To help it rebuild, the GOP needs a rare mix of leadership qualities. It needs a visionary who will harness technology to the party’s advantage. It needs a grounded realist who realizes that technology is not an end unto itself and that, while the party is in desperate need of a complete technological overhaul, traditional methods of communication must also be strengthened with equal vigor. The party needs a fighter. At the same time, it needs a conciliatory negotiator who will act as a voice of reason to bring its various factions together to work as one.
The various candidates for RNC Chair each bring with them many of the above aspects. But those who will be right there with them are sometimes even more important. Who we choose as Secretary of the RNC is, in a way, even more important than the chairmanship. While the Chairman will need to spend a large part of his time as the face of the GOP to the media, much of the heavy planning and strategy will go to the rest of the committee. It is with that in mind that I would urge the party to elect Sharon Day as RNC Secretary.
Before I get into Sharon Day’s personal story, her devotion to the party, her competence and her integrity, it is necessary to point out why she is one of the rare mixes of all the ingredients needed to rebuild and revitalize this party. This is an important race. After reading the following information, if you agree that she is indeed the best candidate for the job, I would encourage you to go to http://www.gop.com/Connect/States.aspx, click on your state to contact your state party (specifically your chairman and committeepeople) and urge them to support her candidacy.
To begin with, Sharon Day has been leading the fight to revamp the party’s technological outreach. “Just having been in Florida alone, we saw the great technological advantage that the Obama Campaign brought with it to the table. It became clear that we were waging a 2008 battle with 2004 technology. That has to change.” Her plan to revitalize technology includes everything from organized social networking to providing operatives and volunteers with the hands on equipment that they need. “Generally, the Obama people knew exactly where to go at all times. Our people were at a serious disadvantage due to the lack of equipment needed to coordinate with them. We must ensure that this does not happen again.”
The case that Day makes for increased technology is compelling. But that is only a small part of the picture. What makes her candidacy unique is that despite her strong advocacy to increase utilization of technology, she does not fall into the trap of believing that technology is a be all and end all unto itself. To Day, it is an important tool, but not an entire marketing plan. She agrees that the failure of the GOP to get its message out to the public must be countered by coordinating with local clubs, college groups and county executives, encouraging them to conduct media write-in campaigns and providing them with the talking points needed to set the record straight in their local areas. She recognizes that this form of outreach is key to shaping the hearts and minds of the public.
But beyond these needed strategy points, who is Sharon Day? She’s someone who possesses that rare mix of qualities, the heart of a fighter and the head of a leader. The former quality was most prominently displayed in each of the past several election cycles when she paid to have her car wrapped top to bottom and bumper to bumper for the GOP presidential nominee.
To many, that may seem to be simply a nice gesture, albeit one that shows tremendous spirit and party loyalty. But given that Sharon Day lives in Broward County, Florida, where conservatives are few (but those who are conservative are strong ones), the act of so openly displaying her support for our party was nothing short of heroic.
In 2004, many cars were keyed for simply having Bush/Cheney bumper stickers. Fortunately for Sharon, nothing happened to her car. She recounts with laughter how people would give her a thumbs down. She’d smile and return a thumbs up and they’d usually go back and forth a few times before driving off. That was in 2004. This past year was another situation entirely.
Day got her car wrapped for McCain. This time, the least she had to worry about was getting keyed. Students would jump off of bus benches and surround her car. One time when she went to fill up on gas, she was chased out of the station. She was surprised, but did she back down? No. Her car stayed wrapped until the end. She plans to do it again in 2012.
Yet she is not oblivious to the dangers. When asked, she readily acknowledges the risks. She just cares more about doing what’s right and isn’t deterred or distracted by other factors.
Day is a fighter, yet one who is conciliatory by nature. More often than not, it takes a combination of those two qualities to get the job done. Day exemplifies both such qualities. When many of her neighbors who she had given McCain bumper stickers took them off their cars amid much more minor cases of harassment than the ones she faced, they were embarrassed to tell her. Day reassured them. She didn’t look down on them, she understood where they were coming from. And without thinking twice, she simply continued to do what she felt she needed to do.
