Objectivity (Or The Lack Of Same)
By Charles Cole (10/19/04)
One point on the recent presidential debates has yet to be “debated” – the insistence of the “mainstream” media to inject itself in a self aggrandizing and pompous manner. One wonders, why do the Republican candidates are forever expected to acquiesce to debates on hostile university campuses? Why are the likes of Jim Lehrer, Gwen Ifil, Charles Gibson, and Bob Schieffer the “auricles” who decide what to ask and what to omit?
For example, Charles Gibson selected an audience member to ask the President what three mistakes he most regretted. No such question was directed at John Kerry – a man who had disgraced himself, besmirched his fellow veterans, and betrayed his country in the early 1970s, and yet now wants to command U.S. troops in the field during a war. Does this mean that he has nothing to be “sorry” for? Hardly, one supposes.
In the third “debate”, Mr. Schieffer started tossing softballs for Kerry to hit out of the park after the tide seemed to have turned in the President’s favor around midway through the action. Liberals can always be expected to rescue their protected species (Democrats) when the going gets tough. Kerry seemed to acknowledge this fact by beginning his answer to one of the softball questions by saying, “I want to thank you for asking that question”. Little wonder that he would be grateful for the help!
One wonders why individuals such as Brit Hume, Rich Lowry, or Michael Barone, are never included as debate “moderators”. But, alas, such folks are “biased”, as opposed to the “independent”, fair-minded, “objective” folks selected as moderators.
John F. Kerry has served for some 20 years on the Senate Intelligence Committee. How about asking him why he missed so many of that committee’s meetings and hearings. He voted several times (most notably in 1995) to handcuff the CIA with inane “guidelines” which the agency’s erstwhile director warned would emasculate their ability to provide accurate, timely intelligence. No questions about that either. Gee, that’s strange.
Bernard Goldberg was right on the mark in his book “Bias” when he blew the lid off the clear ideological bias of the “mainstream” media. Example after example from the current election cycle reinforce Goldberg’s claims. Here are but a few:
John Kerry consistently tells the American people that the current administration routinely “misleads” them on important issues – most notably on the war in Iraq. The record is very clear as to which party has “misled” the people about getting into wars. One of their most (in)famous “leaders” of the 20th century – Lyndon Baines Johnson – made the following promise a few weeks before the 1964 presidential election: “I will never send American boys to do what Asian boys should do”. One year later, he had sent 125,000 American ground troops into the rice paddies of Southeast Asia. All forgotten. After all, as with Bill Clinton, it’s always time to “move on”.
On the contentious issue of judicial nominations, the following remarks of Senator Edward M. Kennedy appear in the September 21, 1999 Congressional Record:
“For several months, many of us have been concerned about the Senate's continuing delays in acting on (the president’s) nominees to the federal courts…. These delays can only be de- scribed as an abdication of the Senate's constitutional responsibility to work with the President and ensure the integrity of our federal courts. The continuing delays are a gross perversion of the confirmation process that has served this country well for more than 200 years…. The vast majority of these nominees are clearly well-qualified, and would be confirmed by overwhelming votes of approval. It would be an embarrassment for our colleagues to vote against them. It should be even more embarrassing for the Senate to abdicate their clear constitutional responsibility to do what they were elected to do. It is true that some Senators have voiced concerns about these nominations. But that should not prevent a roll call vote which gives every Senator the opportunity to vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’.…. It is long past time to act on these and other nominations. I urge my colleagues to end this partisan stall and allow the President's nominees to have the vote by the Senate that they deserve.”
Compare those words with the actions taken by the Democrat cabal in the U.S. Senate, including Senator John Kerry. They have engaged in an unprecedented filibuster of several Bush judicial nominees for positions on the important federal circuit appellate courts. Yet, once again, leftwing Democrats say one thing, then proceed to do the precise opposite! Nevertheless, their allies in the “mainstream” media, as usual, fail to hold them accountable for such overt duplicity. None of this year’s debate moderators deemed that matter of sufficient importance to merit a question for Mr. Kerry.
Even when a question is asked and a Democrat dissembles in his response to it, no one ever follows up to challenge their positions. Consider the following examples:
John Kerry drones on incessantly about the importance of “international coalitions” to carrying out operations such as Iraq, not to mention his concoction of a “global test” which he feels America must pass before applying military force to a matter of national security. Perhaps a truly objective interviewer would ask him why he would suppose the French, Germans, and/or Russians would ever have agreed to join with us in actions bound to expose their connection with Saddam Hussein in the Oil for Food debacle.
Kerry consistently claims that America is needlessly bearing the brunt of the burden in the war on Iraq. Perhaps some interviewer might ask him if that means that he would have opposed the Korean War, too. After all, casualties suffered by 15 of the 16 allied U.N. nations in Korea totaled just over 3,000, while America lost over 54,000 of its sons in that action. Even in new math, that meant that America bore 96% of the casualties in the U.N. military operation in Korea. But, I suppose that must have been somehow justified, whereas with the Iraq situation, such a burden is considered unwarranted.
Finally, consider the following remarks of John Edwards during the Vice Presidential debate in response to a question about the issue of gay marriages:
“No state for the last 200 years has ever had to recognize another state's marriage. This is using the Constitution as a political tool, and it's wrong…. I want to make sure people understand that the president is proposing a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage that is completely unnecessary. Under the law of this country for the last 200 years, no state has been required to recognize another state's marriage. Let me just be simple about this. My state of North Carolina would not be required to recognize a marriage from Massachusetts, which you just asked about. There is absolutely no purpose in the law and in reality for this amendment.”
It makes one wonder whether Mr. Edwards ever took a course in Constitutional Law! Perhaps a truly “impartial” moderator would ask a follow up question to determine why Mr. Edwards thinks that the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case of Loving v. Virginia (which required Virginia to acknowledge an interracial marriage from another state in contravention of Virginia state law at the time) would not be binding on the states today vis-à-vis marriages granted by other states. Maybe the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the Constitution would somehow be put in abeyance on the issue of the recognition of one state’s marriage by another state? As usual, the “mainstream” media refuses to point out this glaring misstatement of fact, not to mention the fact that “objective” moderators don’t consider a follow-on question to be in order.
The clear fact is this: the hard leftwing oriented “mainstream” print and electronic media, including their so-called “objective” colleagues in the PBS system, really do agree with Tom Brokaw who claimed that holding Dan Rather accountable for his clearly intentional use of bogus falsified “documents” is akin to a “jihad” carried out by whacko internet bloggers. With overwhelming majorities of journalists and university professors self identifying themselves as liberals, the deck is clearly stacked against conservatives in general and Mr. Bush in particular.
Despite this control of the information dissemination industry for over three decades, the current presidential race is a dead heat – clearly demonstrating the ideational bankruptcy of the left. In football terms, competing against the likes of John Kerry, Ted Kennedy and John Edwards is similar to allowing the other team to begin their offensive series at midfield, while your team must always start at their own 10-yard line. Let’s not pretend that it is any different.
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