-Caveat Lector- "I pledge Allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America and to the REPUBLIC for which it stands, one Nation under God,indivisible,with liberty and justice for all."
visit my web site at http://www.voicenet.com/~wbacon My ICQ# is 79071904 for a precise list of the powers of the Federal Government linkto: http://www.voicenet.com/~wbacon/Enumerated.html ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2003 04:00:00 -0700 From: Media Research Center <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: MRC Alert Special: Bozell columns ***Media Research Center CyberAlert Special*** 8am EST, Monday February 17, 2003 On this holiday with Washington, DC snowed in, three recent Creators syndicate columns by MRC President L. Brent Bozell: "Beware the Predatory 'Rich'?"; "The Kiss-Me-Kate Democrats" and "Harsher Memories of Clinton." (Check your in box for the February 15 CyberAlert distributed on Saturday morning with items about coverage of Friday's UN Security Council meeting, mostly focusing on ABC's Peter Jennings.) Bozell's columns are posted online at: http://www.mrc.org/archive/newscol/welcome.asp > The text of Bozell's January 14 column, "Beware the Predatory 'Rich'?" Robert Menendez wants everyone to know he's not a wealthy guy. He has this little studio apartment two blocks from the Capitol. He drove the same blue Buick "clunker" for ten years. He says that "materialistic things are not important to me." But the poverty plea from this New Jersey Democratic congressman in the January 5 Washington Post Magazine doesn't impress most Americans. Menendez insists, "My whole income is my congressional salary. I don't have any other sources of income, you know, so I watch it." This year, that translates to a paltry $155,000. This is the fourth straight year that congressional salaries have risen. (Under a bizarre 1989 law only Congress could envision, congressmen receive automatic cost-of-living salary increases unless they vote to reject them.) By Democratic Party standards, every penny-watching Washington legislator should be considered a member of the pampered super-rich. After all, every one of them has an income in the top five percent of American households. But just days after his Post Magazine act, Menendez was out accusing President Bush of targeting his tax cut at the filthy rich, as if he weren't one of them: "The Democratic plan helps all Americans, and the president's plan helps mostly wealthy Americans." In the party's national radio address a few weeks ago, Menendez insisted Democrats want to help "working individuals and families, not more in the hands of those fortunate enough to only have to worry about how much their fortune has diminished." The Menendez mendacity is to be expected. This is what Democrats in Washington do. But should it be equally predictable to find that the tone and tenor of the media's coverage of the President's economic stimulus plan carries an identical obsession with the "unfairness" of tax cuts? That supposedly rich people are somehow unjustly given the "gift" of their own money, which will "cost" the government in a "massive" and "controversial" payout? By the liberal media's standards, the goal must not be how best to stimulate the economy, but how to strike the best pose as the champion of the little guy, regardless of its economic effect. If it's ridiculous for congressmen to grouse about the "super-rich," imagine Peter Jennings sitting on top of his personal mountain of cash kvetching that the Bush plan "has unleashed a very political debate about whether it will stimulate the economy or just further enrich the wealthy." Jennings is right that the debate is very political. But the condescension sounds a little like the head of a rap music label complaining that the music is a little coarse. It's the media that are fueling -- and loving -- this political debate,. A policy debate will not do. It's too boring. It's bad television. It makes an anchorman's head hurt. That's a shame. The media should host a serious debate, matching economists and accountants and philosophers. They should explore instead of just parrot the left's proposition that it's the government's job to correct the "maldistribution" of income. They should evaluate how New Zealand's economy performed after it ended the double taxation of corporate income in 1988. There's so much they could do to return not just civility but intelligence to the discussion. Instead, they choose to construct a partisan bomb, indoctrinating the media consumer into the view that Republicans favor the top one percent of society at the expense of everyone else. So Harry Smith of CBS hounds Commerce Secretary Don Evans: "By one calculation, the wealthiest one percent of taxpayers would get 47 percent of the benefit. How would that stimulate the economy?" Smith's question is designed not to elicit an answer, but to leave a negative impression. It says: Try getting that stain off your shirt, Mr. Secretary. While Smith and everyone else in the media crib their economic numbers from liberal outfits like the Brookings Institution, a more conservative analysis from a group like the Tax Foundation rarely sees the light of day. Why? Because it balances the argument that the rich will benefit disproportionately from most tax cuts with the natural counterpoint that the rich are pay a very disproportionate part of that tax burden. The top five percent of taxpayers -- that loaded fraction that includes most of Washington officialdom -- pays 56.5 