When Mrs. McPhillips came to the White House, she was joined by her husband, David — a Marine combat vet of Vietnam — as well as Brian’s younger sister, Carolyn. They sat on one of the sofas in the Oval Office. When the president entered the room, he said, “I have two daughters, and I can’t imagine what it would be like to meet with the man who was responsible for their death.”

“It’s comforting,” Mrs. McPhillips replied softly. And thence commenced a 45-minute exchange about Brian, about Iraq, about what the president hoped to accomplish in the Middle East, and so on…At various points, their conversation was punctuated with observations on the challenges and consolations of faith.

I was never lucky enough to know Brian McPhillips in life. I know enough, however, to recognize in this Providence College graduate the kind of man you hope would be leading your son if your son were going into battle. The kind of man you pray will be waiting at the altar the day you walk your daughter up the aisle.

These men are not born; they are formed — by families like the McPhillips, by institutions such as the Marine Corps, and by the convictions that extort sacrifices from any who dare to live by them.

…on a day that celebrates the arrival of hope into our world, the McPhillips refuse to concede the last word to grief. This Christmas, Mr. Bush’s last as commander in chief, Mrs. McPhillips would like him to know how grateful they are that Brian served a president who was determined, at great cost to his own popularity, to ensure that their son’s sacrifice would not be in vain.

“Mr. President,” she says, “Brian was proud to be a Marine. And he carried within him the same light that you do — a faith in God, in America, and in the dignity and worth of every man, woman, and child on this earth.”

“A blessed Christmas for you and your family, Mr. President.”

One of the offenses of the left-leaning media establishment is it’s contempt for the values of honor, duty, commitment, and faith.  Thus, a spiteful Cindy Sheehan is glorified as the public face of grieving families of fallen warriors.  The hundreds, if not thousands of families who don’t want to be identified with her are simply ignored, and thus in the mind of much the public, don’t exist.

Do yourself a favor and read the whole editorial.

One might assume that Albert Hunt, after decades as a political columnist and TV talking head, would be an intimidating combination of wisdom and intellectual prowess.  But in today’s column Hunt continues earn his reputation for shallow, simplistic, mostly emotional commentary.

It seems that the daughter of President John F. Kennedy, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, wants to be appointed by the Governor of New York, to take over the US Senate seat that Hillary Clinton will vacate when/if she is confirmed by the Senate to be the new Secretary of State.

After hiring a public relations firm to help her influence Governor Paterson, Ms Kennedy has suspended use of her married name, Schlossberg.

Ms. Kennedy has been criticized for expecting a free ride on her family name since she has no relevant experience or record of accomplishment that would qualify her to serve in the Senate.  Hunt undertook to explain why she should be appointed anyway.  Among his reasons:

• She possesses a collegial charm that would serve her well in the Senate.

Fine, she’ll be fun at Georgetown cocktail parties.  Has she read and does she fully comprehend the US Constitution?

• None of the other unqualified candidates the media herd speculates are being considered by the Governor are as “compelling.”

Do any of them understand the Constitution?

• There are several sitting senators who traded on family names to get elected.

Yep, and almost none exhibit Constitutional competence, as they continuously promote and vote for laws and intervention into the private economy not authorized by the Constitution.  Hunt declares:

Hillary Clinton’s political success in the state derived from the huge amount of attention she paid to [the neglected, rural, Upstate] area. Can Kennedy quickly learn that the Buffalo Bills are not a barbershop quartet and empathize with heartbreaking stories in Elmira?

Maybe Ms. Kennedy can deceive uninformed voters as well as Hillary.  But what about the economic crisis?  Since the new President and Congress are determined to continue the Bush policy Unconstitutional intervention in the private economy, does she at least understand economics well enough to be able to predict the negative consequences? Apparently not.

Hunt goes on to assure us that she can “conquer the challenges” of a “rough and tumble world’ where a Staten Island party…

…was attended by men with oiled pompadours, women with teased updos and floor-length furs, retirees and grizzled members of a Vietnam veterans’ motorcycle club.

What, you ask, is this rambling claptrap?  I kid you not, this was part of the August Albert Hunt’s defense of Caroline Kennedy as the best New Yorker to serve in the US Senate.  And Hunt actually gets paid to write this twaddle!

Hunt adds that…

She has all the qualities — intellectual curiosity; a friendly, at times pointed, sense of humor, and a deferential manner (she hails her own cabs) — that are the stuff of a good legislator.

WOW!  She hails her own cabs!  Well, what else do we need to know about her?  Where do we sign up for her fan club?

America is a nation in crisis, largely because we’ve elected very wrong people to high political office, people who traded in celebrity status and/or family wealth but lacked any record of real achievement, and certainly did not understand the Constituiton they were sworn to uphold.  Commentators like Al Hunt have been part of the problem all along.

