Category ►►► Media Madness

July 22, 2008

In This Corner, the NYT: Even Worse Than We Thought!

The story about the New York Times refusing to run John McCain's op-ed responding to Obama's propaganda piece is "old news"... which wouldn't stop us ordinarily; we love to take on old news -- even ancient history -- if we can offer a unique, lizardly slant on things. But in this case, it had seemed kind of cut and dried, with everything obvious we could say having already been said by, e.g., Power Line and Patterico's Pontiff Vacation (Wolf Howling is on the same track as we).

But here is a rare piece of breaking news on Big Lizards... as in, breaking the facade of elite journalistic objectivity wide open. In a stunningly candid attempt to "defend" his position, the editor of the Times' editorial pages, David Shipley, has admitted that he spiked the McCain op-ed precisely because he doesn't agree with it... despite the fact that "op-ed" -- which literally means "opposite the editorial pages," in terms of its physical placement on the other side of the printed sheet -- has historically also indicated an opinion piece that differs from that of the editors... even at the august NYT:

In an e-mail to the campaign on Friday, David Shipley, an op-ed editor at the newspaper, said he could not accept the piece in its current form, but would look at another version. In the e-mail, released by McCain's campaign, Shipley wrote that McCain's article would "have to lay out a clear plan for achieving victory -- with troops levels, timetables and measures for compelling the Iraqis to cooperate. And it would need to describe the senator's Afghanistan strategy, spelling out how it meshes with his Iraq plan."

In other words, sure, we'll publish your opinion piece... when you adopt Barack H. Obama's position on a set timetable for withdrawal, no matter the facts on the ground.

While no legal rule requires a newspaper to be fair -- obviously, or the elite print media wouldn't even exist -- the Times and other top "news"-papers has certainly claimed for decades that they do not discriminate against those candidates they oppose, that they are unbiased in their willingness to allow both sides of contentious issues to be aired, that they are not simply partisan propaganda mills for liberal Democrats. But this brazen new fracas puts paid to that false preening. Shipley has as much as said that he won't publish McCain's response unless McCain relents and "admits" that Obama is right and McCain is wrong on the critical foreign-policy issue of this campaign.

As I've said before, the new motto of the New York Times should be, "all the news we see fit to print!"

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 22, 2008, at the time of 8:29 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

July 20, 2008

Will Elite Media Ask Obama Whether Their Coverage of Him is Fair?

Well, we're not quite back yet; but we're out of the back country and rarin' to jump back into the political fray. So cowboy up and read on!

The elite media love to gaze upon Barack H. Obama... but if there is anything they love more, it's gazing upon their own navels. Thus, we're not at all surprised to note that the big story of the day is -- "What should the big story of the day be?" Or in this case, who should it be... and should it be Barack H. Obama all day, every day?

Television news' royalty will fly in to meet Barack Obama during this week's overseas trip: CBS chief anchor Katie Couric in Jordan on Tuesday, ABC's Charles Gibson in Israel on Wednesday and NBC's Brian Williams in Germany on Thursday.

The anchor blessing defines the trip as a Major Event and -- much like a "Saturday Night Live" skit in February that depicted a press corps fawning over Obama -- raises anew the issue of fairness in campaign coverage.

The news media have devoted significantly more attention to the Democrat since Hillary Rodham Clinton suspended her campaign and left a two-person contest for the presidency between Obama and Republican John McCain, according to research conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The media have two competing impulses here:

• One is the irresistable force of their desire to elect the "revolutionary" Obama, whose soap-bubble-thin image mirrors every radical longing these wannabe Weathermen wannasee crammed down the throat of real America... each desire highlighted in the prismatic, rainbow aura in which these "journalists" see themselves.

(I remember when I was about five and a half years old and in a funk about something bad that had happened, I would visualize myself standing tall, arms akimbo, atop a platform shaped like a giant, scintillant number six; I convinced myself that When I Was Six, all would be airy perfection and rushy success.

(I envison Charles Gibson and Brian Williams doing roughly the same thing; respected elder statesmen that they are, they're still but pre-schoolers in the emotional and spiritual sense.)

• The countervailing impulse is the immovable object of journalists' song of themselves: pristine, Ivory-Soap exemplars and Templars of absolute neutrality and unbiased, tell it like it is honesty.

Their desire to save the world careers headlong into their Gibraltaresque image of themselves as Murrow, Cronkite, and Rather tossed together and covered with Green Goddess dressing; they cover Obama obsessively, all the while questioning their own politicking with a primal, narcissistic scream of existential angst.

I fill to the brim with sardonicism.

A large part of my amusement flows from the inability of newsies even to recognize how biased they really are. For example, throughout this song of themselves, all actors assume that naturally, what Obama does is truly "newsworthy"... while McCain is just the same, boring old story:

News executives say there are reasons for the disparity, such as the continuing story about whether Clinton's and Obama's supporters can reconcile. [What about the "continuing story" about whether McCain and conservatives can reconcile?] They even partly blame McCain. By criticizing Obama for a lack of foreign policy experience, McCain raised the stakes for Obama's trip, "especially if he winds up going into two war zones," said Paul Friedman, senior vice president of CBS News.

Obama has traveled to Afghanistan and is expected to go to Iraq. He is also scheduled to visit Jordan, Israel, Germany, France and England. Network anchors stayed home during McCain's recent foreign excursions.

When McCain travels to Afghanistan and Iraq, it's stale, old news. When Obama does the same, it's Obama traveling to two war zones! -- and it leads. But it's worse than that... the elite media simply cannot imagine that anyone in the country is interested in anything that a Republican says or does, except to the extent that it illustrates his perfidy. Thus, in their minds, there are no McCain stories to report in the first place:

Friedman cautioned against reading too much into things like PEJ's coverage index, noting that it's a long campaign. Yet it's an open question about whether Obama is simply a more interesting candidate at this point, partly because McCain has been on the scene longer.

While fairness is the goal, "what are we supposed to do, go gin up some story about McCain to get some rough equality of airtime?" he said. "I don't think so."

Well, for starters, CBS and the other nets could try honestly reporting McCain's speeches, policy proposals, legislation, pork-busting activities, biography, and growing support within both the Republican and independent communities... you know, the same things they report with breathless excitement about Obama. (Except that B.O. hasn't any of those qualities but the first -- a few speeches that push all the right buttons in all the right megaphonic media mavens).

But such open-minded, democratic coverage you will not see. Boiled down, the nabobs simply cannot bring themselves to believe that anybody cares a fig for John S. McCain. So they will go through the motions, rolling eyes and hucking and smirking, reassuring themselves that they're beacons of objectivity... all the while making the world safe from democrazy and other derangements.

But it's to no avail, because these media legends in their own minds are about as subtle, opaque, and inscrutible as Barack Obama's personal presidential seal. With every
"fawning" performance, the American voter will further discount anything he sees, reads, or hears about the Obamessiah from the anointed ones.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 20, 2008, at the time of 10:54 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

July 6, 2008

War Trauma, Media Style

A judge in upstate New York has set up a special court for veterans, evidently on the media-driven, criminal-justice theory that staggering numbers of vets, far more than ever in the past, are returning PTSD-struck from the parade of horribles in Iraq and Afghanistan:

While the defendants in this court have been arrested on charges that could mean potential prison time and damaging criminal records, they have another important trait in common: All have served their country in the military.

That combination has landed them here, in veterans treatment court, the first of its kind in the country.

[Judge Robert] Russell is the evenhanded quarterback of a courtroom team of veterans advocates and volunteers determined to make this brush with the criminal justice system these veterans' last.

"They look to the right or to the left, they're sitting there with another vet," Russell said, "and it's a more calming, therapeutic environment. Rather than them being of the belief that 'people don't really understand me,' or 'they don't know what it's like' - well, it's a room full of folks who do."

All right; I don't really have any objection to such a special court... in theory; though I have yet to see any evidence that veterans, as a group, tend to be more criminal-minded than civilians who have never seen an actual battlefield. (In fact, I'm of the impression vets are less likely to commit crimes than eternal civilians.)

I would expect such a court to be geared specifically towards those vets with extensive combat experience, having seen their best friends murdered by Islamist terrorists, who have seen children blown to pieces by al-Qaeda bombers. I can imagine a veteran who has had to deal with such death-worshippers and human-sacrificers might have problems adjusting to civilian life.

You know, vets like this guy:

Charles Lewis, who stood before Russell at a recent session, may be exactly the kind of defendant the judge had in mind. The 25-year-old acknowledged walking out in frustration from his last counseling session.

"We all know that you're a good person who at times has done some inappropriate things," Russell told him. "It's time to get past the nonsense, don't you think?"

Lewis nodded in agreement. A jet mechanic four years into what he thought would be a 20-year Navy career, he severely injured his leg on the flight deck of the carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt in 2004 and was discharged.

One can only imagine the horrors he must have seen. I don't exactly recall which combat operations in Iraq or Afghanistan used carrier-based aviation, nor do I quite understand exactly what trauma would be faced by a mechanic who stayed on the ship. But it must have been something pretty horrendous to produce such symptoms...

Admittedly stubborn -- he walked out of counseling because he got tired of hearing people complain -- the 25-year-old father of four is only now addressing anxiety and attention disorders linked to his wartime service and the toll it took on his leg and hearing. A 30-day stay in rehab to get off prescription drugs began his path through veterans treatment court.

