either way,
one thing is crystal clear: When a media story concerns President Bush or his
pro-American, pro-democracy policies, expect what you got in New Orleans:
outright lies at every turn.
Fool us
once, shame on them. Fool us twice -- well, you know the rest.
Copyright: Rod D.
Martin, 18 November 2005.
-------------------------
--
Rod D. Martin is Founder and Chairman of Vanguard PAC <http://www.theVanguard.org>.
A former policy director to Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Special Counsel to
PayPal.com Founder Peter Thiel, he is a member of the Board of Governors of the
Council for National Policy, Executive Vice President of the National Federation
of Republican Assemblies (NFRA), and editor and co-author of
Thank You, President Bush, the definitive handbook to the second term.
Vanguard PAC
1099 Forest Lake
Terrace
Niceville, FL
32578
850-855-5412
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