We who believe in the principles of liberty, free markets, and personal responsibility must convince fellow Americans that the time has come to toss the political-media establishment’s failed ideas in history’s ash can and elect leaders who will limit the power of government to those functions authorized by the United States Constitution.   We can not survive as a nation if we continue to elect incompetent politicians with no relevant experience or qualifications.

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]]> http://libertyworks.com/media-picks-caroline-kennedy-for-senate/feed/ 2 http://libertyworks.com/media-ignored-or-praised-chicago-politics/ http://libertyworks.com/media-ignored-or-praised-chicago-politics/#comments Thu, 11 Dec 2008 20:42:19 +0000 BoomerJeff http://libertyworks.com/?p=2026 News that until this week Obama’s Senate seat was up for auction to the highest bidder has focused the nation on the perennially corrupt Chicago political machine.

But before the election the national media dutifully denied  voters any review of the rich history of dirty politics in Obama’s home town and political indoctrination center.

The Media anointed candidate won the Presidency and Time Magazine was still caught up in the euphoria a few days later when it published a piece by Amy Sullivan called “How the Chicago way Helped Obama.”

Below are some choice excerpts.  Of course news that until this week  Governor Blagovech was offering Obama’s Senate seat up for auction to the highest bidder makes these excerpts even more laughable than when they were written.

…since Barack Obama’s election, conservatives have been busy warning that…dozens of Chicago advisers, officials and fundraisers have helped grease Obama’s ascent from community organizer to President-elect.

John McCain trotted out a similar attack against Obama in the last few months of the campaign…But [it] didn’t resonate with voters.

The jab was based on an outdated caricature of Chicago…

What McCain and fellow Republicans didn’t (and probably still don’t) understand is that being from Chicago is now an asset for a presidential candidate, not a liability.

It’s possible, due to the intense efforts of the national media to ensure that most Americans were not informed of Obama’s political heritage, that being from Chicago might indeed have been an asset.  Candidate Obama could benefit from the services of a corrupt political machine, while the media swaddled his naive, young supporters in emotional slogans, masking the stench.

The problem with trying to taint Obama with the label of “Chicago politics” is that most Americans no longer make the association with corruption.

Since Obama’s media fans understood that “most Americans”  know only what the networks and newspapers decide they should know, they created a fumigated, political bio of Barack Obama deleting any references to corruption in Chicago.

These days Chicago is known for blending working-class kitsch…with cosmopolitan shopping and restaurants on Michigan Avenue. Its graceful mix of cutting-edge, environmentally conscious modern architecture and classic parks and buildings has actually given it a reputation as a model of a 21st-century metropolis.

Obviously, appealing buildings and parks do not cleanse corrupt, local politicians.  But, in a typical Big Media diversion, the author inserted her emotional reaction to the city’s ambiance as if it were somehow relevant.

After the Blagovech revelations, this final excerpt is so preposterous it stands alone with no need for further comment.

…for now, Republicans might need to look for a new line of attack. With Obama on his way to the White House, the [Chicago bred] Axelrod-Emanuel-Podesta trio by his side and Illinois Senator Dick Durbin the new center of influence in the U.S. Senate, Chicago Democrat appears to be a winning label.

A typical example comes from New York Times columnist Frank Rich who just spit out a column asserting

“a violent escalation in rhetoric, especially (though not exclusively) by Sarah Palin.”

Rich cites several examples, only one of which might border on excessive, Ms. Palin’s line about “palling around with terrorists.”

Included in Rich’s list of examples of “violent escalation in rhetoric” is this from Sarah Palin’s stump speech:

Obama “launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist.”

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Since Barack Obama does not deny that his first campaign event was in the home of William Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn, why shouldn’t Gov. Palin mention it?

Ms. Dohrn was convicted and served a prison sentence for terrorist acts.  Charges against Ayers were dropped because evidence against him had been gathered illegally by the FBI.  But Ayers openly admits to his terrorist acts and has said in recent interviews that he does not regret them, and that he should have done more.

Another of Rich’s examples of “violent escalation in rhetoric” is the next line in Gov. Palin’s stump speech, when she says

Obama  “is not a man who sees America the way you and I see America.”

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Is this really a “violent escalation” compared to the continuous stream of invective from Obama and the Democrats charging McCain and Bush are “out of touch” with working people, that they care only about Billionaire CEOs, that they are “destroying the middle class,” that they want 100 years of bloody combat in Iraq, that they are robbing you of your health care?  What about the hundreds of leftist websites and YouTube videos claiming President Bush is directly responsible for the 9-11 attacks?  Come on Frank!  Get Real!

