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10/20/03 The New Bigotry Bias against ethnic minorities and underprivileged genders has been relegated to the shadows of our culture. The only fashionable bigotry now is the bigotry against conservatives that is constantly exploited by liberal demagogues to silence or demonize their opposition. You can't get away with running around to every available microphone calling an American President a liar unless he is conservative. Those who ran to microphones calling President Clinton a liar became the pariahs of their time, the evil panty-raiders who dragged our nation through a pointless scandal. And those men were right: Clinton was a liar and everyone knows it. Now Democrats like Teddy Kennedy run to every microphone they can asserting that "for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks" the administration put out "lie after lie after lie after lie" to frighten the nation into attacking poor, innocent Saddam Hussein. But they can't point to a single demonstrable lie. When the President said British intelligence believed Hussein's regime had attempted to buy yellow cake in Niger, he was telling the truth: British intelligence did believe that then and they still believe it now, as far as I know. Our Clintonite investigator came back with a report purporting to show that no transaction ever took place, but that certainly leaves wide open the possibility that the attempt was made, and failed. When the administration argued that Saddam Hussein was not complying with security council resolutions, they were telling the truth. David Kay's preliminary report contains abundant evidence demonstrating that Hussein had active biological and chemical weapons programs, including precursors and labs, that were in operation until the day the war began, all in violation of security council resolutions that required him to disclose all such programs or demonstrate that they had been dismantled and their products destroyed. It shows that there was a nuclear program waiting in the wings, ready to start up again as soon as the heat was off. Most importantly, for all those claims constantly made by liberals that there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Kay Report clearly shows that no such conclusion can be drawn. There are hundreds of huge ammo dumps in Iraq that have not been searched, and more are being discovered every week. It will take years to search them all, and despite the irresponsible conclusions being drawn by liberals to serve their own shortsighted political goals, we do not know whether WMD will be found anywhere among them. Moreover, all the administration ever claimed before the war was that we had every reason to believe that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons and the capability to deliver them. We knew that he had had them prior to 1998 when he kicked out U.N. inspectors who had found and catalogued many. We know that, despite security council resolutions requiring him to disclose them or show that they had been destroyed, no such evidence had been produced. We had clear and convincing evidence that Hussein's people were actively defrauding Hans Blix's kinder, gentler regime of inspection. In short, we had every reason to conclude that he still had such weapons, because only a fool will walk blindfolded into a room with a mass murderer who had a gun yesterday and who claims, sight unseen, to have thrown it down. No lies here, either. Those who say he lied, are lying. That means you, Teddy Kennedy. You are a liar, and you know it. But lies work, because the media likes them when they embarrass conservatives. Sound bites of Teddy Kennedy and Robert Byrd calling the President a liar without offering a whit of factual evidence (the best they can do is say that he declared before the war that Saddam had WMD, which he did not) go out over the airwaves, and impressionable, ill-informed people begin to wonder if the President isn't a liar. Well, he isn't, so far as the evidence indicates. But why trouble about evidence when you're moving the polls? Far be it from the Daschle's and Kennedy's of the world to let the truth stand in the way of their own demagoguery. And if there can be any doubt that the mainstream press does not fan the flames by piling on when unfair attacks are made on conservatives, let me close with a vignette from a recent edition of Hardball with Chris Matthews on MSNBC. The following exchange took place between Matthews and Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards: Matthews: "... back in the last presidential election a Boston TV reporter Andy Hiller asked the President--presidential candidate George W. Bush if he could name the four world leaders of four hotspots around the world then; they were Chechnya, Taiwan, Pakistan, and India. Do you think that was a fair set of questions to put to a guy running for president, to name those--?" Edwards: "No!" Matthews: "Do you think it would be a fair question to put to you right now?" Edwards: "No; absolutely not." Matthews: "So, you don't want [unintelligible] I have the answers here if you wanted to try, but since you don't want to try we'll move on. If you, uh -- are you sure? You don't want to answer these questions? I know you know at least one of them; you know at least one of them..." Edwards: "Oh, no, no, let's don't [sic] go there." Matthews let it go at that point. When Bush tried to answer the original questions and failed, he was ridiculed as being unprepared for the presidency. Fairness demands that the same accusations of incompetence and lack of preparation now be made against Edwards, but they will not be. This is the new bigotry: conservatives seem stupid to liberals because they don't share the lofty enlightened nonsense that passes for liberal philosophy these days. It is easy for them to conclude, then, when some journalist broadsides a conservative, that the conservative really is stupid. But when a liberal moderator like Matthews tries to give the impression of being even-handed by casually casting the same broadside at one of his own, and the liberal candidate blanches, everyone laughs it off knowingly because they're all in the same fraternity. Well, it really isn't funny. It's a shame that 85% of the people who report the news in this country are registered Democrats, and that this filter determines the features of the political landscape. It is an outrage that "respected" media outlets like The New York Times and the BBC can get away with deliberate slanting and falsification of reports in order to destroy a conservative position, and still be trusted for anything approximating objectivity. But that is precisely the situation we face. Hopefully the growing power of more moderate sources like Fox News will win the day and eventually we will be treated to a much more balanced view of reality. Until then, we'll just have to read very critically to detect and control for the bias, and we'll just have to dismiss any liberal assertion of dishonesty on the part of a conservative until it is supported by some clear and convincing evidence. Modified: 09/10/2004 |
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