This combination of determination and an ability to work with and influence others will carry over well when it comes to taking a leading role in the party.
Day is a strong conservative. Yet she recognizes that it takes a coalition of diverse people to win. So on the one hand, she will never stop fighting for core Republican values and never abandon her principles for the sake of expediency (or for any other reason). At the same time, she is disarming and seeks to bring others to the fold through reasoning and discussion.
In other words, she’s a leader, and an effective one at that. Her high spiritedness is reserved for her own actions and for campaigns. When it comes to winning over hearts and minds, she uses the convincing but endearing Ronald Reagan approach, a strong ability to communicate that resonates well and is focused on educating others to see the inherent rightness of conservatism. For more information about Sharon Day, readers are encouraged to visit her website, www.SharonDayGOP.com.
We need to support this unique candidate. Only 168 people can vote for RNC Secretary, but we each have a voice. Go to http://www.gop.com/Connect/States.aspx and click on your state and view the contact info for your state. Then email or call your state party chairman and committeepeople. Tell them that the GOP needs a leader like Sharon Day to serve as our next RNC Secretary.
Monday, January 19, 2009
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Message to the GOP: Fight Kos With Kos and Kendrick Meek With Marion Thorpe
Marion Thorpe is not only a great conservative candidate with a record of recruiting youth and minorities to the GOP. He’s also the only candidate who can dampen the enthusiasm that Democrats plan to build around Kendrick Meek for the US Senate. If Republicans want to keep the seat we need to begin fighting on the terms that Democrat activists have set in motion. That begins by understanding what their tactics are and reacting to them.
Understanding the ground game of the opposing side is central to any battle. If one team thinks they’ve arrived on the field for a game of dodge ball while the other side is ready to play tackle football, you don’t need to be a professional sports caster to figure out where this game is headed. That much should be obvious. But for some reason, when it comes to politics, Republicans come out with bouquets while Democrats bring brickbats to the match.
The problem goes back almost to our nation’s founding. In 1800, Federalists pushed harder than they ever had in the three days before the election. But that was no match for the Republican-Democrats, who had campaigned nonstop for an entire year. On the surface, both original parties seem to have more in common with today’s Republican Party (and, truthfully, not much in common with either of today’s parties). But as far as campaign strategy goes, Democrats have inherited the campaign zeal of Aaron Burr, while Republicans are at least somewhat the heirs of those who sat back and thought that their ideas would carry the day by virtue of, well, their ideas. If only the public were that attentive.
Which brings us to the Daily Kos. Their views certainly run counter to the ideals of either Adams or Jefferson, but it is their tactics that we must discuss. When it comes to rallying their base, they have shown a keen ability to run a long and protracted war to win over voters. In the world of politics today, there are few who are better at stealth fighting than the radicals at the Daily Kos.
Republicans can be better. Republicans are smarter. And much more of the time than do they, we have the truth on our side. We can and should be just as relentless in preserving the traditions that have been shown time and again to be essential to the healthy survival of any civilization. We can and should be able to defend the sanity of our side versus the insanity and spin of theirs. Yet we don’t. We won’t. Anticipate? Not us. And so we lose.
Well it’s time for us to say: No more! Democrats have 59 seats. Liberals have a few more than that. We must reverse the trend and the way to do so is to recognize that we’re in a fight, not a skateboarding contest.
The Daily Kos knows that conservative values beat liberal ones hands down, no contest, each and every time. Even California is fed up with the liberal insanity that is their eventual goal for all 50 states. So they spin and distort, they attack relentlessly, they lie and confuse the public and then….
Are they successful? Are the best bartenders (and presidents) Irish? In 2004 the Democratic Party was the clear minority party. People were fed up and downright sick of so many of their antics. And that was with a media that was more in the tank for them then than they are now (as we’re finally starting to call them on it, albeit ever so slightly).
