We’re a month and change away from the mid-term elections. As far as I can tell the Dems (with a few exceptions) are OPPOSED TO:

Bush,
NSA,
Coercive interrogation techniques against captured terrorists,
Bush,
Staying the course in Iraq,
Bush, and
Bush.

The Dems are IN FAVOUR OF:
………………………………well, not Bush.

Right now the Dems are a reactionary, ideological political movement. They are not, by any reasonable measure, a political party with a positive message (platform) detailing how they would direct the management of the country.

The Dems are gambling that this mid-term will be about what people don’t want, rather than what people want. They are wrong, and as a result, will not make any material gains in either the House or Senate.

It’s a shame too. A healthy functioning democracy requires a legitimate government in waiting.

It’s time for the Dems to get in the game, rather than shouting insults from the sidelines. The country needs a legitimate healthy democratic debate.

The media’s dishonest approach to the NIE continues unabated. Numerous examples abound, but Isikoff offers us an unparalleled display of projection and hypocrisy.

The by-line: The National Intelligence Estimate doesn’t say what Bush says it does.

As a starting point, the premise of the story is misleading as I don’t believe Bush summarized what the NIE said, but rather he simply released it for people to judge for themselves. Paradoxically, this is something most media outlets have refused to do. Isikoff, like the rest, prefers to carefully control what we should know, by summing up the entire report in a single paragraph containing a handful of carefully selected quotes. Here’s how he summarizes what he calls “the actual wording” of the NIE:

The NIE, which is supposed to reflect the consensus judgment of the U.S. intelligence community, states that the global jihadist movement “is spreading and adapting to counter-terrorism efforts”; that the number of jihadists are “increasing in both number and geographic dispersion,” and that the war in Iraq had become “the cause celebre” for jihadis around the world, “breeding a deep resentment of U.S involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.”

There’s no mention in the article about the NIE citing the importance of bringing democracy to the middle east – the hallmark of Bush’s fight against terrorism. Further, there’s no mention of the NIE’s warnings about dangers of failing in Iraq. In fact, Isikoff suggests the NIE doesn’t say it:

None of this necessarily undercuts the president’s argument that a U.S. defeat in Iraq would embolden the worldwide jihadi movement

The NIE, as parsed by Isikoff, doesn’t necessarily undercut Bush’s position? In fact the NIE follows the president’s argument precisely:

“We assess that the Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives; perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere.”and

“If democratic reform efforts in Muslim majority nations progress over the next five years, political participation probably would drive a wedge between intransigent extremists and
groups willing to use the political process to achieve their local objectives.”

It gets worse. Take a look at this quote from the Bush administration which Isikoff cites as an example of how it conflicts with the NIE:

“Together with our coalition partners,” Bush said, “we’ve removed terrorist sanctuaries, disrupted their finances, killed and captured key operatives, broken up terrorist cells in American and other nations and stopped many attacks before they’re carried out. We’re on the offense against the terrorists on every battlefront.…”

Yet here is what the NIE says (in the fist paragraph no less), which Isikoff conveniently fails to mention:

“United States-led counterterrorism efforts have seriously damaged the leadership of al-Qa’ida and disrupted its operations”

Remarkably, the rest of the article is largely spent chastising the White House on how it “mischaracterizes intelligence-community assessments in politically useful ways.”

A few quotes from the declassifed NIE the Dems won’t like to hear (or the agenda journalists – though I doubt they’ll report these in any meaningful way):

United States-led counterterrorism efforts have seriously damaged the leadership of al-Qa’ida and disrupted its operations;

(that’s the very first line of the report by the way)

Greater pluralism and more responsive political systems in Muslim majority nations would alleviate some of the grievances jihadists exploit.

Now who is it that has been talking so much about the importance of bringing democracy to the middle east…….hang on….it’ll come to me.

We assess that the Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives; perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere.

So, leaving Iraq before the job is done would be a ……. bad thing?

The jihadists greatest vulnerability is that their ultimate political solution an ultra-conservative interpretation of shari a-based governance spanning the Muslim world is unpopular with the vast majority of Muslims. Exposing the religious and political straitjacket that is implied by the jihadists propaganda would help to divide them from the audiences they seek to persuade.

So I guess denying or minimizing the existence of the threat, rather than “exposing” it, is also………..a bad thing?

Sorry for the sarcasm, but I couldn’t resist.

Welcome Wizbang! readers. Please have a look around. We have segment transcripts from Fox News today featuring one who says he didn’t read the NIE report but all the reports he’s read say…. and Terry McAuliffe stating “…when Chris asked the question, he asked it, as you know, as an accusation.” You have to read it and you still won’t believe it…

Selective reporting.

It’s at the heart of agenda journalism. Here’s how it works:

You start with a conclusion, like say “the Iraq war is a failure”, and then you seek out facts that support the conclusion, while omitting facts that contradict the story line.

We know with near certainty that selective journalism is practised with the Iraq war coverage generally, by following this simple axiom:

– there exist negative stories out of Iraq: bombings, violence
– there exist positive stories out of Iraq: re-irrigation for Marsh Arabs, Kurdistan’s relative success, repatriation of millions of Iraqis who fled Saddam’s regime
– but only the negative stories are told, and they’re told to us daily.

This week we saw another explicit example – a selective leak, specifically tailored to only tell the negative while refraining from showing the positive. As with the macro-level coverage of the war generally, this latest leak is being presented as if it’s the whole story.

The war waged by agenda journalists continues.

UPDATE! President Bush has decided to declassify the report to let the American people read it and decide for themselves: (Fox News)

Bush said he was declassifying part of a classified National Intelligence Estimate completed last April because he wanted people to be able to read the conclusions without filters that “create confusion in the minds of the American people.”

