Ben Johnson
Ed Schultz, the Left’s spokesperson fer jest-plain-folks, attempted to belittle Karl Rove on “Psycho Talk” but ended up belitting himself. He singled out an interview Rove did on Fox News about the dangers of giving far-Left Congressmen classified information. In that, Rove noted the anger leftists had over not being briefed about a CIA proposal that was never operational. Schultz singled out this Rove quotation as beyond the pale:Â “We, the left-wing in Congress, want you to brief us on ideas you have, not necessarily on programs.”
Schultz began with his characteristic eloquence: “UH, let’s be clear. This was not an idea; this was a plan.”
Thanks for clarifying that, Ed.
A scheme by any other name is still hypothetical.
Jacob Laksin’s lead story at FrontPage Magazine outlines the manufactured controversy.
Not long ago, Democrats, chastened in the 2004 election by “values voters,” embarked upon a campaign to communicate their new-found, lifelong values. To this end, Democratic candidates began repeating the Name of Jesus more often than Billy Graham in a series of crusades and Larry David in his entire HBO series combined. But they could not long maintain the charade.
On her program tonight, Rachel Maddow launched her second straight day of Cassandra cries on the C Street home, a house in Washington, D.C., which hosts Bible studies for Congressmen and organizes the annual National Prayer Breakfast; its sponsor has organized prayer rallies for Mideast peace and instigated an eventual peace treaty between Rwanda and Congo. Maddow has painted the organization, “The Family,” as a shadowy group of right-wing theocrats.
Maddow failed to inform her viewers that, according to the far-Left DailyKos blog, among onetime associates of The Family is the rabid right-winger Hillary Clinton. Clinton, who once had a White House seance to communicate with the ghosts of Eleanor Roosevelt and Mahatma Gandhi, joined a Family Bible study in the 1990s. The DailyKos’ take? “Fundamentalism is not the religion of the GOP, it is the established religion in Washington and it to some extent maintains control over both parties.” [sic.] (Current Democratic C Street residents include Congressmen Rep. Mark Doyle and Bart Stupak.)
Rachel Maddow hit upon another conspiracy, as well: she claimed Monday that a Congressman “described one of the most worrying aspects of this shadowy, powerful organization: its secrecy.”
Maddow was building on her Friday program, when she was outraged that two C Street residents, John Ensign and Mark Sanford, ”say now that they disclosed [their extramarital] affairs to other members of Congress and other people affiliated with this secretive religious group for a long time while the affairs continued, and while they were kept secret from the world at large. This organization was allowed to know but nobody else was.”
Maddow may be interested to know that dastardly “religious secrecy” is more widespread than she ever dared dream. There is a worldwide organization so powerful that scores of Congressmen, prime ministers, and even crowned heads of state whisper their secret sins in a dark, hidden place — even though those sins may go on for years, or their whole lives. The members of that group who hear these confessions must keep “absolute” secrecy, upon pain of serious discipline by the organization. (Imagine, people whose first inclination is not to run to the media. They treat personal sins with greater delicacy than Democrats treat CIA secrets.) Why, there’s probably even one of their outposts in Maddow’s own town.
Perhaps the only thing more ridiculous than Maddow’s clueless response to Christian counseling is her attempt to make the organization threatening. Last Friday, Maddow interviewed author Jeff Sharlet, who “infiltrated” the group and wrote an “expose” remarkable for how boring it is. Apparently the cabal centers mostly around memorizing Scripture, praying, and basketball. Sharlet’s other revelations include:
- “To the Family, Jesus is not just a name; he is also a real man.”
- The C Street “regimen was so precise it was relaxing: no swearing, no drinking, no sex, no self.”
- One boarder took a vow of “abstaining from “shady†R-rated movies, lest they provoke dreams of women.”
Only the Left can demonize Ned Flanders.
Anyone searching for an explanation of why the mass media’s coverage is typically so far off-base could begin with Howard Fineman’s performance on Countdown with Keith Olbermann last night.
Olbermann, who never lets any facts interfere with his political grandstanding, was busy misrepresenting the CIA’s reaction to the letter seven Democrats wrote to director Leon Panetta. (Read the details in today’s lead story on FrontPageMag.com.) Panetta briefed the House Intelligence Committee on June 24 about a defunct program he had just learned about, and which he said the CIA had not fully disclosed before. The media have breathlessly reported this is an admission that the CIA had misled, or even lied to, Congress for eight years. The previous evening, Andrea Mitchell told Olbermann, “The CIA and Leon Panetta are not acknowledging, in any fashion, that he testified that there was any misleading of Congress. That is not true.†Nonetheless, Olbermann reported the letter and Panetta’s non-response as an admission of deception.