Fast forward to 2006. After unending spin, lie after relentless lie and years of offering up slogans as an alternative to national security, the President and the GOP had successfully been discredited in the eyes of the public. Kos activists had worked with the media to take measures that would have turned the public against FDR during WW2, not the least of which being the coverage of the full life story of every individual soldier that was killed, done on an almost daily basis without ever mentioning the reasons that led to the war (such as the UN weapons reports and the failure of Saddam to open up to inspectors after 12 years of non-compliance and 18 months of constant warning).
Kos and likeminded activists also worked a district by district strategy. They concentrated on developing candidates in each district who would appeal to their local area. Most of these candidates masqueraded as conservatives. Some actually were moderate. Once elected, all went on to vote with Pelosi at least 80% of the time.
We can continue to ignore the strategies and tactics of the left and continue to run races as if we’re the only party whose actions matter. But if we do so, we can change our name to the Insanity Party, as we’ll have fit the clinical definition of the word as coined by Einstein, the act of “doing the same thing over… again and expecting different results.”
Which brings us to Florida and the United States Senate. The fight for Florida’s Senate seat was set to be a battle royale. Three Democrats seemed likely to enter the race. They still might, but if they do, the other two will find out soon enough that only the anointed one (yes, the Obamaesque phrase can be passed on to his disciples too) has been preordained to win.
How was Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink, Florida’s most well known Democrat (more so than even Bob Graham at this point) outmaneuvered by Congressman Kendrick Meek, a relatively unknown figure outside of Miami-Dade? And it is worth noting that Kendrick Meek also seems to have out maneuvered fellow Congressman Ron Klein, who also has more name recognition and fundraising power.
The answer is simple. Activists at the Daily Kos and Huffington Post recognized that common wisdom is generally folly. They analyzed the race as anyone intent on winning should. Forget the hype. Concentrate on who can win.
And so a few weeks ago, when the race seemed to be headed to be Jeb Bush vs Alex Sink, these online activists yelled out “not so fast!” They touted Meek as a far more viable, easily winnable, candidate.
And they were met with ridicule. But those who scoffed did so in error. Running Meek was a brilliant strategy.
What makes Meek such a formidable opponent? Simply put, he fits in with the very effective Kos strategy: Look to rally the crowd in whatever superficial way possible, usually with intense emotion fueled by ignorance.
Sometimes they instill hatred by politicizing a war or other measures. When there’s no fault or wrongdoing they manufacture it. When both sides fall short they cast all blame onto their opponents. When someone on the other side does something wrong they trumpet it around for years. When ten members of their side all do worse, they fight to silence all criticism.
Other times, most notably in the last campaign, they fuel emotions with baseless appeals to hope and love, turning real politicians into false messiahs in the process. And that is their campaign strategy for the US Senate.
Kendrick Meek is popular among Obama’s strongest base. He’s well known in disadvantaged areas. Activists on the left will appeal to minorities, immigrants and other struggling working people to see in Meek the embodiment of themselves. Their appeals are ludicrous, shallow and should be viewed as insulting. But for far too many, those tactics are effective.
Once their target audience has drunk the kool-aid, Kos activists go on to inspire others to take pride in the false hopes of their initial recruits. They proclaim their candidate of choice as an inspiration to the masses, a man who is the living embodiment of the best that society has to offer.
This is their plan for Kendrick Meek. The fact that his Senate race would make him the first African-American to be nominated as the lead candidate for statewide office in Florida is the fuel they need to put their appeal into motion. It is, in fact, a catchy narrative for all of us who believe in the importance of equality. And while those who truly mean it are concerned with substance and record, not with race, that doesn’t stop the Daily Kos, who are only interested in exploitation, from distorting the issue, turning the Meek race into a fairytale that it is not.