Here is another obvious case of combat psychosis:

The approach cultivates a sense of trust and understanding, said Guy LaPenna, a 40-year-old veteran with a history of stealing and drug violations. The high-stress life of Navy duty aggravated problems he had before, but he said he left the service an angry alcoholic battling mental health issues.

Russell is "appreciative that we're working so hard," said LaPenna, a high-energy personal trainer. He is following the veterans court program to see a petit larceny charge dismissed, "but the real reward is getting my life back and functioning as a member of society, a productive member of society," he said.

Before I get lynched by vets, I want to say that I don't begrudge any service veteran getting some special treatment later in life; vets give a portion of their lives to their country, it's reasonable that they get some consideration in return.

But when the media begins slinging around words like "post-traumatic stress disorder" causing "anxiety and attention disorders" that are "linked to his wartime service" or "the high-stress life of Navy duty," I honestly expect better examples than four gut-churning years working below decks on an aircraft carrier which never came under attack (none of them have).

Rather than allow what could be a valuable program to be hijacked by anybody who has ever worn a uniform, no matter how far removed from the action or whether he even left the United States, I wish they would direct the benefits to those vets who actually fought and bled for America.

And I really, really wish the elite news media would stop trying to portray all veterans -- even those whose service was more or less indistinguishable from similar jobs in the private sector -- as ticking time bombs just waiting to explode. It's offensive and jarringly tendentious.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 6, 2008, at the time of 10:10 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

June 25, 2008

Blackballing Charlie Black

Both wings of the Democratic Party (the political wing and the elite media) have piled onto poor, old Charlie Black, a senior advisor to John S. McCain, for a comment of his. Yet nobody has the faintest idea how the exchange actually ensued, or whether Black was an idiot or was set up (after the fact).

Even so, and not surprisingly, a passel of crowing, self-righteous Republicans has loudly joined the scrum, eager to do as much damage to their own candidate as possible... a sadly typical manifestation of the Republican tendency towards self-immolation that we've seen in every election from 1988 onward. It seems we must always fight on two political fronts: against the Democratic nominee and against all Republicans who supported a different candidate to be the GOP nominee.

For the record, here is the entire "terrorist attack" exchange from Fortune Magazine that has caused all the ruckus. McCain is asked what will be America's biggest economic challenge during the next president's administration, and he answers, "Well, I would think that the absolute gravest threat is the struggle that we're in against radical Islamic extremism, which can affect, if they prevail, our very existence. Another successful attack on the United States of America could have devastating consequences."

Not a bad answer; the attack on September 11th, 2001, was apocalyptic not only due to the loss of more than 3,000 innocent lives (counting those who died in the moment and those who died later), but even more via the crushing blow to the American economy it precipitated, which affected everyone, rich and poor alike. McCain answered Fortune's question exactly, despite the rather adolescent response of Editor at Large David Whitford:

Not America's dependence on foreign oil? Not climate change? Not the crushing cost of health care? Eventually McCain gets around to mentioning all three of those. But he starts by deftly turning the economy into a national security issue - and why not? On national security McCain wins. We saw how that might play out early in the campaign, when one good scare, one timely reminder of the chaos lurking in the world, probably saved McCain in New Hampshire, a state he had to win to save his candidacy - this according to McCain's chief strategist, Charlie Black. The assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December was an "unfortunate event," says Black. "But his knowledge and ability to talk about it reemphasized that this is the guy who's ready to be Commander-in-Chief. And it helped us." As would, Black concedes with startling candor after we raise the issue, another terrorist attack on U.S. soil. "Certainly it would be a big advantage to him," says Black.

Following which, the article simply moves on, making no further reference to Black's response; evidently, the supposely staggering nature of this allegedly shocking admission entirely escaped the notice of Mr. Whitford at the time.

As Fortune admits, it was they, not Black, who "raised the issue" of who would benefit from a terrorist attack on the American heartland. Black merely responded to the question.

And to what question, exactly, was Black responding? Fortune doesn't tell us, and there is evidently no transcript or video available. Perhaps it was super explicit: Mr. Black... if there were another 9/11, would that benefit Barack Obama or John McCain most? Yet on the basis of that single, flimsy piece of evidence, Republicans are willing (eager) to ascribe the basest and vilest motives to Black.

One prominent conservative blogger (much prominenter than we) goes so far as to sarcastically ask whether Black thinks that it would be even more advantageous if a terrorist attack slew Obama himself and all other Democratic candidates in some blue state... a smear I consider low enough to have been published by a Markos Moulitsas or a Juan Cole.

But what is so outré about his answer? If Whitford asked Obama's campaign mangler whether a sudden downturn in the economy would be good for his client, and if he answered honestly that it probably would, would anyone -- even Republicans -- be up in arms? Or would they simply agree?

For some reason, when a disaster or catastrophe occurs, Republicans (but not Democrats) grow suddenly reticent about noticing that it might have a political impact among all the other real-world effects it causes. Desite our evident foot-scuffing, red-faced embarassment at noticing such trivia in the midst of crisis, politics is an integral part of our lives... and the shifting sands of electoral fortune usually determine whether we respond to adversity with courage and vigor -- or whether we turn tail and run from the fight.

Take Hurricane Katrina. Even before it made landfall (at a greatly reduced category 3), Democrats were already on the air slamming Bush for his "non-response" (which was actually one of the fastest and most effective disaster responses in history, as we noted more than two years ago). Yet rather than fight back against the Democratic smear machine, Republicans lined up by the score to castigate, ream, and verbally defenstrate the president for his "pathetic," "incompetent" preformance. They cheered Democrats on as the latter singled out FEMA director Michael "Brownie" Brown and called him a clownish dullard who allowed hundreds of helpless old people to drown -- by not waving his hands and magically diverting the storm elsewhere.

Republicans have a terrible penchant for joining any hysterical lynch-mob attack on fellow Republicans: Perhaps to prove they're not really the heartless, unfeeling fiends that liberals portray them to be; more often to advance their sectarian civil war with other GOP blocs. But rather than engender respect from the Left for their principled nuance and unbiased fair-mindedness, they call only even more energetic contumely upon their heads.

We have a bad habit of playing dhimmi to the Democrats... and it's so ingrained that many conservatives cannot help themselves, even when they know the scam being run. They eat their own as inevitably as a dead frog leg twitches when you zap it with a few volts of electricity.

As here. There is nothing indefensible about what Black said; he spoke the truth: Another terrorist attack would focus voters' minds on national security, just as another Senate scandal would focus voters' minds on congressional corruption. Either might turn the election.

So let's cut the dramatics and stop pretending that politics doesn't matter, or that it should be "above the fray" of real-world battles and other incidents. Had the counterinsurgency gone ill, doed anyone think Democrats would have hesitated for a nanosecond to use that failure -- which could have led to the deaths of far more than 3,000 Americans -- to ride their way into la Casablanca?

Instead of trying to suck up to the Left by cannibalizing our own troops, why don't we point out the hypocrisy of a party whose motto is "the personal is political," and which has in very recent memory politicized the war, 9/11, various natural disasters, and the funeral of Sen. Paul Wellstone, whining that Charlie black is trying to "politicize" a presidential election.

Of course a terrorist attack would affect the vote. So would an assassination, the capture of bin Laden, an Iranian demonstration of a nuclear bomb, or an economic collapse (which the Democrats are assiduously trying to bring about, in contrast to Republicans, who are doing their best to prevent another 9/11). How could such earth-shattering events fail to influence the vote?

Instead, let's defend the importance of politics and the election. Let us note that Democrats seem more than eager to return to the halcyon days of Jimmy "Malaise" Carter and Walter "We Must Not Arm the Heavens" Mondale. And let's stick up for Charlie Black telling it as it is... something Democrats couldn't do if their reelection depended upon it.

And for God's sake, stop playing errand boy to Barack Obama. Let him pedal his own smears.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 25, 2008, at the time of 3:47 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

June 24, 2008

The Big Lizards "Name That Party" Drinking Game!

Welcome, gentle readers. Here are the official rules to the new, fad drinking game of -- Name That Political Party.

Here are the rules:

1. Find a story published by some member of the elite media (or wannabe-elite) about political corruption;
2. If the first paragraph of the story reveals that the corrupt pol is a Republican, take a shot each and every time the story mentions that urgent fact;
3. Contrariwise, if the first paragraph of the story does not say anything about the political party of the indicted, investigated, or indicted politician, take one shot for each and every paragraph that does not mention any political party;
4. Finally, in the event of rule (3), where the story does not mention the political party of the elected official of interest, you must look him or her up by other means -- and if it turns out, by wild coincidence, that he or she is a Democrat, you must take two more shots.

Here is a sample, so you can see how the game is played...

The story in the Baltimore Sun (in the elite-wannabe category, I would say) is "Dixon gifts probed; Prosecutors look at mayor's ties to developer who got city breaks." It begins thus:

Prosecutors are investigating whether Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon received thousands of dollars in gifts -- including fur coats -- from a prominent developer whose projects benefited from tax breaks and zoning changes she supported as City Council president, a document obtained by The Sun shows.

We can now begin the game. Note that the first paragraph does not say "Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon, a Republican;" thus we invoke rule 3, and you must drink a shot for the opening paragraph (running shot total: 1).

A little later in the article, we find this paragraph:

Dixon was also scheduled to meet with Lipscomb and Sen. Ulysses Currie, a Prince George's County Democrat who is now under federal investigation, in February 2004, according to the documents. They do not say what the meeting was about.