After interviewing one of the letter’s authors, Olbermann asked Howard Fineman if Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi had been “vindicated†in claiming the CIA had not told her about waterboarding and lies to Congress “all the time.” Fineman immediately responded, “Yes…Yes, she’s been vindicated, no question about it.â€
The chief problem with this is, as Andrea Mitchell told Olbermann the night before, the program in question had nothing to do with waterboarding, interrogation techniques, or Pelosi, and thus provided no vindication for Pelosi’s claims whatsoever. It was, at most, an indication Congress had not been briefed on one minor program that was never made operational, not that the CIA regularly lies to innocent San Francisco leftists. Somehow, Fineman used one assertion to prove an entirely unrelated conclusion, which happened to match his political views.
This was an encore performance for Olbermann’s audience, which was treated to a similar journalistic sleight-of-hand from Fineman’s colleague at Newsweek, Michael Isikoff, last week. Isikoff maintained the fact that President Bush and Vice President Cheney had had a conversation about another topic somehow proved that they coordinated the leaking of Valerie Plame’s name from antiwar conservative Richard Armitage to antiwar conservative Robert Novak.
These are no anonymous left-wing bloggers. Fineman is “Newsweek‘s Senior Washington Correspondent and Columnist, senior editor and deputy Washington bureau chief”; Isikoff is one of the publication’s most prominent reporters.
Their fact-free assertions should make one question all Newsweek‘s output.
Despite stereotypes about “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” it is the Left that will never let a good conspiracy theory die. Last night’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann proved the point, as it attempted to resurrect the vast Bush-Cheney conspiracy to humiliate truth-teller Joseph C. Wilson IV. On the MSNBC program’s third story, guest host Dan Abrams (Keith Olbermann was out; celebrate small blessings) said new information had surfaced that could possibly be interpreted to indicate Bush and Cheney may have discussed revealing Plame’s CIA position ”to punish or discredit her husband, Joe Wilson, who had just blown the lid off President Bush’s lies about Iraq trying to buy a uranium [sic.] from Niger” (which he gave the obligatory pronunciation Nee-zhair).
The idiocy of this statement has been covered repeatedly in FrontPage Magazine, here, here, here, here, here, here, and elsewhere.
Abrams blustered on: “Despite the Obama administration’s growing pattern of public secrecy, the filing does appear to offer something new, namely official confirmation or further confirmation that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney did in fact discuss the Plame leak” — but ”When is not clear.” Then he brought on Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff.
Isikoff revealed how vast this conspiracy had become. Not only did antiwar conservatives RobertNovak and Richard Armitage do the Bush administration’s bidding, but their newest conspirator is Barack Hussein Obama.
“Time and again…[leftists] see the Obama administration retreating to using the same arguments for secrecy that were used by the Bush administration. We saw that with the decision to withhold the photos of detainee abuse,†Isikoff whined.
Why would Obama want to do such a thing? Isikoff notes one result of the decision to protect American lives is “to further blunt the calls for accountability and a truth commission on this the harder it is to build the political pressure for some form of accountability†— for detainee abuse cases whose perpetrators have already been ajudicated and punished.
Returning to the Plame case, he said Bush and Cheney discussed how to rebut Joe Wilson’s assertion the president knowingly lied about Iraq seeking yellowcake uranium in Niger, a story the British continue to affirm as true. Isikoff intoned the duo decided to “selectively declassify and leak aspects of the  NIE on Iraqi WMD that they thought would support their case,” and that led to Scooter Libby speaking with Judy Miller, and “that was the fateful conversation when disclosed the fact that Joseph Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, worked at the CIA.â€
The correlation between these two events is nearly as strong as the causal link between pickles and cancer. The declassification of the NIE has absolutely nothing to do with Richard Armitage revealing Valerie Plame’s occupation to Robert Novak. The NIE does not mention her. These unrelated facts are intertwined only to give Isikoff a truth on which to hang his conspiracy theory.
Reading Isikoff’s three part exchange with David Horowitz and Ben Johnson on the book Party of Defeat offers insight into his thinking and “unbiased journalistic” outlook.
Unlike President Bush or Vice President Cheney, Michael Isikoff’s lies really did cause people to die. In May 2005, he and John Barry “reported†in Newsweek that Guantanamo Bay guards had flushed a Koran down a toilet. His story was a lie premised on the flimsiest of pretexts: it was based on one anonymous source, one “no comment,†and the non-denial of an uninformed party. But it demonized U.S. soldiers, and the unsourced story went forward post haste.
In his last exchange, he continued to defend the story, like Mary Mapes continuing to look for proof George W. Bush did not complete his National Guard training, or O.J. looking for the real killer.
In the Left’s obsessive imagination, Plame goes marching on.