Simply put, Kendrick Meek can rally Obama’s base in ways that no other Democrat can. Once activists have built up hype about Meek to Obama-like levels in their target areas, they will use the mass hysteria that they manufactured to portray him as the hope of the great masses. In doing so, they can rally a large number of voters to “look beyond” (i.e. to ignore) issues and concentrate only on the narrative that they will have successfully invented out of thin air. Their plan, to first galvanize the base and then motivate the masses, is what makes Kendrick Meek so effective.
Jeb Bush understood this. He didn’t run. Now a number of others are rumored to be considering entry into the race, none of which are able to counter the above narrative. If Jeb felt the time wasn’t ripe for him, they’ll be quashed. Even with all the hype, Jeb would have made it at least a 50-50 race in his favor, not odds that would interest him when any other statewide run would be an all but guaranteed win. He has other options.
The Meek strategy has been laid out. Republicans can ignore it, fail to react and lose. Or we can do something about it. And we can actually do something about it, because there is one candidate who can attack the Achilles heel of their strategy and in so doing cause it to be rendered moot. He’s Florida’s past Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Marion Thorpe, Jr. Dr. Thorpe is a true conservative. He’s also an African-American who is widely known and respected in the regions that turned out most strongly for Obama.
Sure, we as Republicans can keep pretending that whoever the Democrats nominate doesn’t matter. All depends on the delivery of our message. But any battle in which the actions of the opposing side are not anticipated is one that is fought recklessly. To win we must analyze the other candidate, see why they’re running him and react accordingly. Democrats are running Meek to build up enthusiasm by using the historic nature of his run. They have nothing else. So Republicans: make sure that their only point, the one they want to hype all the way to the general election, is taken away from them. In this case, the only way we can do this is by nominating Marion Thorpe.
Democrats are counting on Barack Obama coming down to Florida to help rally the crowds to help elect the first African-American senator from the South since Reconstruction. Neutralizing the race factor and putting up a truly qualified candidate who has tackled the hard issues takes the air out of the balloon that they have come to substitute for real strategy.
The reasons why we must embrace Marion Thorpe’s candidacy are strategic. But that alone does not do justice to his run. Dr. Thorpe is an excellent candidate and leader in his own right.
Marion Thorpe has preached the message of Republicanism to African-American churches. He makes no bones about the moral decay of the Democrats. He also points out their history, how
the Republican Party was the civil rights party for over 100 years, how the NRA was founded to supply weapons to African-Americans for their own protection (and how decades later, Charlton Heston’s involvement in the organization was a natural progression of his strong civil rights advocacy) and how Democrats have exploited the issue of race without doing one concrete thing for African-Americans. More importantly, he paints the contrast between Republican values and those of the Democrats.
In doing all of the above, Dr. Thorpe has brought thousands of youth and minority voters to the Republican fold. And that’s just in South Florida. Running statewide, he can do wonders for our party. As an African-American leader in the Senate and as an active leader on the national level, he can and will be a key voice in building the stronger and more diverse base that is so needed for the GOP in going forward.
Dr. Thorpe is staunchly pro-life. But he’s more than that. Marion Thorpe points to the targeting of minority areas by groups like Planned Parenthood. He points to the moral values that most people recognize as being right and educates audiences on the positions that both parties take on those issues. This may not be news to us, but it is to much of his audience. And few people can grab their attention as can Dr. Thorpe.
He is also a national security hawk and understands the risks that America faces. He also understands economic realities, seeing the economy as being priority number one. To quote Thorpe “without jobs our educational system, our healthcare and our national security fall apart.” He has proposed concrete steps to revitalize Florida’s agriculture based economy. Along those lines, he was one of the first political leaders in South Florida to oppose the bailouts, measures that he finds to be band-aid fixes that will do little for the middle class.
In the area of education, Thorpe supports financial literacy and lifeskills (manners, employment) training in middle schools and high schools so that students graduate with the tools they need to compete in the workplace. He boldly paints the contrast between Republican solutions and those offered up by the Democrats by asking youth whether they’d like to work hard, own a business and pass it on to their children or whether they’d prefer a life of constant dependency, accomplish far less and pass nothing on. When they inevitably choose the former he tells them: “Well I agree, and that’s why I’m a Republican. That’s why you need to be a Republican too.” He then goes on to educate them on policy.