Rich charges that “Wielding a wildly out-of-context Obama quote, Palin slurs him as an enemy of American troops.”

Well, here’s a 15 second video of Barack Obama’s remark, that Gov. Palin quoted:

Obama regrets it, but he did say that, and it may be an indicator of his real attitude toward the American Military, that because they may not have enough resources to do execute the mission the way he thinks they should, they turn into rogue thugs who “air raid villages and kill civilians” without remorse.

Let us not forget that Obama’s great advantage in this campaign has been the nearly total lack of any publicly available information, other than two books he wrote about himself, that would give voters a sense of his character or his core beliefs. In the prologue to his second book Senator Obama wrote:

…I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.

He has used his blank screen status to maximum advantage throughout this campaign by making sure his past remains mostly a mystery.  The few publicly available character indicators voters can review are his associations with unsavory men such as convicted political fixer Tony Rezko, former terrorist William Ayers, and the Anti-American racist, Reverend Wright.

Frank Rich went on to allege “the uninhibited slinging of racial epithets,” at McCain-Palin events.  If you click on the link Rich provides to back up this allegation, you find it to be based on another opinion column by Dana Milbank, who claims that one person in the audience at one campaign event said to an African-American TV technician “sit down, boy.”  If this really happened, it’s obviously repulsive and inexcusable.  But nobody with an ounce of common sense would believe that John McCain or Sarah Palin condoned such language, or that they directly control each of the tens of thousands of people who decide to show up at a campaign event.

Are we expected to believe that nobody in any Obama audience ever said anything offensive?  Perhaps the media believes we have forgotten that Barack Obama sat in the pew for 20 years, absorbing Reverend Wright’s racist messages and wild accusations against America, including:

• The US Government introduced AIDS into the black population
• America is a terrorist nation and 9-11-01 America’s chickens came home to roost

YouTube has hundreds of videos of Reverend Wright’s incendiary sermons

Thus began the opportunity of a lifetime for local reporter Tom Brokaw to appear daily on TV screens across the nation. Early media speculation about celebrities, drugs and sex turned out to be tame stuff compared to reality, the seventeen month, made-for-TV investigation and outrageously bizarre trial of Charles Manson and his freaky, female cult followers.

The Manson trial propelled Brokaw from reporter at the local NBC affiliate to national reporter at the network, and eventually to the NBC Evening News anchor desk.

Today, after four decades of reading teleprompters, Tom Brokaw is the Eastern political-media establishment’s semi-retired News Personality Emeritus, who is called forth whenever the appearnace of sage wisdom and gravitas seems appropriate.

Last night Mr. Brokaw demonstrated the power of a professional media personality to dumb down what we were promised would be a lively “town hall style” debate, with questions from “real people.”  John McCain, we were told, is most effective in the town all format, exchanging ideas directly with regular Americans.  This debate would be his moment to shine.

Eighty “Real People” who claimed they were “undecided but very interested voters” were picked by the Gallup polling organization.  Each offered a question he or she wished to ask the candidates.  Also, the Internet flood gates were thrown open to several million suggested questions.

But the catch was that News Personality Emeritus Brokaw was appointed sole decision maker, to determine which of the eighty audience questions, and millions of Internet questions would be presented to the candidates.  Not surprisingly with so many choices, he managed to cull out the very questions he, himself would have asked, had there been no input at all from the Real People.  Then, the Real People in the audience whose questions had been picked were forced to stand in front of the camera and act like mechanical replicas of themselves, stating their questions as briefly as possible, forbidden to interact with the candidates.

Finally, as if his power over the process wasn’t complete enough, Brokaw inserted several additional questions of his own, between the selected, Real People questions.

So, what was billed as John McCain’s shining moment, in spontaneous give-and-take with voters, turned out to give the advantage to Barack Obama, whose skills are best suited for the tediously predictable,  personality driven TV format.

Brokaw was helped by John McCain’s apparent lack of preparation.  Senator McCain introduced what might have been a headline-making plan to deal more effectively with the financial crisis than The Big Bailout passed last week.  He might have lured Obama into arguing against what could be a much more popular alternative.  But his presentation was so halting and sketchy nobody could be sure what, exactly, he was proposing, so Obama didn’t bother to risk a response.

Whoever McCain trusted to negotiate the rules for this sham town hall should resign in shame.  Tom Brokaw might well have succeeded last night in his transparent attempt to make sure Barack Obama wins the Presidency.

She didn’t know what he meant and asked for clarification, which he refused to give.  So she ventured a general answer.

Finally, he sneered at her over his half-glasses, and ponderously explained what he meant, playing the long-suffering professor, contemptuously instructing the naive Freshman.