Although this says nothing about the political affiliation of Mayor Dixon herself, it does mention a political party; thus technically you do not have to take a shot for this paragraph... only for the intervening paragraphs from the beginning until this one (running shot total: 26). (If you're simultaneously playing the "Politicians With Doofus Names drinking game," add another shot for "Ulysses Currie" and increase all totals below by 1.)

There are no other mentions of political parties in the story, so just take a shot for each of the remaining paragraphs (running shot total: 32).

Finally, per rule 4, we turn to Wikipedia and look up the party of Ms. Dixon (final shot total: 34).

See? Another marvelous media method to get faced, courtesy the malevolent muttonheads at the MSM!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 24, 2008, at the time of 2:53 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

May 29, 2008

McClellan's Losing Campaign - Part II

Scott McClellan's pathetic campaign against George W. Bush -- hence for the election of Barack Obama -- continues apace; he keeps talking about more snippets from the book in interviews.

Today, McClellan bores deep into the Plame name blame game, which he sees as a "turning point" in his relationship with the president. But here is an oddity: It was clear to everyone from at least October 28th, 2005 -- the day that Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald indicted "Scooter" Libby -- that it was not true that Libby was uninvolved in the inadvertent leak of Valerie Plame's CIA affiliation; and it was also well known by then that Karl Rove had testified five times to Fitzgerald's grand jury, correcting some of his testimony. As I recall, we already knew at that time that the correction involved a conversation Rove had with Matt Cooper of Time Magazine... which clearly implied that Rove, too, had inadvertently revealed Plame's employment.

So by late October, 2005, Scott McClellan already knew that what he told reporters in 2003 was wrong. This was the moral "turning point," he now says.

Yet he continued in his White House employment, after Libby's indictment, for six more months; he did not resign until late April, 2006 -- when he was ousted by new White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten. Some "turning point!"

And once again, not a single charge of McClellan's is backed up by any evidence so far released... and much of it is in fact contradicted by strong, available documentation. (And this complete lack of evidence does indeed make McClellan, as Rove put it, sound like a "liberal blogger!")

Not only that, but McClellan and his new allies in the elite media (didn't they used to despise him?) now stoop to deliberate obscurantism to hide the absurdity of what they're claiming. Viz:

[McClellan] was ordered to say from the press room podium that White House aides Karl Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby were not involved in leaking CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity to the press. Later a criminal investigation revealed that they were.

Revealed that they were "involved," yes; revealed that they were criminally culpable? No.

In fact, neither I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, then Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff, nor Karl Rove, then Deputy White House Chief of Staff for Policy, was ever indicted for leaking Plame's name or CIA affiliation: Libby was indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice, and Rove was never indicted for anything at all.

("Involved" -- what a weasel word! For that matter, Robert Novak, Matt Cooper, and Tim Russert were also "involved," weren't they?)

During the investigation, Richard Armitage, then Deputy Secretary of State to Secretary of State Colin Powell, admitted that he was the first to inadvertently leak to reporter Robert Novak the fact that Lyin' Joe Wilson's wife was in the CIA; Armitage was also never indicted on any charge. Had the leak been intentional, the leaker would almost certainly have been indicted; thus it's a pretty fair conclusion that the Special Counsel believed the leaks were unintentional and inadvertent. (Particularly so since Armitage, like his boss Colin Powell, opposed the Iraq war... so why would be try to "discredit" the guy who was trying to prevent it?)

So yes, Libby and Rove were "involved in leaking CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity to the press;" but AP (and McClellan, so far as they report) fail to mention that they were both exonerated of the accusation that they did so deliberately in order to discredit Wilson.

You would think that would be an important part of the story.

Here's another wonderful bit of half-truth misdirection from AP, which they save to the end as the supposed killer-anecdote that demonstrates, to everyone who already suffers from BDS, what a liar and hypocrite is George W. Bush:

And [McClellan] recalled a day in April 2006, when the unfolding perjury case against Libby had revealed that Bush secretly declassified portions of a 2002 intelligence report about Iraq's weapons capabilities to help deflect criticism of his case for war. High-profile criticism was coming from Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, in those days before the war. [Take note that AP doesn't reveal what this "declassified" intelligence report was; but I'll let the beans out of the bag in a moment.]

The president was leaving an event in North Carolina, McClellan recalled, and as they walked to Air Force One a reporter shouted a question: Had the president, who had repeatedly condemned the selective release of secret intelligence, enabled Libby to leak classified information to The New York Times back then to bolster the administration's arguments for war?

McClellan took the question to the president, telling Bush: "He's saying you yourself were the one that authorized the leaking of this information."

"And he said, 'Yeah, I did.' And I was kind of taken aback," McClellan said.

"For me I came to the decision that at that point I needed to look for a way to move on, because it had undermined, I think, a lot of what we had said."

Really? Let's stick a few particulars into that vague and smelly indictment...

First, anytime an administrative official speaks to a news source off the record -- even if fully authorized -- that could be called "leaking." As McClellan himself has done this many times (along with every other White House Press Secretary), he should not feign such horror.

Second, let's clarify what "intelligence report" Bush "declassified" in 2003 or 2004 (not 2006). There are only two possibilities that McClellan could be referencing, and the first is easily dismissed:

• The October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate;
• Or the 2002 intelligence report on the debriefing of a certain former ambassador who was recommended by his CIA wife to be sent to a certain African country.

The October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate

President Bush relied upon this estimate, compiled by the CIA, in his decision to ask Congress for an Authorization for the Use of Military Force; an AUMF is the legal equivalent of a declaration of war.

By mid-2003, with the war in full swing, the elite media was abuzz with claims that the 2002 NIE had said that Iraq had no WMD and was not even trying to develop any. In particular, these many stories claimed that the idea that Saddam Hussein was trying to obtain Uranium had been "debunked" by the CIA before the war -- and that the war was therefore entirely predicated on a lie.

It turns out that all these stories had a single source: Former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, who had been sent to Niger by the CIA in response to his CIA wife's nagging of the Agency.

It was absurd that the CIA accepted Plame's suggestion of her husband for the trip. Its purpose was ostensibly to determine whether Saddam Hussein was trying to buy Uranium yellowcake, yet Wilson had no expertise whatsoever in nuclear or WMD investigations. He did, however, have one indispensible qualification: He already believed the story was a fairy tale, even before he left for Africa.

When he returned, and after he was debriefed by his CIA handlers (see below), he covertly went to numerous elite-media sources and told them that he had found that the idea that Hussein was trying to acquire Uranium yellowcake was bunk. Later, he published an op-ed in the New York Times (July 6th, 2003) titled "What I Didn't Find in Africa," in which he peddled the same claim.

As more and more people came to believe, because of this disinformation campaign, that the administration had "lied us into war" (a cherished Democratic mantra), the president decided to declassify parts of the NIE on which he had relied. Not the whole thing, as that would reveal sources and methods; just the "key judgments" that the CIA presented the White House. He did so with great fanfare on July 18th, 2003... the day after Scott McClellan was named White House Press Secretary. This is an important point: McClellan was already the presidential spokesman when Bush announced the declassification of parts of the NIE and distributed it to reporters; and even prior to his promotion, he was the Deputy Press Secretary to Ari Fleischer.

Therefore, I suggest that the NIE cannot be the "2002 intelligence report about Iraq's weapons capabilities" that Bush "declassified," which McClellan now says he first found out about in April of 2006. Obviously, McClellan knew about the declassification of portions of the 2002 NIE way back in 2003... when the rest of the civilized world found out about it.

So this cannot possibly be what AP means above, unless Scott McCellan is dumber than a box of Barbara's boxers. That leaves only one other reasonable possibility:

The 2002 intelligence report on Joe Wilson's debriefing by the CIA

On July 7th, 2004, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence issued a document titled Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq. In the section titled "Niger," there is a chapter tantalizingly called "the Former Ambassador." It includes the following summary of the previously classified CIA debriefing of "the former ambassador" -- that is, of Lyin' Joe Wilson -- when he returned from the trip to the African nation of Niger that his CIA wife, Valerlie Plame, wangled for him. The briefing was included in an intelligence report disseminated within intelligence-community circles on March 8, 2002.

When the Senate Intelligence Committee wanted to publish their report, they asked the president to declassify any intelligence in the report that was still classified. Bush complied; we don't know whether Wilson's debriefing was declassified at that point or before, but I don't recall anybody writing about it until after the report came out.

I strongly believe that this is what AP means when they write "Bush secretly declassified portions of a 2002 intelligence report about Iraq's weapons capabilities to help deflect criticism of his case for war." I can think of no other 2002 intelligence report that has made its way into the unclass information world besides these two... and it cannot possibly be the NIE for reasons elucidated above.

But why did this declassification so enrage the Left -- and so horrify Scott McClellan, becoming one of his "turning points?" Let's see what, exactly, former Ambassador Joe Wilson did tell his CIA handlers when he returned. In this case, speculation is unnecessary, because we know exactly what information Wilson gave them from his little Nigerien adventure. From that same chapter linked above:

The intelligence report based on the former ambassador's trip was disseminated on March 8, 2002. The report did not identify the former ambassador by name or as a former ambassador, but described him as "a contact with excellent access who does not have an established reporting record." The report also indicted that the "subsources of the following information knew their remarks could reach the U.S. government and may have intended to influence as well as inform." DO officials told Committee staff that this type of description was routine and was done in order to protect the former ambassador as the source of the information, which they had told him they would do. DO officials also said they alerted WINPAC analysts when the report was being disseminated because they knew the "high priority of the issue." The report was widely distributed in routine channels.