The only thing worse than Populist nonsense is pseudo-Populist nonsense. Enter Ed Schultz. Tonight on MSNBC’s The Ed Show, the Left’s least-unsuccessful talk show host (none can be called successes) took aim at Newt Gingrich in his “Psycho Talk†episode. (There’s truth in advertising.) Channeling Rush Limbaugh, if Limbaugh had one-half of his charisma and one-quarter of his IQ, Schultz showed common-man grit by repeatedly calling Gingrich “The Newtster.†Schultz called the former Speaker a psycho for stating the twin facts that 260 million Americans have health insurance, and “71 percent of Americans are relatively satisfied with†it.
The Edster shot back: “Alright, a study out of Harvard showed that in 2007, 78 percent of people who had filed for bankruptcy because of medical debt had obtained and currently held health insurance.â€Â This is true, and it undermines his contention that universal, taxpayer-funded health insurance would act as a panacea for all the nation’s troubles. If high health care costs, regardless of insurance coverage, are the problem, the answer must be to bring costs down. One way to accomplish this is to increase the number of health care providers, and to increase the incentives for them to compete by offering lower prices and better services. To entice more health care workers into the field, the administration would have to limit frivolous lawsuits, cut bureaucratic demands on their performance, and eliminate the rationing that acts as a disincentive to doctors remaining in the profession.
Instead, Ed just complained that Newt was wrong, because new insurance is “too damned expensive.†And Newt knows this and he doesn’t care! “He only worries about fear-mongering, pushing the Republican line.â€
This is the same Ed Schultz who was purchased as a subsidiary of the Democratic Party and began his career with $800,000 raised by Senate Democrats to spread their propaganda, yes?
On CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 last night, Cooper used the handover of power in Iraq to examine the costs and benefits of the war, an exercise he called “an exercise in raw politics and, of course, human lives.†Cooper introduced Tom Foreman, who presented what seemed, for CNN, a relatively balanced analysis – which caused my senses to tingle like Chris Matthews’ thigh during an Obama stemwinder.
Foreman opened, “The cost of Iraq is easy to see and hard to look at.†He noted the number of American and Iraqi civilian deaths, as well as its alleged economic costs. “The Bush administration thought it would be quick and relatively cheap – $60 billion, maybe,†but Foreman informed his audience: “Plenty of analysts think the tab could run to $1 trillion or more.†Indeed, one such economist estimates a trillion dollar price tag – by 2015; others inflate the costs by attributing the entire rise in oil prices to the war. In April, the Obama Pentagon estimated the cost at $694 billion, or less money in six years than President Obama spent the day he signed a $787 billion stimulus bill that has increased unemployment to 9.4 percent (reportedly 9.6 percent as of tomorrow). But what is money when, as Foreman noted, “the world’s opinion of the U.S. has plummeted�
CNN’s journalist then moved to the war’s benefits, which “are trickier to calculate since polls show most Americans are against it, and they don’t really see any benefits.†Thanks for the heads-up. He made the obligatory remark: “We now know Hussein did not have Weapons of Mass Destruction, but we also know he did want them and had worked on getting them.†He acknowledged the war helped “avert potential, future threats†from Saddam and his sons, and that democracy had taken root in Iraq.
True, he missed a few other benefits: the bloodthirsty barbarians of Al-Qaeda were driven out of the area that Osama bin Laden called the “epicenter†of the War on Terror; Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (the bin Laden ally who personally beheaded American businessman Nicholas Berg) was killed; the people of Iraq decisively turned against jihad after living under the strictures of Shari’a; Abu Abbas was captured in Baghdad, 17 years after he had masterminded the Achille Lauro hijacking and murdered an elderly, crippled American Jew; Abu Nidal (the Palestinian terrorist leader and Saddam ally) died, under whatever circumstances; Saddam’s $25,000 honoraria to suicide bombers’ families came to an end; the Kurds were freed from the threat of genocide to develop a democratic, pro-American Kurdistan; the Iraqi government-sponsored rape rooms were closed; the recreational use of electric drills on children’s craniums was suspended; and the man “responsible for the deaths of more Muslims than any single leader since the Mongol hordes invaded the Middle East in the 13th centuryâ€Â was put to death.
Still, despite being leavened with dismissive comments, it had been a remarkably balanced report for the mainstream media.
Then Foreman got to his final benefit.
Pointing to a large screen featuring a picture of Barack Obama, Tom Foreman intoned dramatically: “And–there–is–this: not only did the war’s unpopularity lay the groundwork for Barack Obama’s election, but it’s also been a training ground for American troops learning to fight against insurgencies, lessons that are already proving critical as they shift to the new president’s top military concern now: the war in Afghanistan.â€
“[N]ot only did the war’s unpopularity lay the groundwork for Barack Obama’s election“?
Ah, a benefit from the war at last.
The unbiased professional journalism begins at 26:50.