Here are the facts:

• There is no Administration policy or government publication or law or executive order with the official name “Bush Doctrine.”
• In his column in the Washington Post Charles Krauthammer, who was first to use the label and is as authoritative as anyone, lists four Bush Administration policies or initiatives that have been called “The Bush Doctrine” by major media outlets.
• The Bush-haters in Congress and the media have carelessly applied the label in scores of ways.  Law enforcement policies they disliked, tax cuts they disliked, poverty, illness, high priced gasoline, and crowded airports, have all been called “The Bush Doctrine.”

Only by being a mind reader could Sarah Palin have known what Charlie Gibson meant by “The Bush Doctrine.”

In our previous post we discussed The Left’s irrational fear of religious expression, and Charles Gibson’s outrageous attempts to deceive ABC’s TV audience by misquoting remarks made by Sarah Palin to a gathering at her church.

Someone should remind The Left of their roots.

On the evening of June 6, 1944, as American troops began the D-Day landing on the coast of France, The Left’s most revered President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, led America in prayer over nation- wide radio  Here are some excerpts:

My Fellow Americans:

…in this poignant hour, I ask you to join with me in prayer:

Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.  Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.

They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.

And for us at home — fathers, mothers, children, wives, sisters, and brothers of brave men overseas, whose thoughts and prayers are ever with them — help us, Almighty God, to rededicate ourselves in renewed faith in Thee in this hour of great sacrifice…As we rise to each new day, and again when each day is spent, let words of prayer be on our lips, invoking Thy help to our efforts.

With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogances. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace — a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil.

Thy will be done, Almighty God.

Amen

This Presidential prayer was considered entirely appropriate by almost every American, including the Democrats in Congress!

How far we have come since then.  Imagine the outrage from The Left if, on the eve of the military operation against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, President Bush had appeared on TV to lead the nation in the same prayer, and hoped to do God’s will!

One wonders what FDR would say to those who now lead the movement he started, and who are so hysterically intolerant of any expression of this nation’s Judeo-Christian foundation and traditions.

Below is a video the media herd and the Leftist blogs have used as a source of quotes they hope you will find as objectionable as they do.
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In this video Ms. Palin  speaks to people in the church she attended for most of her life, from early childhood.   Her tone is informal and familiar as she skips from thought to unrelated thought, enjoying an emotional reunion with beloved old friends.  Quite obviously she is not giving a serious political or theological address.

In Last night’s combative interview Gibson sneered:

You said recently, in your old church, ‘Our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God.’  Are we fighting a holy war?

Ms. Palin responded by noting that this was not an exact quote, but Gibson snorted, emphatically, “exact quote.”

Well, it was not an exact quote.  Gibson lifted 14 words out of the middle of a rambling, 58 word sentence.  With the portions Gibson deleted in strikeout print, Here is what Ms. Palin actually said in her “old church”, beginning at 3:35 in the video:

Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right, also for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God, that’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that it is God’s plan.

After Gibson blatantly lied that he had quoted her exactly, she apparently decided it was futile to keep insisting that he had not.  Instead she cited the theological basis for the thought she had expressed in the video:

…the reference there is a repeat of Abraham Lincoln’s words when he said — first, he suggested never presume to know what God’s will is, and I would never presume to know God’s will or to speak God’s words.  But what Abraham Lincoln had said, and that’s a repeat in my comments, was let us not pray that God is on our side in a war or any other time, but let us pray that we are on God’s side.

Then Gibson lied a second time by again lifting a few words out of context from a longer thought:

I take your point about Lincoln’s words, but you went on and said, “There is a plan and it is God’s plan.”

This is from the same excerpt quoted above.  Here is the complete thought, with the portion Gibson left out in strikeout print:

…that’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that it is God’s plan.

Obviously, Gibson believed he could trip her up and deceive his audience by deliberately, deleting major portions of her thoughts, in order to change the apparent meaning.  And he probably did succeed in deceiving a lot of viewers.  By sourcing Ms. Palin’s casual and intimate stream of consciousness,  as if it were a serious statement of political or theological beliefs, Gibson proved he lacked any record of genuinely objectionable comments by Governor Palin.

Ms. Palin expressed the perfectly reasonable, non-controversial hope and prayer that national leaders might want to act in accordance with God’s will.  But Today’s hyper-secular Left, including the national media reacted as if they thought she had a supernatural power to inflict a black-magic curse on the nation.

Sarah Palin can take comfort in the words of Jesus found in Matthew 5: 11 – 12:

God blesses you when people mock you and persecute you and lie about you^[c] and say all sorts of evil things against you because you are my followers. Be happy about it! Be very glad! For a great reward awaits you in heaven. And remember, the ancient prophets were persecuted in the same way.