(Redacted) The intelligence report indicated that former Nigerien Prime Minister Ibrahim Mayaki was unaware of any contracts that had been signed between Niger and any rogue states for the sale of yellowcake while he was Prime Minister (1997-1999) or Foreign Minister (1996-1997). Mayaki said that if there had been any such contract during his tenure, he would have been aware of it. Mayaki said, however, that in June 1999, (Redacted) businessman, approached him and insisted that Mayaki meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss "expanding commercial relations" between Niger and Iraq. The intelligence report said that Mayaki interpreted "expanding commercial relations" to mean that the delegation wanted to discuss uranium yellowcake sales. The intelligence report also said that "although the meeting took place, Mayaki let the matter drop due to the UN sanctions on Iraq."

And there you have it: In setting straight the record of prewar intelligence on Iraq, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee had to note that former Ambassador Joe Wilson (husband of former CIA employee Valerie Plame) told his CIA handlers that the former prime minister of Niger revealed that an Iraqi delegation tried to meet with him to discuss "expanding commercial relations," which the former prime minister believed was an attempt to purchase Uranium.

Wilson then went to the elite media and lied through his teeth... covertly, at first; but when that failed to bring down the Bush regime, overtly in an op-ed in the NYT. Thus, the Senate Intelligence Committee's report exposed Lyin' Joe Wilson as exactly what he was; and for that, the Left will never forgive either the president who declassified the debriefing or the committee that revealed Joe Wilson to the world.

For reference, here is what President Bush said in his January, 2003 State of the Union address... the very "sixteen words" that Wilson flatly claimed in his op-ed "was not borne out by the facts as I understood them."

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

Sounds like an excellent summary of what former Nigerien Prime Minister Ibrahim Mayaki told former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson.

Selective declassification vs. selective leaking

The elite media and its new sock puppet Scott McClellan make much to-do out of this final point, as if it were the synecdoche that encapsulates McClellan's entire charge:

Had the president, who had repeatedly condemned the selective release of secret intelligence, enabled Libby to leak classified information to The New York Times back then to bolster the administration's arguments for war?

Once again, vagueness to the rescue! There are two ways to "selective[ly] release" classified information; one is completely legal, the other criminal, despicable, and a gross and offensive betrayal of the United States of America:

1. The president or some Congressional committees can legally declassify specific information, in consultation with the agency that classified it, and release it to the general public, including the news media;
2. A disgruntled government employee, fighting against the express policy of the elected government, can criminally "leak" the classified information to individual elite reporters he believes are friendly to his cause, in an effort to destroy whatever legal intelligence program he dislikes.

AP is correct: The president has on many occasions decried a "selective release of secret intelligence" of Type 2, such as the leak of details about the Terrorist Surveillance Program (the NSA al-Qaeda telephone intercepts) or our perfectly legal -- nobody even denies this -- voluntary surveillance of the SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) system, part of the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program to find and interdict terrorists' money transfers.

This sort of "selective release" does incalculable damage to our intelligence-gathering capabilities, puts human sources at risk, and alerts death-cult terrorists that they should change their modus operandi to avoid detection by intelligence and law-enforcement agents. Such leaks kill good people and aid and abet al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and other evildoers.

But that's not what McClellan is whining about. He was so shocked and horrified that he "came to the decision that at that point [he] needed to look for a way to move on" because the president made no attempt to conceal the fact that he had engaged in a perfectly legal Type 1 "selective release of secret information": He formally declassified part of a CIA debriefing, after consultation with the CIA, possibly even at the request of the United States Senate Intelligence Committee.

Are you able to detect the subtle, miniscule difference between some low-level toady in the NSA leaking details of the Terrorist Surveillance Program, thus shutting off the flow of information about potential al-Qaeda cells in the United States -- and the president declassifying a summary of a debriefing that the Senate Intelligence Committee wanted to release as part of a report on pre-war intelligence, more than a year after the debriefing was conducted?

If so, then you're one up on both the former White House Press Secretary and the elite media!

What McClellan didn't prove in his book

I'm sorry that so many folks are shocked to learn that former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson is a liar; but it's hardly the president's job to keep old intelligence documents classified -- even when the Senate Intelligence Committee wants to publish parts of them -- just to preserve Wilson's reputation... so he can continue to accuse President Bush of lying, when in fact the evidence indicates that all along, the liar was Wilson himself.

And I note, once again, that all of this was printed not only in the Senate report on July 7th, 2004; it was also discussed extensively -- and put into the context of debunking Joe Wilson's lies -- in a July 12th, 2004 column in the National Review by Clifford May. I myself was late to the game; I didn't start blogging (on Patterico's Pontifications) until May of 2005. But by October of that year, I was already posting about this on Big Lizards.

Where the hell was Scott McClellan that he wasn't already aware of this until sometime in April of 2006? The rest of us knew it eight months earlier.

More and more, the evidence indicates that McClellan's faux horror and his "turning points" are entirely fabricated after the fact... and the only two reasons I can imagine are (1) to sell more copies of his book, and (2) to set himself up for a position in the fantasized administration of President Barack Obama.

The saddest part is that even if Obama were elected, then just as with David Brock (anyone remember him?), he would no more give a job to a betrayer like Scott McClellan than he would pluck somebody else's used Kleenex out of the rubbish and blow his own nose into it.

McClellan is burning all his former friends and colleagues for nothing.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 29, 2008, at the time of 6:41 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

May 28, 2008

McClellan's Losing Campaign - Part I

I believe that McClellan's campaign will turn out to be a disaster, not for the president but for McClellan himself.

(And I assume you all realize I mean the campaign by Scott McClellan, White House Press Secretary until he was ousted by incoming Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten -- and not a minute too soon! -- to damage the GOP enough that Barack Obama wins the presidency in 2008... not the failed presidential campaign of ousted -- and not a minute too soon! -- Civil War Gen. George McClellan in 1864.)

Alas, I was scooped on the following observation by John Hinderaker at my favorite blogsite, Power Line; but I shall persevere, secure behind the lizardly firewall of "Never first, always final."

What has struck me is "the Case of the Missing Evidence": McClellan is quoted as leveling numerous charges against President Bush and members of his administration, from "misleading" us into the Iraq war by spreading "propaganda," to McClellan's accusation that Karl Rove and "Scooter" Libby conspired together to out Valerie Plame and then lie about it to the grand jury, to -- this is truly bizarre -- McClellan's psychic claim that Bush lied about never having tried cocaine. Yet in not a single accusation in a single article I have read (I've read six) is there even a shred of evidence offered for the claim, other than the rather dubious word of a man hawking his new "tell-all" book.

Nothing. Nada. Bagel.

Here is a typical example from our ancient enemy, the Times:

Mr. McClellan writes that top White House officials deceived him about the administration’s involvement in the leaking of the identity of a C.I.A. operative, Valerie Wilson. He says he did not know for almost two years that his statements from the press room that Karl Rove and I. Lewis Libby Jr. were not involved in the leak were a lie.

“Neither, I believe, did President Bush,” Mr. McClellan writes. “He too had been deceived, and therefore became unwittingly involved in deceiving me. But the top White House officials who knew the truth -- including Rove, Libby, and possibly Vice President Cheney -- allowed me, even encouraged me, to repeat a lie.”

Of course, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald extensively investigated Karl Rove in that case, calling him back numerous times for more testimony. Rove even corrected some of his testimony, which almost certainly led to even more intense investigation by Fitzgerald. Yet after all that, Fitzgerald -- who was highly motivated to find some legal victim higher up the food chain than the chief of staff to the Vice President -- couldn't even gain an indictment from a grand jury... which hears only the prosecution's case.

But I'm sure McClellan knows better. I wonder whether he shared whatever evidence he has with Fitzgerald, who obviously considered it pretty unconvincing (or he would have used it) -- or whether McClellan only discovered this "evidence" of perjury and obstruction of justice after Fitzgerald failed to indict Rove.

Here's another good one:

[McClellan] is harsh about the administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina, saying it “spent most of the first week in a state of denial” and “allowed our institutional response to go on autopilot.”

Does anyone else detect a pattern here? Systematically, McClellan is working his way, one by one, through every anti-Bush fairy tale promulgated by the "reality-based community," the nutroots of Daily Kos. (I fully expect that somewhere in the book, which I will not waste time reading, McClellan will express his doubts that 9/11 was really carried out by al-Qaeda -- maybe it was Mossad! -- and will suggest that the Pentagon was hit by a U.S. missile and that the World Trade Centers were taken down by controlled demolition...)

Anent Katrina, I was going to make some scathing response about how effective President Bush really was, in contrast to the Demo-lib caricature; but then I remembered I already did -- two years ago. I'll stack my evidence up against McClellan's any day... or I would, if McClellan could find any.

Maybe McClellan should start reading Big Lizards before writing future books.

Although I did independently come up with this observation, I must confess that John beat me into print phosphor with this addendum to an excellent (if short) post by Paul Mirengoff:

JOHN adds: McClellan was a lousy press secretary. A much better spokesman, Tony Snow, once told me that the best thing about his job was the opportunity to follow President Bush around and observe his conduct of the Presidency. Tony said that he came away with a deep appreciation of President Bush's character, judgment and knowledge of the issues. Unless McClellan can come up with some facts to back up his claims--facts have been notably absent from the press accounts I've seen of his book--I think Tony's assessment is considerably more reliable.