percent of the tax burden. Wouldn't it be nice if the media remembered that old proposition that the news should be balanced? Instead, liberal politics rule, so like a broken record, the "news" media are again warning Americans they're about to be shafted by conservatism being enacted. And if Americans making $50,000 a year object to being considered evil mustache-twirling examples of the "wealthy," perhaps they should call Robert Menendez or Peter Jennings ? collect. It's not like those two can't afford it. END Reprint of first of three columns > Bozell's January 28 column, "The Kiss-Me-Kate Democrats." As Democrats compete to take on President Bush in 2004, they still fear the power of his appeal on the prominent issues of the day: war and taxes. They rhetorically ape his appeals for national security and economic stimulus. But on one issue, these emerging candidates will not budge, no matter what. They are lock-step radicals on abortion. On January 21, the militant pro-abortion group "Naral Pro-Choice America" held an abortion-affirming dinner. Their leader, the ever-shrill Kate Michelman, laid down her marching orders. Every judicial nominee who ever stood in the way of a 12-year-old getting an abortion without telling her mother must be filibustered and defeated. And there on stage were six kiss-me-Kate Democrats, all tap-dancing on her hard line: Howard Dean, John Edwards, Dick Gephardt, John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, and Al Sharpton. Just how far out on the fringe can we find the Michelman agenda? The latest Gallup poll tells us only 24 percent favor abortion for any reason. Another 14 percent think it should be "legal under most circumstances." Add those together and you get barely a third of public opinion. The other side now carries the majority: 18 percent want abortion completely illegal, and 42 percent say "illegal under most circumstances." That 60 percent can elect a president ? easily. And yet the Democrats are all chasing that 24 percent, the abortion-on-demand fringe, with absolutely zero fear that they'll look "out of the mainstream" to the American people. Why? Because they know the Democratic primaries are dominated by feminist pro-abortion militants, and so are the "mainstream" media. Ryan Lizza of the liberal New Republic magazine explains the realities of politics: "There remains an iron triangle of Democratic constituencies -- blacks, labor, pro-choice women -- whom every candidate must appease during the primaries." But it is the perception that is always more powerful, a perception created and nurtured by the supposedly mainstream news media. Reporters are congenitally incapable of portraying the abortion lobby as sitting on an ideologically extreme pole. Oh, they love to do that to the pro-lifers -- perpetually portrayed as a ultraconservative millstone around Republican necks that will ruin the GOP with women and "moderates" and "independents." Just three years ago, reporters complained that candidate Bush was "squeezed by the right" into a "hardline" pro-life position, but they weren't fazed at all as Al Gore and Bill Bradley competed for Kate's kiss. Now six Democrats sit like school boys on a NARAL stage, and the only pandering extremist for "intolerance" is the president who touches the March for Life with a ten-foot telephone pole from St. Louis. No group gets a freer ride from the political press than Kate Michelman's, even as it keeps renaming itself to de-emphasize its passion for the abortion procedure. "Naral Pro-Choice America" now rolls out of reporters' keyboards so easily, you wonder if next, they won't rename the other groups as Kate Michelman wants, like the "National What Opponents Call Right to Life Committee." Dan Balz of The Washington Post covered the NARAL dinner. He found no "liberals" in attendance, but he calmly passed along the militant rhetoric as objective journalism, writing the candidates "pledged last night to lead the fight to protect abortion rights and battle intolerance." Adam Nagourney of the New York Times was there, and he also didn't identify NARAL or anybody else there as "liberal." Ronald Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times did notice that "liberal" groups like NARAL would be active in 2004 ? using the L word in the very last paragraph. Jill Lawrence of USA Today carried no labels, either. But she alone wondered if some of the rhetoric was too "jarring," such as Howard Dean claiming that if the Bush administration continued on its anti-abortion path, soon U.S. women wouldn't be able to go to school. Al Sharpton drew big cheers for insisting that the "Christian right" ought to meet the "right Christians" who favor abortion. He also claimed abortion promoters were the "real patriots" because they favored "freedom for all Americans." Can you imagine the reaction to a Republican candidate saying their position was the most Christian or the most patriotic? Reporters would be choking on their Evian bottles. These reporters left out the patriotism sentence, but passed on the "right Christians" line without a hint of objection. If reporters weren't militant feminists, if they took their job seriously as nonpartisan observers, they would observe that each party has a base on a pole of the abortion question. But Kate Michelman sits at one extreme calling the other pole extreme -- though it's now certifiably the mainstream -- and the media elite just take her dictation, year after year, destroying their own credibility as "moderates" or "independents," or, it's almost to laugh, "objective." END Reprint of second of three columns > Bozell's February 11 column, "Harsher Memories of Clinton." The Clinton era seems long gone now, but when the memories come back, they're not generally pleasant. For conservatives, the bad memories surface when CNN has the gall to bring Clinton on "Larry King Live" on Ronald Reagan's birthday. There he was, to publicize his stage appearance with the Rolling Stones to raise funds to fight that global warming monster. In his typically petty way, this most unpresidential former president slammed George W. Bush for not spending enough on homeland security while giving tax cuts to the rich. Liberals still regret having to drop all the fairy tales about the admirable Clinton marriage and the president's supposedly reformed sexual behavior. A few weeks ago, ABC's "Good Morning America" revisited the five-year anniversary of the Monica Lewinsky story, and reporter Claire Shipman couldn't help shuddering at the "acid flashbacks" to that awful moment for Democrats when a Clinton scandal moved the Nielsen ratings meters. But for a few journalists, the memories of the Clinton impeachment are becoming sharper than they used to be. Longtime CBS Capitol Hill correspondent and "Face the Nation" host Bob Schieffer has a new memoir out called "This Just In: What I Couldn't Tell You on TV." It seems that what he couldn't tell you on TV was what everyone already knew: Clinton was a sleazeball. Schieffer confesses that early on he had a "prejudice" in favor of Clinton, since he corrected the notion that not all wisdom somehow originates in the northeast United States. He adds "I come from a long line of conservative Texas Democrats, but I claim no political party." He says Clinton established some "remarkable feats," from NAFTA to welfare reform to balancing the budget -- feats which seem less remarkable when you acknowledge they were GOP initiatives, not his. But Schieffer grows agitated remembering September 11, 1998 ? the day he spent part of his afternoon reading snippets of the Starr Report in live coverage. He remembers "as the father of two grown daughters, I found the whole thing depressing." On that day, he had the ability to express that personal feeling, but he never did. Reporters express their personal feelings about everything else, but not this. Schieffer suggests "Clinton disgraced the highest office in the land, and as the tawdry details of his affairs became a part of the national conversation, he coarsened the culture of the people he had been elected to lead. That was his crime." Schieffer never talked about a coarsened culture on TV, either. What conservatives had so forcefully maintained, and which Schieffer now concedes was true, was roundly ignored when it was news. In his book Schieffer also trashes Clinton for making his secretary Betty Currie come in on her days off to clear Monica into the White House, then wait through the sexual escapades before she could go home. He attacks Clinton for sending Madeleine Albright and Donna Shalala out to lie on his behalf. He says Clinton "had shown himself to be a user of women who was not hesitant to take advantage of his friends when found it necessary for business or pleasure. Schieffer actually did say a version of this on television -- on his "Face the Nation" commentary two days after reading the Starr Report on the air. But he never chided Currie, Albright, and Shalala ? no babes in the woods ? for knowing full well they were hiding the truth and lying to the American people. Perhaps the most telling anecdote in his Clinton chapter comes near the end, where he tells the story of Lanny Breuer. In August 1999, six months after Clinton's acquittal, Schieffer received an engraved card from Covington and Burling announcing that Breuer was returning to his old law firm. But the announcement struck him by boasting that Breuer represented the White House "in presidential impeachment hearings and trial, four independent counsel investigations, a Justice Department task force investigation, and numerous congressional oversight investigations." While Schieffer thought Breuer "was a good lawyer I had dealt with and come to like and respect over that time...that engraved card carried an arresting and somewhat unsettling message: If you need a good criminal lawyer, get someone with White House experience." Schieffer never said that on TV, either. There's no question but that the pro-Clinton media circled the wagons around this man in 1998. Maybe Schieffer's memoir is far too little, far too late. But it's better than the obedient silence from those who continue to deny the shameful performance from this shameless disgrace of a president. END Reprint of third of three columns > Tonight, Monday, on NBC's Tonight Show with Jay Leno, the man who is the polar opposite to Dennis Miller: Bill Maher, whose new HBO late-night show debuts this Friday. -- Brent Baker >>> Support the MRC, an educational foundation dependent upon contributions which make CyberAlert possible, by providing a tax- deductible donation. Be sure to fill in "CyberAlert" in the field which asks: "What led you to become a member or donate today?" For the secure donations page: https://secure.mediaresearch.org/Donation/Order/MediaResearch25-27/mck-cgi/mrcdonate.asp To subscribe to CyberAlert, send a blank e-mail to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe, use the link at the very bottom of this message. 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