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10/28/04 Another Shameless Deception Shameless deception is the staple of Democratic campaigns. But I'm not sure we've ever seen a candidate as eager to leap on the bandwagon with anyone peddling deceptions, lies, forgeries, and other falsehoods designed to destroy a President as John Kerry is. It raises the question: if George Bush is so incompetent, such a war-monger, so hostile to middle-class voters, why do his opponents constantly lie and twist the truth in order to make their case? Apparently the truth won't make the case for them. Unfortunately, the media don't wait for Kerry to make up outlandish and demonstrably false charges. They make them for him, and he just picks them up and runs with them. Most recently CBS News' "60 Minutes" and The New York Times were pursuing the same story: That the interim Iraqi government had reported to officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that explosives that the Agency had last verified in March of 2003 were stored at the military complex at Al Qaqaa were no longer there. CBS and the Times seized upon this as evidence that the Bush Administration had failed to order troops to secure the nearly 380 tons of high explosives the IAEA had tagged and stored there. The reporters assumed that, since the explosives were not there in May of 2003 (which is when it was actually verified that they were missing), that they had been taken out by looters at some point after coalition forces had secured the area. That assumption is very likely to be false. There is no positive evidence that the explosives tagged by the IAEA were there on the day the war began, much less that they were there when U.S. troops went through the area (on their way to other areas, not to either secure or search Al Qaqaa). Reporters who were with those troops went through the area, and they have said that they didn't see any evidence of IAEA tags, and that it is unlikely any substantial looting was taking place in that area, since it is remote and the roads were clogged with military convoys during the intervening period. The 38 truckloads of explosives would have had a hard time passing unnoticed. But these considerations did not impact the reporting by the Times or Ed Bradley at CBS, who did not bother to be skeptical of their own assumption that it was the incompetence of the Bush Administration that allowed the explosives to disappear. CBS was clearly planning to air the report Sunday evening as a classic "October Surprise" to try to generate a bump for Kerry moving into the election on the following Tuesday. The Times scooped them, so they came forward with the story early. In either event, they handed Kerry a bludgeon which he happily picked up to whack the President with it. Once again, they are acting as an unpaid wing of the Democratic National Committee, doing the dirty work of political hacks like Terry McAuliffe and hatchet-men like James Carville. Now that the facts are coming out, and it is clear that the reporters jumped to hasty conclusions rather than dispassionately analyzing the evidence and reporting only what the evidence would justify. The basis for Kerry's claim, so oft and so vigorously repeated yesterday, that this demonstrates the incompetence of the President, has evaporated. He is once again relying on an assumption, not a fact. If there is any justice, undecided voters will draw the following obvious conclusions: 1) Kerry does not take his own advice on evaluating and carefully using intelligence. Kerry is not concerned to be sure that he bases his public decisions on verifiable truths. He relies on assumptions and biased information supplied to him by biased sources. 2) Kerry doesn't understand the role of the President as Commander-in-Chief. The President does not issue specific orders to officers up and down the chain of command, and doesn't specifically command the day-to-day operations of the troops. He would never have told the troops on the ground to guard a specific spot. He would have ensured that his commanders had general orders they should follow and that they had information that was available to help them apply those orders efficiently. Kerry clearly does not understand, this, or ignores it when it suits him. A man who displays ignorance of the realities of the office of the President is clearly unfit to hold it. 3) Kerry doesn't pay attention to facts that don't support his political aspirations. It has been shown that the evidence for his assertions is lacking, and that there is no evidence of any incompetence, since there was no warning to the administration or the troops until May of 2003--when we now know the explosives were definitely already missing--that there were such explosives there. Thus, even if the explosives were there in April, which is unlikely, there is no reason the Administration would have known, and thus they could not have been expected to take precautions. He points to the 380 tons of explosives as evidence that the administration hasn't protected America, but ignores the 400,000 tons of explosives that have been secured or destroyed in Iraq since the beginning of the war. This means that even if Kerry were right, 1/1000th of the explosives got away. Our military has secured or destroyed 99.9% of the explosives in question, which is a pretty remarkable ratio. Kerry ignores these considerations and continues to make his flimsy accusations. Kerry is exposed as a hypocrite. He criticizes the President for supposedly having entered into the war in Iraq on the basis of flimsy intelligence, and then he himself relies on flimsy reporting to criticize the President's execution of that war. He also sets an unrealistic standard. 99.9% efficiency (at worst, and perhaps 100%, since we don't know that this stockpile was ever in a position to have been secured) at safeguarding the American People is not enough. He will rarely, if ever, achieve that ratio of success should he become President, but since he has established that standard, he can be beaten with it by his enemies anytime they want, and he won't be able to criticize them without exposing his hypocrisy yet again. He exposes himself as a shameless political opportunist. He doesn't wait to be sure something is true before he beats his opponent with it, and since dishonesty is his favorite charge to level against that opponent, he again shows blatant hypocrisy. But let Kerry be a liar and a cheat. He's a liberal politician, so what else is new? But journalists aren't supposed to be stumping for any politician, much less one that can't stop himself from lying if there's any political hay to be made for it. They are supposed to report the facts and let people decide. But the Times, and ABC, and CBS have shown their true colors. The Times cares about the truth when they think they can make Bush look like he wasn't truthful, but they don't care about the truth when liberals or their own reporters make up tales. CBS finds forged documents convincing because they justify their own anti-Bush conclusions, not because there's any evidence the documents are real. ABC finds it unnecessary to hold liberal politicians like Kerry equally accountable for dishonesty, because they've already concluded that Democrats are less dishonest (despite the fact that the things they say rarely turn out to be true) than Republicans (despite the fact that the things they say can rarely be shown to be false). The liars and cheats in the media might succeed in duping undecided and politically unsophisticated voters to vote for the more dishonest, more hypocritical, less consistent, less hawkish candidate at a time when having an honest, straightforward, consistent, and aggressive president is as much a necessity as it has ever been. It is outrageous that people who hold a public trust would abuse it so in pursuit of their own biased agenda. I suppose that they have good intentions (that is, I assume they have themselves believing their own fantasies about Bush as the sinner and Kerry as the saint). Let's not let them pave our road with them. We don't want to go whither that road leads. Modified: 10/31/2004 |
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