I could not agree with John more... especially the part about McClellan's squirmy "talents" as a presidential press secretary; he always came across to me a lot less like Ari Fleischer, or even Clinton's Mike McCurry, and a lot more like Jon Lovitz's pathological liar character from Saturday Night Live in the late 1980s ("Yeah, yeah, the Queen of England... that's the ticket!")

But I also agree with Paul: McClellan's tabloid trash is going to get a full-court press of reviews, news articles, and free PR by the Democratic Party (both political and journalistic wings)... making the contrast all the more stark with the brilliant insider tome War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism, by former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith.

Feith's book received no reviews by any major elite-media source except for Bret Stephens' review at the Wall Street Journal... despite the fact that War and Decision was written by the man who actually made (in consultation with his direct boss, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld) the important decisions he discusses; while What Happened -- say, if this is about McClellan's career, then didn't the printers accidentally leave off the question mark that should have been at the end of that title? -- is nothing but the ramblings of a man whose only function was to explain other people's decisions to the press.

Say, has anybody else ever noticed that life isn't fair? (Darn... I think I was scooped on that observation, too.)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 28, 2008, at the time of 5:12 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

May 26, 2008

All the Views They Spit Into Print

It's a vile word. It combines slander and vilification, the essence of what the Bible calls "bearing false witness." A traducer is a person without a conscience, without a chest; a hollow, soulless spirit. Stitching together the worst segments of a harpy and a demon, traducers are sociopaths who literally feel absolutely nothing for their fellow men and women but contempt. They are unable to conceive of other human beings as persons; lives and reputations are tools to be manipulated for the day's desire.

But it's not quite strong enough to describe the editorial board of the New York Times.

There are lies, damned lies, and the Times. To the editors, a man's good name is a wad of toilet paper to be used once then flushed away. Truth is an alien contagion to be warded off by voodoo chants and stuffed alligators. Accuracy is a speedbump on the slander track, over which the Times SUV smashes at unstoppable speed.

Not sure what I'm talking about? You all know that there are several proposals for a "new G.I. Bill" kicking around D.C.; two are significantly popular within Congress.

The first, supported by Democrats, such as Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA, 85%), whom voters fantasized was a moderate non-partisan when they elected him by a razor's edge over George Allen; this followed yet another Democratic campaign of lies and ad-hominem attacks, which is all they have been able to muster in the way of argument in the seven lean years of political oratory. It's also supported by RINOs like Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE, 79%)... a man who, through thick and thin, is always there when he needs you.

This version of the new G.I. Bill gives full benefits -- the same benefits -- to every vet who served at least three years. The net effect of this, of course, is to encourage veterans to leave the service after a mere three years, typically before even rising to the rank of sergeant or petty officer third class. Every institution from the Pentagon to the Congressional Budget Office agrees that it would hurt retention of combat veterans -- in the middle of a war.

The other version is supported by the likes of Republican presidential nominee and Sen. John McCain and by Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC, 88%), and Richard Burr (R-NC, 92%)... and also by the President of the United States, Commander in Chief of the armed forces, George W. Bush. This version has two major differences with the other:

• It pays benefits on an increasing scale based upon time in service, so the longer the vet has served before retiring, the more benefits he or she receives. This is far superior to the Webb bill, because it encourages enlisted members to stay in military service longer.

  Non-commissioned officers are the backbone of the American military. We give our NCOs unprecedented command authority, setting us apart from, and making us far more victorious than, the other militaries of the world.

• It allows the veteran to transfer the educational benefits from himself to his spouse or children, thus helping veteran families pay for college eduction for their kids.

With that prolog, here is how the editorial by the New York Times linked above describes, in an unbiased and non-partisan way, the president's and the nominee's rejection of the first G.I. Bill, the one by Sen. Webb:

President Bush opposes a new G.I. Bill of Rights. He worries that if the traditional path to college for service members since World War II is improved and expanded for the post-9/11 generation, too many people will take it.

He is wrong, but at least he is consistent. Having saddled the military with a botched, unwinnable war, having squandered soldiers’ lives and failed them in so many ways, the commander in chief now resists giving the troops a chance at better futures out of uniform. He does this on the ground that the bill is too generous and may discourage re-enlistment, further weakening the military he has done so much to break.

So lavish with other people’s sacrifices, so reckless in pouring the national treasure into the sandy pit of Iraq, Mr. Bush remains as cheap as ever when it comes to helping people at home.

Where on Earth -- or further south -- did the Times get such truculent and absurdist rhetoric? Where did they get the cockamamie idea (whether they believe it or are simply lying for political purpose) to say that Bush and McCain reject the Webb bill because it's "too generous?" What brilliant reporter dredged up a hidden memo, a secret meeting, a cabal of Republican infamy that spouted such a phrase, to justity the New York Times using it as a bludgeon?

Oh, wait; now I remember. Does this sound at all similar?

Barack Obama told veterans Saturday that he can't understand why Republican John McCain opposes legislation that would provide college scholarships to people who have served in the U.S. military.

"Now, let me be clear: No one can dispute John McCain's love for this country or his concern for veterans. But here's what I don't understand. I don't understand why John McCain would side with George Bush and oppose our plan to make college more affordable for our veterans," the Democratic presidential candidate said. "George Bush and John McCain may think our plan is too generous. I could not disagree more."

Or maybe it's from this article, which appeared in an obscure publication that the New York Times may perhaps have missed:

Mr. Obama and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, his rival for the Democratic nomination, voted to expand the benefits. Mr. McCain was not present.

“There are some who oppose this benefit, arguing that our men and women in uniform haven’t earned it, that it’s too generous,” Mrs. Clinton said. “I could not disagree more strongly. It’s time we match our words with our actions.”

Thus we now learn that the Times now farms out their editorial pages. With all the journalistic standards and gravitas of a pack of gibbons flinging poo at their rivals, the Times simply parrots Barack Obama's and Hillary Clinton's gross and offensive caricature of the objections of serious critics of the Webb bill. Apparently, Democratic campaign staff were invited to New York to ghostwrite an "editorial" befouling Bush and McCain.

(I suggest the Federal Election Commission investigate whether this editorial constitutes a substantial and unreported in-kind donation to Barack Obama's campaign, possibly violating McCain-Feingold.)

If you're still not convinced of the mendacity here, let's read a little more of the Times' love letter to Obama:

The Senate version was drafted by two Vietnam veterans, Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia, and Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska. [Ah, so this version is supported by "Vietnam veterans"... unlike the other version, which is only supported by chickenhawks like McCain.] They argue that benefits paid under the existing G.I. Bill have fallen far behind the rising costs of college.

Their bill would pay full tuition and other expenses at a four-year public university for veterans who served in the military for at least three years since 9/11....

Mr. Bush -- and, to his great discredit, Senator John McCain -- have argued against a better G.I. Bill, for the worst reasons. They would prefer that college benefits for service members remain just mediocre enough that people in uniform are more likely to stay put.

What a nice thing to say about Sen. McCain. Of course, liberals would treat him with more respect had he, you know, served his country, as Democrats do.

Lest you think the Times has not thought about the arguments against the bill they support (that is, the one that drains us of our non-coms), here is their unassailable answer:

They [Republicans like McCain] have seized on a prediction by the Congressional Budget Office that new, better benefits would decrease re-enlistments by 16 percent, which sounds ominous if you are trying -- as Mr. Bush and Mr. McCain are -- to defend a never-ending war at a time when extended tours of duty have sapped morale and strained recruiting to the breaking point.

Their reasoning is flawed since the C.B.O. has also predicted that the bill would offset the re-enlistment decline by increasing new recruits -- by 16 percent [imagine a dramatic "ta-dah" playing in the background]. The chance of a real shot at a college education turns out to be as strong a lure as ever. This is good news for our punishingly overburdened volunteer army, which needs all the smart, ambitious strivers it can get. [As opposed to the tired, cynical, doddering NCO hacks the Times wants to boot out.]

So let's see... we lose a bunch of Army Staff Sergeants, Air Force Top sergeants, Navy Petty Officers, and Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeants. But that's okay, because we gain an equal number of buck privates, airman recruits, seaman recruits, and privates.

So what are those ungenerous, veteran-hating Republican macacas whining about? The same number of losers will still be stuk in irak, right? They should instead be grateful the Democrats don't simply ban NCOs all together -- "three stripes, you're out."

The Times editors hasten to add that they support a "larger, sturdier military;" but what is now as obvious as Michael Moore's, ah, fundaments is that liberals, especially those anointed beings who control the elite media, consider the United States military as primarily a massive jobs and welfare program. Its only purpose is to support those illiterate, uneducated, stupid people who didn't study in school. One soldier, one widget is more or less interchangeable with another. And they want to cycle the widgets through the military entitlement complex as quickly as possible, so they can go to college and get "real" jobs.

Like, for example, moving to Chicago to become a "community organizer." I understand that's a career path where you can get to the top really fast.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 26, 2008, at the time of 6:20 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

May 23, 2008

California Marriage Protection Act Gets a Jump at the "Starting Gun"

The starting gun was just fired for the November campaign... and in this case, I mean the campaign for the California Marriage Protection Act, a citizen's initiative state constitutional amendment to restore the traditional definition of marriage in California -- now that four judicial activists on the California Supreme Court overpowered three judicial conservatives to force same-sex marriage on America's largest state.