Thorpe is also a staunch advocate for effective healthcare that isn’t government run. He proposes viable solutions that don’t call for all competition, and therefore all quality, to be taken out of the system. He boils down the dangers of socialized medicine in simple terms without detracting from the seriousness of the dangers involved. On the national level he’d be one of the few voices against socialized medicine with the background needed to be able to oppose the issue effectively.
And he makes no bones about some recent Obama picks that few others have been willing to criticize. On the stump, he labels Dr. Sanjay Gupta an “entertainer, not a Surgeon General,” and “someone who knows little about public policy.” He calls the appointment part of the Obama team’s smoke and mirrors tactics and quotes a supporter who said “Dr. Sanjay Gupta; isn’t that like appointing Judge Judy to the Supreme Court?” He rightly adds that he was shocked that Obama was able to find a less qualified Surgeon General than Jocelyn Elders.
But above all else, in the race against Kendrick Meek, the inevitable Democratic nominee (and the strongest Democratic candidate, due to the tactics outlined above), for Republicans, it’s Marion Thorpe or bust. Take your pick.
Here’s what those who want to make a difference need to do:
Understanding the ground game of the opposing side is central to any battle. If one team thinks they’ve arrived on the field for a game of dodge ball while the other side is ready to play tackle football, you don’t need to be a professional sports caster to figure out where this game is headed. That much should be obvious. But for some reason, when it comes to politics, Republicans come out with bouquets while Democrats bring brickbats to the match.
The problem goes back almost to our nation’s founding. In 1800, Federalists pushed harder than they ever had in the three days before the election. But that was no match for the Republican-Democrats, who had campaigned nonstop for an entire year. On the surface, both original parties seem to have more in common with today’s Republican Party (and, truthfully, not much in common with either of today’s parties). But as far as campaign strategy goes, Democrats have inherited the campaign zeal of Aaron Burr, while Republicans are at least somewhat the heirs of those who sat back and thought that their ideas would carry the day by virtue of, well, their ideas. If only the public were that attentive.
Which brings us to the Daily Kos. Their views certainly run counter to the ideals of either Adams or Jefferson, but it is their tactics that we must discuss. When it comes to rallying their base, they have shown a keen ability to run a long and protracted war to win over voters. In the world of politics today, there are few who are better at stealth fighting than the radicals at the Daily Kos.
Republicans can be better. Republicans are smarter. And much more of the time than do they, we have the truth on our side. We can and should be just as relentless in preserving the traditions that have been shown time and again to be essential to the healthy survival of any civilization. We can and should be able to defend the sanity of our side versus the insanity and spin of theirs. Yet we don’t. We won’t. Anticipate? Not us. And so we lose.
Well it’s time for us to say: No more! Democrats have 59 seats. Liberals have a few more than that. We must reverse the trend and the way to do so is to recognize that we’re in a fight, not a skateboarding contest.
The Daily Kos knows that conservative values beat liberal ones hands down, no contest, each and every time. Even California is fed up with the liberal insanity that is their eventual goal for all 50 states. So they spin and distort, they attack relentlessly, they lie and confuse the public and then….
Are they successful? Are the best bartenders (and presidents) Irish? In 2004 the Democratic Party was the clear minority party. People were fed up and downright sick of so many of their antics. And that was with a media that was more in the tank for them then than they are now (as we’re finally starting to call them on it, albeit ever so slightly).
Fast forward to 2006. After unending spin, lie after relentless lie and years of offering up slogans as an alternative to national security, the President and the GOP had successfully been discredited in the eyes of the public. Kos activists had worked with the media to take measures that would have turned the public against FDR during WW2, not the least of which being the coverage of the full life story of every individual soldier that was killed, done on an almost daily basis without ever mentioning the reasons that led to the war (such as the UN weapons reports and the failure of Saddam to open up to inspectors after 12 years of non-compliance and 18 months of constant warning).