VDH at his very best.  A few quotes, but do read it all:

On Oriana Fallaci's courage to confront radical Islam:

Candor, after all, can get one killed, exiled, or ostracized—whether a Danish cartoonist, a Dutch filmmaker, a Wall Street Journal reporter, or a British-Indian novelist. So here, ill and in her seventies, returned Ms. Fallaci one last time to take up the hammer and tongs against radical Islam—a diminutive woman of the Left and self-proclaimed atheist who wrote more bravely on behalf of her civilization than have most who are hale, males, conservatives, or Christians.

Her fiery message was as timely as it was caricatured and slandered: Muslims who leave the Middle East to live under the free aegis of the West have a moral duty to support and protect the civilization that has welcomed them, rather than romanticize about what they have forsaken; Christianity is more than a religion, but also a powerful emblem of the force of reason, in that it seeks to spread belief by rational thought as well as faith; and that affluent and leisured Westerners, bargaining away their honor and traditions out of fear and for illusory security, have only emboldened radical Islam that seeks to liquidate them.

I wish she were still alive to scoff at the politically correct, the appeaser, and the triangulator, but alas she is gone, defiant to the last.

On the Pope:

And what are we to make of poor Benedict XVI, the scholastic, who, in a disastrous display of public sensitivity, makes the telling point, that Christianity, in its long evolution to the present, has learned to forsake violence, and to defend its faith through appeals to reason—and thus can offer its own experience in the current crisis of Islam. And by quoting from the emperor rhetorician Manuel Paleologus—whose desperate efforts at strengthening the Morea and the Isthmus at Corinth a generation before that awful Tuesday, May 29, 1453 all came to naught—the Pope failed to grasp that under the tenets of radical Islam of the modern age, context means little, intent nothing, learning less than zero. If a sentence, indeed a mere phrase can be taken out of context, twisted, manipulated to show an absence of deference to Islam, furor ensues, death threats follow, assassins load their belts—even as the New York Times or the Guardian issues its sanctimonious apologies in the hope that the crocodile will eat them last.

His concluding lines:

So long may you run, Ms. Fallaci, you who by now have learned that, yes, there is a soul, and, yes, yours was indeed saved for eternity if only for its singular courage and honesty alone. And dear Pope: clarify, contextualize, express sorrow over the wrong interpretation of your remarks, but please don’t apologize for the Truth—not now, not ever.

Amen.

Just saw The Path to 9-11. It was 98% focused on the terrorists, 2% on Clinton. How fitting that the Dems would rather have that 98% – an important reminder of the lurking dangers of terrorism – buried, in order to stop the potentially politically damaging 2%.

For the Democrats partisan politics trumps security. It’s as simple as that.

Note from kimsch: I’ve TiVo’d it but haven’t seen it yet…

This is big. Really big.

Jeff at Protein Wisdom (his site is down after an apparent DOS attack) was on the receiving end of some pretty grotesque trolling done by a Psych Professor at the U. of Arizona, which targeted Jeff’s infant child. Michelle Malkin has all the details.

Apparently she has resigned. Her quasi-apology is accompanied by this pathetic attempt to distance herself from her own actions:

Protein Wisdom has been down since this all started so it is not possible to see all the comments and everything that led up to this. People are posting snippets of what I posted that have been embellished with references to french kissing and other things I didn’t say.

When and if protein wisdom comes on line again, it will be hard to tell what Jeff added or deleted to the transcript.

Funny thing though, I was actually visitng the site when some of her comments were made (you’ll see a comment by Jeff1999 when the site comes back up). Sorry Dr. Frish, but I, and many other folks who visited the site, were there before the site went down and can attest to the vile comments you made, including your insinuations of Jeff tongue kissing his own child.

Update: link to the actual post here.

Jeff’s comment here:

“but I have no intention of snuffing the mofo’s chillen myself”

you know your in a bit of a legal bind when you have to issue a clarifying statment that you DON’T plan on killing someones child.

Thanks for clearing that up professor.
Posted by jeff1999 | permalink
on 07/07 at 12:13 AM

If reality doesn’t assist in the war against Bush, simply ignore it. That’s been the MSM’s method of reporting since Bush took office, well one of the methods. The media has been portraying our economy as “sagging”, “sluggish”, “slowing” for years now. They’ll cover every individual facet of negativity they can find and report it ad nauseum. How many times have you seen gas prices highlighted in the news? They take any tree in the forest they can find which shows things are bad, but what they won’t do is report on the forest itself, at least not honestly.

The fact is, America is going through one of its greatest periods of economic growth in its history. Check out Kudlow’s recent article: Employment, which under the Clinton administration appeared to be the hallmark of economic health, is at historically high levels. Growth has been astounding. Most importantly, the economic expansion reveals an underlying trend of flexibility. When one area retracts, others rebound.

But rather than reporting on a healthy and vibrant forest, the media will report on whatever wilting trees it can find in order to create the impression that Bush’s policies are failing.

The problem for old media is that I just read an article that completely belies its preferred storyline. And then I passed it on to you folks through this blog.

UPDATE: Right on cue is the NYT headline: “Jobs Data Indicates Economy is Slowing”.

Slowing? The MSM skips right past the fact that it was/is fast and moves right into slowing. Just to put this in persepctive: the fact that the recent US economic growth was equal to China’s entire economic output ISN’T newsworthy, but that fact that it may be slowing (which given its torrential pace, a slowing down period was certain to come about) IS newsworthy.

With Harper’s Conservatives recently winning the Canadian election and Mexico staying conservative, the entire continent of North America is now ruled from the right.

Nice.