By "starting gun," I mean the Los Angeles Dog Trainer Times has comissioned the first set of polls since the court's decision -- and in a twist that evidently bothered the Times enough that they tried to cover it up by circumlocution, it turns out that Californians begin with a wide and deep antipathy to changing the definition of marriage. All three major party registrations -- Republican, Independent, and Democratic -- support the constitutional amendment, as do men (narrowly) and women (very strongly), as well as (I surmise from the silence) all age demographics; if some age group opposed it, I believe the Times would not be reticent about mentioning the fact.

These poll numbers are spectacularly good for an opening bid! (Hat tip to Patterico.)

And the Times cannot even blame it on "homophobia," an accusation that has become the first refuge of scoundrels in this debate, because by wide margins, respondents have no problem with gays or homosexuality itself.

Let's jump right to the numbers from the L.A. Times poll:

Either way, the poll suggests the outcome of the proposed amendment is far from certain. Overall, it was leading 54% to 35% among registered voters. But because ballot measures on controversial topics often lose support during the course of a campaign, strategists typically want to start out well above the 50% support level.

As Patterico points out on the post linked above, that is a 19-point margin of victory before the first salvo from the pro-amendment camp is fired. But he also notes (with wry amusement, I would imagine) that the Times tries to bury this lede under a flood of generally pro-gay sentiment. Here are the opening two grafs of the article; there are three more "great news for gays!" paragraphs before the Times finally gets around to reporting the actual numbers (so much for the traditional "inverted pyramid" structure that is supposed to characterize news stories):

By bare majorities, Californians reject the state Supreme Court's decision to allow same-sex marriages and back a proposed constitutional amendment aimed at the November ballot that would outlaw such unions, a Los Angeles Times/KTLA Poll has found.

But the survey also suggested that the state is moving closer to accepting nontraditional marriages, which could create openings for supporters of same-sex marriage as the campaign unfolds.

A reader may imagine that the Times is onto something when they say that "because ballot measures on controversial topics often lose support during the course of a campaign, strategists typically want to start out well above the 50% support level." But it's just more disingenuousness on the part of our wretched monopoly newspaper.

In fact, on this particular ballot issue last time, support for the identically worded Proposition 22 actually rose from its initial support to its final victory in June, 2000. Here is a fairly liberal blogger (Calitics) who is a strong supporter of legalizing same-sex marriage:

We all know that initiatives need to be well ahead to start before the advertising ramps up and the No side chips away at the lead. This poll would traditionally signal an initiative in the danger zone. However, the initial polls for Prop. 22 in 2000 were at 58%, and it rose to 61% by election day. Opinions may be fairly hardened on this one.

Support for the amendment is fairly consistent in all demographic groups; Republicans, Independents, and Democrats all support it:

Generally, the poll found consistency between views on the court decision and the proposed amendment. Overall, Californians opposed the court's view by a 52%-41% gap....

Yet support for the ruling did not necessarily lead to opposition to the proposed constitutional amendment, and vice versa. Democrats and independents narrowly backed the amendment despite their support for the court action. Democratic men favored the ruling but were split on the amendment. Democratic women, meanwhile, approved of both the court decision and the amendment.

Also, according to the few internals the Times released (as a graphic!), while men are almost evenly split on how they would vote in the amendment (43% for, 41% against), women -- generally more liberal than men on other issues -- are resoundingly in favor by 58 to 31, a whopping gender gap of 25%, with women being much more supportive of the amendment.

?

But the strong, across-the-board support for the amendment cannot be attributed to bigotry or homophobia. In fact, a solid majority of Californians agrees with me (which means they are correct, for a change): There is nothing immoral about same-sex relationships, and there should be no legal stumbling blocks preventing two (or more) adult men or women -- or mixed groups -- from living together and doing whatever they want to do behind closed doors. That is a simple question of individual liberty.

More than half of Californians [54 to 39] said gay relationships [not marriage] were not morally wrong, that they would not degrade heterosexual marriages and that all that mattered was that a relationship be loving and committed, regardless of gender.

Overall, the proportion of Californians who back either gay marriage or civil unions for same-sex couples has remained fairly constant over the years. But the generational schism is pronounced. Those under 45 were less likely to favor a constitutional amendment than their elders and were more supportive of the court's decision to overturn the state's current ban on gay marriage. They also disagreed more strongly than their elders with the notion that gay relationships threatened traditional marriage.

Oh, yeah, and by the way, they strongly reject the court's decision and resoundingly support the amendment to restrict marriage to the traditional definition. But that's a side issue -- we're talking "generational schism" here!

Interestingly, however, a significantly greater number of registered voters younger than 35 think that same-sex relationships are "morally wrong" than those over 35: 48% of 18-34s think such relationships are "morally wrong," compared to 27% of 35-44s, 37% of 45-64s, and 44% of respondents aged 65+. A greater percentage of young people think gay relationships are "morally wrong" than of senior citizens!

But the fact that a strong majority does not see gay relationships as "morally wrong" does not mean we should change the traditional definition of marriage, upon which our civilization is founded. We have seen what happened in Europe when marriage was steadily eroded as a special institution -- not only in Belgium and the Netherlands, where same-sex marriage was allowed (even encouraged), but in other European countries that abandoned religious-based marriage: Marriage itself was devalued, the marriage rate dropped, and more worrisome, so did the fertility rate among native-born Europeans. (See Mark Steyn's book America Alone: the End of the World As We Know It for why a diminishing fertility rate throughout Western Civilization, other than the United States, is a terrible problem.)

For example, in the Netherlands, according to CBS, from 1995 to about 2000, the marriage rate was struggling back from a previous sharp drop. But when the campaign to legalize same-sex marriage began in 2000, culminating with full legalization nationwide in mid-2001, the rising tide of marriage did a U-turn -- and by 2005, it had plummeted to the lowest level since World War II, when couples in war-ravaged Holland postponed marriage "for the duration."

Another CBS table shows that the marriage rate (marriages per 1,000 Netherlanders) had remained fairly steady, averaging 5.5 from 1995 to 2000; but in 2001, it began a precipitous decline down to 4.4 by 2006, a drop of 20%.

During that period, the fertility rate (children born per woman per lifetime) rose significantly, from 1.53 to 1.73, an increase of 13%... but the entirety of that rise was due to presumably Moslem immigrant women born in Morocco and Turkey. The fertility rate among women born in the Netherlands stayed absolutely stagnant at 1.7 from 2000 to 2005 -- well below the bare replacement rate of 2.1.

Obviously, not all of this drop in marriage and fertility rates among cultural Europeans can be attributed to same-sex marriage; the marriage rate also dropped precipitously in France, which did not legalize same-sex marriage.

But all the factors cited for the drop in marriage across Europe --

• Easy, no-fault divorce laws
• Increasing rejection of religious marriage in favor of civil marriage
• Increasing acceptance of shacking up and out-of-wedlock births as normal
• More leftist and socialist governments that are hostile to traditional religion and values
• And a general rejection of religion by the populations in Europe

-- fit very well into the same disastrous social attitude: Europeans have lost their belief that there is anything special about traditional moral values, including traditional marriage. Expanding marriage to include same-sex couples is just one more example of that, albeit an important one.

So far, we have not seen a similar precipitous decline in the marriage rate or the fertility rate in the United States; and if this Times poll is an indicator -- conducted, as it is, in one of the most liberal states in the nation -- we're also not likely to legalize same-sex marriage in the United States anytime soon.

If this trend holds and the amendment passes, as I believe it shall, we will still be back to the same paradigm we have always had: It's never the people but always the "experts" -- especially our robed masters -- who push radical ideas like legalizing same-sex marriage.

When the people actually get to vote, as in California, they invariably reject same-sex marriage and support traditional marriage, even as they accept same-sex unions short of marriage.

But what about Massachusetts, arguably the most liberal state in the Union? If those who favor same-sex marriage truly believed they could ratify their court-imposed regime with a vote of the people, wouldn't they jump at the chance? Yet the opposite has happened: Democrats in Massachusetts have hysterically opposed any actual vote there.

The simplest explanation is the most likely one: I suspect they have their own internal polling, and they already know who would win.

Our previous (recent) posts on this subject have been:

• Californichusetts, originally posted in March but bumped up to May 15th, 2008, after the court announced its decision; this post lays out the many arguments against same-sex marriage and explains why it is so bad and dangerous -- not just for America, but for Western Civilization itself.
• Marriage, Money, and Ursus Maritimus, posted May 21st, 2008; this post attacks the appalling way that same-sex marriage was thrust upon the people of my home state of California, against their democratically expressed will, by a breathtaking act of judicial activism.
• Patterico and Gay Soldiers: Strict vs. Rational - Liberty vs. Privilege, posted May 22nd, 2008; this post argues a different aspect of the debate -- I voice stalwart opposition to laws criminalizing "sodomy," on grounds that they violate basic human liberty, but distinguish between that liberty and support for traditional marriage.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 23, 2008, at the time of 6:24 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 19, 2008

It's Not the Crime, It's the Cover Up: NYT Still Shielding Obama On "No Preconditions"

Today, even AP admits that Barack Obama did indeed say that he would hold summit meetings with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Syrian President Bashar Assad, Venezuelan President Oogo Chavez, and North Korean Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il "without precondition"... the very policy that prompts many in the GOP (including Big Lizards!) to dub Obama an "appeaser."

(Actually, Obama is even more feckless than Neville Chamberlain: Great Britain had no military to speak of in 1938; they used the eleven months between the dissection of Czechoslovakia -- "peace for our time" -- and Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland in a massive mobilization and buildup for a long war. Obama has no such easy excuse.)