Kos and likeminded activists also worked a district by district strategy. They concentrated on developing candidates in each district who would appeal to their local area. Most of these candidates masqueraded as conservatives. Some actually were moderate. Once elected, all went on to vote with Pelosi at least 80% of the time.
We can continue to ignore the strategies and tactics of the left and continue to run races as if we’re the only party whose actions matter. But if we do so, we can change our name to the Insanity Party, as we’ll have fit the clinical definition of the word as coined by Einstein, the act of “doing the same thing over… again and expecting different results.”
Which brings us to Florida and the United States Senate. The fight for Florida’s Senate seat was set to be a battle royale. Three Democrats seemed likely to enter the race. They still might, but if they do, the other two will find out soon enough that only the anointed one (yes, the Obamaesque phrase can be passed on to his disciples too) has been preordained to win.
How was Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink, Florida’s most well known Democrat (more so than even Bob Graham at this point) outmaneuvered by Congressman Kendrick Meek, a relatively unknown figure outside of Miami-Dade? And it is worth noting that Kendrick Meek also seems to have out maneuvered fellow Congressman Ron Klein, who also has more name recognition and fundraising power.
The answer is simple. Activists at the Daily Kos and Huffington Post recognized that common wisdom is generally folly. They analyzed the race as anyone intent on winning should. Forget the hype. Concentrate on who can win.
And so a few weeks ago, when the race seemed to be headed to be Jeb Bush vs Alex Sink, these online activists yelled out “not so fast!” They touted Meek as a far more viable, easily winnable, candidate.
And they were met with ridicule. But those who scoffed did so in error. Running Meek was a brilliant strategy.
What makes Meek such a formidable opponent? Simply put, he fits in with the very effective Kos strategy: Look to rally the crowd in whatever superficial way possible, usually with intense emotion fueled by ignorance.
Sometimes they instill hatred by politicizing a war or other measures. When there’s no fault or wrongdoing they manufacture it. When both sides fall short they cast all blame onto their opponents. When someone on the other side does something wrong they trumpet it around for years. When ten members of their side all do worse, they fight to silence all criticism.
Other times, most notably in the last campaign, they fuel emotions with baseless appeals to hope and love, turning real politicians into false messiahs in the process. And that is their campaign strategy for the US Senate.
Kendrick Meek is popular among Obama’s strongest base. He’s well known in disadvantaged areas. Activists on the left will appeal to minorities, immigrants and other struggling working people to see in Meek the embodiment of themselves. Their appeals are ludicrous, shallow and should be viewed as insulting. But for far too many, those tactics are effective.
Once their target audience has drunk the kool-aid, Kos activists go on to inspire others to take pride in the false hopes of their initial recruits. They proclaim their candidate of choice as an inspiration to the masses, a man who is the living embodiment of the best that society has to offer.
This is their plan for Kendrick Meek. The fact that his Senate race would make him the first African-American to be nominated as the lead candidate for statewide office in Florida is the fuel they need to put their appeal into motion. It is, in fact, a catchy narrative for all of us who believe in the importance of equality. And while those who truly mean it are concerned with substance and record, not with race, that doesn’t stop the Daily Kos, who are only interested in exploitation, from distorting the issue, turning the Meek race into a fairytale that it is not.
Simply put, Kendrick Meek can rally Obama’s base in ways that no other Democrat can. Once activists have built up hype about Meek to Obama-like levels in their target areas, they will use the mass hysteria that they manufactured to portray him as the hope of the great masses. In doing so, they can rally a large number of voters to “look beyond” (i.e. to ignore) issues and concentrate only on the narrative that they will have successfully invented out of thin air. Their plan, to first galvanize the base and then motivate the masses, is what makes Kendrick Meek so effective.
