A New Low For Liberals
By Edward Daley (10/28/04)
On Monday, October 25th, 2004, the New York Times printed a lengthy front page news story claiming that "380 tons of powerful conventional explosives" had disappeared from a storage facility in Iraq, supposedly while the stockpile had been under American military supervision and control. Throughout the day, newspapers and television networks the world over ran the story, and it wasn't long before Democrat presidential hopeful John F. Kerry was condemning George W. Bush for incompetence over the matter, as he continued on his final campaign swing through New Hampshire.
http://www.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/25/international/middleeast/25bomb.html
Kerry called Bush's alleged failure to have the large cache of weapons secured, "one of the greatest blunders" of his administration, yet there was only one problem with his reprimand... the story wasn't true.
Kerry Slams Bush For "Great Blunder"
http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=608928§ion=news
Only hours after the story broke, CNN reported that the claim of U.S. responsibility for the stolen munitions was utterly bogus, citing an NBC News report of April 10, 2003 by its embedded journalists with the Army's 101st Airborne Division. The report stated that when troops arrived at the Al Qaqaa facility, they found none of the explosives mentioned in the Times article.
Explosives Could Not Be Found When U.S. Troops Arrived
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/10/26/iraq.explosives
Yet in spite of that fact, the "newspaper of record" not only failed to retract the story the following morning, its writers actually followed up on it with another misleading article as if the CNN information did not exist, as did reporters at the Times' sister publication, the Boston Globe, and several other left-leaning papers.
Iraq Explosives Become Issue In Campaign
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/26/politics/campaign/26campaign.html?oref=login
Explosives Were Looted After Iraq Invasion
http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2004/10/26/explosives_were_looted_after_iraq_invasion/
Even though many news agencies have now reported on the initial error, Senator Kerry continues to spread the fallacious claim. During an October 26th speech in Wisconsin, Kerry said "Yesterday we learned that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives vanished from one of Iraq's most sensitive military installations after the invasion." He went on to assert that the president "has failed in his fundamental obligation as commander-in-chief to make America as safe and secure as we ought to be."
Kerry Clings To 'Missing Explosives' Story On Tuesday
http://www.cnsnews.com//ViewPolitics.asp?Page=/Politics/archive/200410/POL20041026d.html
Furthermore, the Drudge Report has learned that Kerry's campaign headquarters have already prepared a new ad (http://www.johnkerry.com/video/102604_obligation.html) which also focuses of this discredited assertion. The following words have been taken from the script for his ad.
John Kerry: The obligation of a Commander in Chief is to keep our country safe. In Iraq, George Bush has overextended our troops and now failed to secure 380 tons of deadly explosives. The kind used for attacks in Iraq, and for terrorist bombings. His Iraq misjudgments put our soldiers at risk, and make our country less secure.
Kerry/Edwards Campaign Preparing Ad On Missing Explosives
http://www.drudgereport.com/dnce.htm
Drudge also reported that CBS, the network which disgraced itself by offering forged documents as proof of its claim that Bush received favoritism from his Air National Guard commander in the late 1960s on its '60 Minutes' program, had manufactured an "October surprise" for President Bush, having planned to release the faulty explosives story on that same, tainted show just three days before the election.
60 Mins Planned Bush Missing Explosives Story For Election Eve
http://www.drudgereport.com/nbcw6.htm
This astounding, and seemingly coordinated effort on the part of the New York Times, CBS News and the Kerry campaign to damage the reputation of George W. Bush, as well as the men and women of the United States armed forces, only a week prior to the presidential election marks a new low in liberal political chicanery.
Not only did these entities, and every other organization (accept CNN) that reported the story, fail to investigate the information presented to them before releasing it for public consumption, many of them, including the Times and John Kerry himself, are apparently in no hurry to admit their egregious error to the American people.
I suspect that once they do, (assuming that they decide to) their admissions will be, shall we say, lacking in the same sort of enthusiasm that their initial reports of a potential Bush scandal possessed. I am also not expecting to hear a heart-felt apology from Mr. Kerry to President Bush anytime soon, although one is certainly warranted in this case.
By any means, this current state of affairs should leave no doubt in anyone's mind that some of the most influential members of the "mainstream" media are steadfastly aligned with John Kerry and his DNC cronies this year, just as they have been in years past with other left-wing presidential candidates.
What should also be glaringly obvious to anyone paying attention is that these people will stoop to any depths necessary to assure a Democrat victory on election day. That they continue to believe in the premise that the end justifies the means, no matter how malicious and deceitful those means may prove to be, is all any undecided voter needs to understand as we go to the polls on November the 2nd.
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