Yet amazingly, the New York Times continues to run interference. Even today, they still pretend that what's at issue is meeting with our enemies at all, rather than meeting with them at a presidential level without any prior agreement to moderate their behavior.

Here is the Times blog the Caucus on the dustup today between John McCain and Barack Obama:

Mr. McCain, who was in Mr. Obama’s hometown to address the National Restaurant Association, diverged from prepared remarks on economic issues to get in his jab at Mr. Obama.

Believing keeping the focus on national security is advantageous to Mr. McCain, his campaign has been continuing to try to make hay over Mr. Obama’s stated willingness to sit down with the leaders of rogue nations.

The Caucus follows this bare-faced mischaracterization of the nature of the dispute with a spirited defense of Obama, just in case any readers were still confused which side was "right":

Arguing for engagement with the country’s foes, Mr. Obama said in a speech on Sunday that “strong countries and strong presidents talk to their adversaries.”

“That’s what Reagan did with Gorbachev,” he said, adding, “I mean think about it. Iran, Cuba, Venezuela -- these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don’t pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us. And yet we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union at the time when they were saying we’re going to wipe you off the planet.”

He went on to argue that Iran spends “one-one hundredth of what we spend on the military. If Iran ever tried to pose a serious threat to us, they wouldn’t stand a chance. And we should use that position of strength that we have to be bold enough to go ahead and listen.”

To which, according to the Caucus, John McCain had no answer and was reduced to impotent harumphing...

Mr. McCain seized upon those comments today, his voice stern and dripping with contempt: “Obviously, Iran isn’t a superpower and doesn’t possess the military power the Soviet Union had. But that does not mean that the threat posed by Iran is insignificant.”

How weak! How embarassing! Things certainly look bleak for McCain's chances, when even a wimp like Obama can spank McCain like a stripper at a stockholder's meeting.

By the way, just to correct the record: Reagan certainly did not, as Obama claimed, talk to Gorbachev when the Soviet Union was saying "we’re going to wipe you off the planet." It was Nikita Kruschev who said "we will bury you" in 1956, three decades before Reagan's summit. The whole point of that meeting was that General Secretary Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev had already drastically reformed the Soviet Union -- remember perestroika and glasnost? -- long before Reagan agreed to that summit.

This summit represents the polar opposite of what Obama actually proposed, and which the Times continues to work overtime to suppress: You won't read a word about Obama's promise to hold summits "without precondition" in this article... nothing.

By contrast, here is AP's version of that same exchange:

Republican John McCain accused Democrat Barack Obama of inexperience and reckless judgment for saying Iran does not pose the same serious threat to the United States as the Soviet Union did in its day. McCain made the attack Monday in Chicago, Obama's home turf.

"Such a statement betrays the depth of Senator Obama's inexperience and reckless judgment. These are very serious deficiencies for an American president to possess," McCain said in an appearance at the restaurant industry's annual meeting....

McCain listed the dangers he sees from Iran: It provides deadly explosive devices used to kill U.S. soldiers in Iraq, sponsors terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East and is committed to the destruction of Israel.

"The threat the government of Iran poses is anything but tiny," McCain said.

AP goes on to characterize -- correctly, we note -- the nature of the dispute:

At the heart of the dispute between the candidates is Obama's assertion that, as president, he would meet with leaders of these rogue countries without preconditions. Obama insists that direct engagement with the Soviets helped prevent nuclear war and, over time, helped to bring down the Berlin Wall.

McCain strongly disagrees with Obama's position; he argues such a meeting would lend international prestige to U.S. foes.

"A summit meeting with the president of the United States, which is what Senator Obama is proposing, is the most prestigious card we have to play in international diplomacy," McCain said.

"An unconditional summit meeting with the next American president would confer both international legitimacy on the Iranian president and could strengthen him domestically, when he is very unpopular among the Iranian people," McCain said.

As to Obama's assertion (as paraphrased by AP) that "direct engagement with the Soviets helped prevent nuclear war and, over time, helped to bring down the Berlin Wall," I refer you to our earlier post, Appease Porridge Hot, Appease Porridge Cold: There's engagement (Kennedy style), and then there's engagement (Reagan style).

Back to the Times. The Caucus takes no judicial note of the about-face Obama took after McCain called him out. Responding to McCain, Obama today denied he had said Iran posed no threat to us:

Speaking during a town hall meeting in Billings, Mont., Senator Obama fired back at Senator McCain. “Let me be absolutely clear: Iran is a grave threat.” But the Soviet Union posed a bigger threat, he said.

A grave threat? "Grave," in the sense used here, means "fraught with danger or harm," "portending future disaster," "involving or resulting in serious consequences : likely to produce real harm or damage," "very serious : dangerous to life." But here is what Obama said over the weekend, while he was still trying to defend his promise to meet "without precondition" with leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, and North Korea by pretending that was a commonplace diplomatic act in which U.S. presidents always engage:

“That’s what Reagan did with Gorbachev,” he said, adding, “I mean think about it. Iran, Cuba, Venezuela -- these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don’t pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us."

He didn't say "they don't pose as serious a threat," he said "they don't pose a serious threat." But maybe he just misspoke. He's a Democrat; he has a license to flub. But what about the overarching point?

Suppose Iran completes development of its nuclear warhead. Then suppose it passes a couple of nukes to Hamas, which passes one to al-Qaeda, which smuggles it into a busy American port and detonates it. (Hamas uses its other nuke on Tel Aviv.)

Wouldn't that be far "graver" than anything the Soviet Union actually did to us? Remember, in one sense, the threat from the Soviets was weaker: Unlike Islamist "martyrs," the Soviet Union wanted to live. We deterred them by threatening nuclear retaliation... a strategy we called "mutually assured destruction," or MAD.

Iran could make retaliation unlikely by putting several cutouts between itself and the nuclear bomb; and al-Qaeda or other apocalyptic, human-sacrificing death cults cannot be deterred by threats of retaliation, because they long to die in the blast anyway, believing that's an express ticket to paradise and the 72 virgins and 72 wives (or perhaps chilled raisins instead).

But evidently, none of this has occurred to the first-term senator from Chicago. He cannot conceive any way in which Iran could pose a serious threat to the United States. Except that he simultaneously believes that it constitutes a "grave threat!"

And the Times doesn't notice any contradiction. This raises an interesting thought... Given the New York Times' inability to stay afloat financially, and given their clear ideological leanings -- maybe it would make more sense for them simply to disband the company and reorganize themselves as the Democratic Party of the Times Square District.

I think they would be a lot more financially secure with a piece of Barack Obama's fundraising action than they are now trying to peddle their "newspapers."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 19, 2008, at the time of 3:46 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

May 16, 2008

Democrat Limbo - How Low Can They Go?

An amazing accusation has just been flung at John McCain by a completely "disinterested" party: James Rubin, President Clinton's State Department spokesman. Rubin accuses McCain of "hypocrisy" for attacking Barack Obama on his willingness to meet with rogue leaders and America's enemies throughout the world. While it seems a simple smear job -- easily debunked, as we do in this piece -- it's also a window into the utter inability of Democrats, not Republicans, to parse nuance, to understand why talking is sometimes good -- and sometimes a horrible blunder.

And as always, a primer into how deeply the elite media is in bed with Obama. "Slither on" for the whole sordid tale...

The bluff...

Let's open with Rubin's smear. In his op-ed in the Washington Post, he writes:

McCain, meanwhile, is guilty of hypocrisy. I am a supporter of Hillary Clinton and believe that she was right to say, about McCain's statement on Hamas, "I don't think that anybody should take that seriously." Unfortunately, the Republicans know that some people will. That's why they say such things.

But given his own position on Hamas, McCain is the last politician who should be attacking Obama. Two years ago, just after Hamas won the Palestinian parliamentary elections, I interviewed McCain for the British network Sky News's "World News Tonight" program.

Rubin then gives a single pair of question and answer; I am always suspicious when a person is accused of some terrible sin -- and the only evidence offered is such a small snippet that we cannot possibly know what, exactly, the target meant.

So I hunted a bit and managed to find a brief video clip from Sky News which shows part of the piece where Rubin interviews McCain. I use Rubin's own transcript, which seemed accurate -- as far as it went (except for one mistranscribed word, in blue font):

Rubin: Do you think that American diplomats should be operating the way they have in the past, working with the Palestinian government if Hamas is now in charge?

McCain: They're the government; sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them, one way or another, and I understand why this administration and previous administrations had such antipathy towards Hamas because of their dedication to violence and the things that they not only espouse but practice, so... but it's a new reality in the Middle East. I think the lesson is people want security and a decent life and decent future, then they want democracy. Fatah was not giving them that.

The continuation bet...

Based upon this single Q&A of ambiguous meaning, Rubin builds an imposing edifice of sweeping conclusion:

For some Europeans in Davos, Switzerland, where the interview took place, that's a perfectly reasonable answer. But it is an unusual if not unique response for an American politician from either party. And it is most certainly not how the newly conservative presumptive Republican nominee would reply today.

Given that exchange, the new John McCain might say that Hamas should be rooting for the old John McCain to win the presidential election. The old John McCain, it appears, was ready to do business with a Hamas-led government, while both Clinton and Obama have said that Hamas must change its policies toward Israel and terrorism before it can have diplomatic relations with the United States.

Even if McCain had not favored doing business with Hamas two years ago, he had no business smearing Barack Obama. But given his stated position then, it is either the height of hypocrisy or a case of political amnesia for McCain to inject Hamas into the American election.