Jeb Bush understood this. He didn’t run. Now a number of others are rumored to be considering entry into the race, none of which are able to counter the above narrative. If Jeb felt the time wasn’t ripe for him, they’ll be quashed. Even with all the hype, Jeb would have made it at least a 50-50 race in his favor, not odds that would interest him when any other statewide run would be an all but guaranteed win. He has other options.
The Meek strategy has been laid out. Republicans can ignore it, fail to react and lose. Or we can do something about it. And we can actually do something about it, because there is one candidate who can attack the Achilles heel of their strategy and in so doing cause it to be rendered moot. He’s Florida’s past Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Marion Thorpe, Jr. Dr. Thorpe is a true conservative. He’s also an African-American who is widely known and respected in the regions that turned out most strongly for Obama.
Sure, we as Republicans can keep pretending that whoever the Democrats nominate doesn’t matter. All depends on the delivery of our message. But any battle in which the actions of the opposing side are not anticipated is one that is fought recklessly. To win we must analyze the other candidate, see why they’re running him and react accordingly. Democrats are running Meek to build up enthusiasm by using the historic nature of his run. They have nothing else. So Republicans: make sure that their only point, the one they want to hype all the way to the general election, is taken away from them. In this case, the only way we can do this is by nominating Marion Thorpe.
Democrats are counting on Barack Obama coming down to Florida to help rally the crowds to help elect the first African-American senator from the South since Reconstruction. Neutralizing the race factor and putting up a truly qualified candidate who has tackled the hard issues takes the air out of the balloon that they have come to substitute for real strategy.
The reasons why we must embrace Marion Thorpe’s candidacy are strategic. But that alone does not do justice to his run. Dr. Thorpe is an excellent candidate and leader in his own right.
Marion Thorpe has preached the message of Republicanism to African-American churches. He makes no bones about the moral decay of the Democrats. He also points out their history, how
the Republican Party was the civil rights party for over 100 years, how the NRA was founded to supply weapons to African-Americans for their own protection (and how decades later, Charlton Heston’s involvement in the organization was a natural progression of his strong civil rights advocacy) and how Democrats have exploited the issue of race without doing one concrete thing for African-Americans. More importantly, he paints the contrast between Republican values and those of the Democrats.
In doing all of the above, Dr. Thorpe has brought thousands of youth and minority voters to the Republican fold. And that’s just in South Florida. Running statewide, he can do wonders for our party. As an African-American leader in the Senate and as an active leader on the national level, he can and will be a key voice in building the stronger and more diverse base that is so needed for the GOP in going forward.
Dr. Thorpe is staunchly pro-life. But he’s more than that. Marion Thorpe points to the targeting of minority areas by groups like Planned Parenthood. He points to the moral values that most people recognize as being right and educates audiences on the positions that both parties take on those issues. This may not be news to us, but it is to much of his audience. And few people can grab their attention as can Dr. Thorpe.
He is also a national security hawk and understands the risks that America faces. He also understands economic realities, seeing the economy as being priority number one. To quote Thorpe “without jobs our educational system, our healthcare and our national security fall apart.” He has proposed concrete steps to revitalize Florida’s agriculture based economy. Along those lines, he was one of the first political leaders in South Florida to oppose the bailouts, measures that he finds to be band-aid fixes that will do little for the middle class.
In the area of education, Thorpe supports financial literacy and lifeskills (manners, employment) training in middle schools and high schools so that students graduate with the tools they need to compete in the workplace. He boldly paints the contrast between Republican solutions and those offered up by the Democrats by asking youth whether they’d like to work hard, own a business and pass it on to their children or whether they’d prefer a life of constant dependency, accomplish far less and pass nothing on. When they inevitably choose the former he tells them: “Well I agree, and that’s why I’m a Republican. That’s why you need to be a Republican too.” He then goes on to educate them on policy.
Thorpe is also a staunch advocate for effective healthcare that isn’t government run. He proposes viable solutions that don’t call for all competition, and therefore all quality, to be taken out of the system. He boils down the dangers of socialized medicine in simple terms without detracting from the seriousness of the dangers involved. On the national level he’d be one of the few voices against socialized medicine with the background needed to be able to oppose the issue effectively.