Rubin plays to the crowd...

Notice the sly way that Rubin seeks to play into what he perceives as McCain's greatest weakness -- the supposed squishiness of conservative support for the "maverick" nominee:

• Rubin compares McCain to "Europeans in Davos, Switzerland;"
• He calls McCain "newly conservative," as if he had switched his positions in order to fool the Republican electorate (Rubin names no issue on which McCain has become "newly" conservative);
• He says that McCain in 2006 "was ready to do business with a Hamas-led government, while both Clinton and Obama have said that Hamas must change its policies toward Israel and terrorism before it can have diplomatic relations with the United States;" in fact, McCain says no such thing in this exchange... he says that because Hamas was elected, "sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them, one way or another." With the modifier "one way or another," how could anybody dispute this statement?
• Finally, Rubin says that it was McCain who "inject[ed] Hamas into the American election;" actually, it was Hamas itself, by endorsing Barack H. Obama... and domestically, it was Obama's former advisor Robert Malley, who got the boot from the Obama campaign a week ago today, after he disclosed that he had actually been negotiating with Hamas. (So much for Team Obama's revulsion at the very thought of meeting with terrorists!)

Before truth can lace up its boots...

The Associated Press has already run with the Rubin smear, others are sure to follow. Naturally, AP simply accepts the accusation as proven beyond all reasonable doubt -- in spite of the fact that even the snippet Rubin himself offers (his only evidence) falls short.

In fact, there is much better evidence that Rubin's claim is groundless and fraudulent; but it requires more work to ferret out than big-budget elite-media reporters can afford to give it. Thus, you must turn to a more determined source, one with the tenacity to dig deeper than the lazy reprinting of other people's stories that is the specialty of the mainstream media: You're left to the tender mercies of Big Lizards instead.

It turns out that the clip on Sky News doesn't end where James Rubin -- the interviewer -- chooses to stop transcribing. Behold, there is a second Q&A that Mr. Rubin asks McCain, but which he chose not to highlight... and you'll see why directly.

Before we look at it, however, let's turn to the question of what, exactly, John McCain accused Barack Obama of doing. (This seems jumpy, but we're going somewhere... trust the lizard.)

The Democrats -- both the main party wing and the media auxiliaries (the Fleet Street Irregulars) -- persistently misstate why McCain and other Republicans have chastised Obama. They repeatedly claim (as does Obama himself) that Obama is attacked for wanting to talk at all to leaders of rogue nations, as in the AP story linked above:

On Thursday, McCain suggested that Obama was naive and inexperienced for expressing a willingness to meet with rogue leaders like Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

In another AP story, Obama repeats that mischaracterization of his blunder:

Meeting with reporters, Obama argued that tough-minded diplomacy and engagement with rivals is a bipartisan foreign policy that dates to former Presidents Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan.

"That has been the history of U.S. diplomacy until very recently," said Obama, who said he was comfortable engaging McCain in a foreign policy debate. "I find it puzzling that we view this as in any way controversial. This whole notion of not talking to people, it didn't hold in the '60s, it didn't hold in the '70s ... When Kennedy met with Kruschev, we were on the brink of nuclear war."

He also noted that former President Nixon opened talks with China, "with the knowledge that Mao had exterminated millions of people." He said he was confident making the case that McCain's policy is flawed.

Don't know much about history...

Even this short response from Obama reveals the shallowness of his understanding of history -- and his inability to parse simple English statements. First of all, Obama is right; "Mao had exterminated millions of people." We agree.

But those exterminations occurred from 1949 to 1953; Mao's subsequent idiotic agriculture policies caused tens of millions to starve to death from 1959 to 1962.

Nixon met with Mao in 1972 -- a decade after the famine, and nearly twenty years after the exterminations ended. In the interim, China had changed dramatically. It was still totalitarian and Communist, but it had certainly stopped murdering millions of people a year, as it did at the beginning of the Communist era. It was only murdering a handful... which, believe me, is great progress where Communist dictatorships are concerned. (They're even better now, though they took a Great Leap Backward with their brutal suppression of dissent and protest in Tibet as the Beijing Olympics approached.)

Perhaps more to the point, Nixon did not meet with Mao "without precondition," as Obama would meet with the presidents of Iran, Syria, and Venezuela and the Dear Leader of the DPRK; President Nixon himself met Mao only after many months of secret discussions between National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and his Chinese counterpart, including a visit by Kissinger to China in 1971. During those earlier discussions, China agreed to several preconditions of any future agreement or diplomatic recognition, including the following:

• They agreed not to launch a military invasion of Taiwan;
• They agreed that they would be satisfied with a statement that both Taiwanese and mainland Chinese agreed that there was only one China, and that Taiwan was part of it -- without demanding that Taiwan agree that the government of this "one China" would be the Communist government of Red China.

These were both very significant: Until the Kissinger visits, China insisted that Taiwan was a renegade province of the People's Republic of China. After meeting with Hammerin' Hank, the Red Chinese agreed to disagree about the final status of Taiwan.

Thus, far from being an example of the kind of meeting Obama wants to hold, Nixon in China demonstrates the polar opposite approach: A long, slow, careful buildup of diplomacy and negotiation, culminating with -- not starting from -- a mano-a-mano summit.

That long, long river in Africa...

This short history lesson illuminates the actual accusation against Obama: naïveté and fecklessness. It's not that he would meet with leaders of rogue states (Iran, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela); there are certainly situations where that would be useful. It's that he would do so without any preconditions -- without a preliminary agreement on what the final agreement would and would not contain. Such open-ended summit meetings serve only two purposes:

• They legitimize the leaders of nations that support terrorism against the United States and our allies;
• And they offer the great temptation for the American president, desperate for a deal, any deal, to agree to unconscionable terms that empower our enemies and enervate our allies and our own forces, civilian and military.

Today, Obama himself and through his spokespeople, denies that he ever said he would meet with such despots "without precondition." Here is Susan Rice, Obama's foreign policy advisor and an official spokeswoman for the campaign, in full denial mode:

Susan E. Rice, a former State Department and National Security Council official who is a foreign policy adviser to the Democratic candidate, said that “for political purposes, Senator Obama’s opponents on the right have distorted and reframed” his views. Mr. McCain and his surrogates have repeatedly stated that Mr. Obama would be willing to meet “unconditionally” with Mr. Ahmadinejad. But Dr. Rice said that this was not the case for Iran or any other so-called “rogue” state. Mr. Obama believes “that engagement at the presidential level, at the appropriate time and with the appropriate preparation, can be used to leverage the change we need,” Dr. Rice said. “But nobody said he would initiate contacts at the presidential level; that requires due preparation and advance work.”

The house of cards...

Yet here is what the man himself said, during the fourth Democratic debate on July 23rd, 2007, in response to a question about meeting with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bashar Assad, Kim Jong-Il, or Oogo Chavez without any preconditions:

COOPER: Let’s go to another YouTube video.

QUESTION: In 1982, Anwar Sadat traveled to Israel, a trip that resulted in a peace agreement that has lasted ever since.

In the spirit of that type of bold leadership, would you be willing to meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea, in order to bridge the gap that divides our countries?

COOPER: I should also point out that Stephen [the question submitter] is in the crowd tonight.

Senator Obama?

OBAMA: I would. And the reason is this, that the notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them -- which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this administration -- is ridiculous.

(APPLAUSE)

Now, Ronald Reagan and Democratic presidents like JFK constantly spoke to Soviet Union at a time when Ronald Reagan called them an evil empire. And the reason is because they understood that we may not trust them and they may pose an extraordinary danger to this country, but we had the obligation to find areas where we can potentially move forward.

And I think that it is a disgrace that we have not spoken to them. We’ve been talking about Iraq -- one of the first things that I would do in terms of moving a diplomatic effort in the region forward is to send a signal that we need to talk to Iran and Syria because they’re going to have responsibilities if Iraq collapses.

They have been acting irresponsibly up until this point. But if we tell them that we are not going to be a permanent occupying force, we are in a position to say that they are going to have to carry some weight, in terms of stabilizing the region.

Translation: Obama plans to have a summit with Ahmadinejad "without precondition," during which he will tell the Iranian president that we're going to pull out... and invite Iran to step in and "carry some weight" in Iraq. This is precisely why such ad-hoc summit meetings without our enemies are so pernicious... Obama is just looking for a chance to hand Iraq over to Iran for safekeeping.

If you're still skeptical, here is the YouTube of Stephen's question and Obama's answer:

 

 

Like a web, the pieces start to fall in to place...

First of all, even the New York Times, in the story linked above, added a correction contradicting Dr. Susan Rice and admitting that Obama said exactly what McCain accused him of saying, just as the transcript above shows.

And second, if you further in the transcript of the debate, both Hillary Clinton and John Edwards are asked the same question, and both insist that such meetings must be preceded by much groundwork and preconditions describing the scope of any future final agreement. Obama listens to both his main Democratic rivals... yet he never says a word; he never says, "Oh, yes, I meant with preconditions and groundwork," or anything similar. He simply stands on his original answer of "I would."

It's a head-cutting competition, and Obama clearly is contrasting his own reckless boldness with the almost conservative sobriety of Hillary Clinton and John Edwards.

Thus we draw the following conclusions:

1. McCain's charge against Obama is not simply that he would meet with tyrants, despots, and Hezbollah's grandboss, but that Obama himself said -- unlike either Clinton or Edwards -- he would hold such meetings with