And he makes no bones about some recent Obama picks that few others have been willing to criticize. On the stump, he labels Dr. Sanjay Gupta an “entertainer, not a Surgeon General,” and “someone who knows little about public policy.” He calls the appointment part of the Obama team’s smoke and mirrors tactics and quotes a supporter who said “Dr. Sanjay Gupta; isn’t that like appointing Judge Judy to the Supreme Court?” He rightly adds that he was shocked that Obama was able to find a less qualified Surgeon General than Jocelyn Elders.
But above all else, in the race against Kendrick Meek, the inevitable Democratic nominee (and the strongest Democratic candidate, due to the tactics outlined above), for Republicans, it’s Marion Thorpe or bust. Take your pick.
Here’s what those who want to make a difference need to do:
- Invite your friends to join this facebook group by clicking here
- Tell your friends. We need to familiarize ourselves with the tactics of the Daily Kos and actively prevent them from taking hold
- Anticipate similar tactics in other states and react accordingly
American Thinker: The Bush Legacy
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/01/the_bush_legacy.html
An accurate account of the legacy of President George W. Bush - points out the shallowness of the media and the profound contributions that President Bush has made to the nation.
Also debunks common leftist myths while analyzing both the successes and errors of the 43rd President based on his track record and on lessons that have been shown to us throughout history.
The post is a long read, but provides a very thorough account of many key events of the Bush Presidency and should be disseminated to liberals in an effort to set the record straight.
See also our new President George W. Bush Legacy Preservation Project at The Bush Legacy.
An accurate account of the legacy of President George W. Bush - points out the shallowness of the media and the profound contributions that President Bush has made to the nation.
Also debunks common leftist myths while analyzing both the successes and errors of the 43rd President based on his track record and on lessons that have been shown to us throughout history.
The post is a long read, but provides a very thorough account of many key events of the Bush Presidency and should be disseminated to liberals in an effort to set the record straight.
See also our new President George W. Bush Legacy Preservation Project at The Bush Legacy.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Marion Thorpe for US Senate - The Only Way the GOP Can Keep its Florida Seat
Dr. Marion Thorpe is the only candidate (aside from Jeb, who is not running) who can beat the Daily Kos' anointed candidate, Kendrick Meek.
The image of Obama rallying his base to support Meek in the midterm will be more than enough to get them going. But Obama cannot vilify someone who is well known and liked in the areas that turned out heavily for him in 2008, even if this candidate is a conservative Republican.
Marion Thorpe moots the impact of Kendrick Meek. He has a track record of bringing thousands of minority voters to the GOP, or of at least getting them to vote for him based on his honesty and by the way he communicates his platform.
Here's what you can do to keep this Senate seat in GOP hands:
The image of Obama rallying his base to support Meek in the midterm will be more than enough to get them going. But Obama cannot vilify someone who is well known and liked in the areas that turned out heavily for him in 2008, even if this candidate is a conservative Republican.
Marion Thorpe moots the impact of Kendrick Meek. He has a track record of bringing thousands of minority voters to the GOP, or of at least getting them to vote for him based on his honesty and by the way he communicates his platform.
Here's what you can do to keep this Senate seat in GOP hands:
- Invite your friends to join this facebook group http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=44503786707
- Contact me if you are interested in blogging to promote this most needed candidacy
- Get involved as a precinct captain or as a Leader for Thorpe
- Host a party or a get together for Thorpe
- Tell all of your friends to get involved in this unique campaign and join the facebook group
Sunday, January 04, 2009
Media Bias: Are the Shameful Practices of the Toronto Star and Columnist Linda McQuaig the Natural Progressions of Liberal Dishonesty?
The leftist bias and activist drumbeating of today’s major media is as self-evident as it is plentiful. A look at how major media acts in North America’s most liberal cities gives us an indication of the true dangers that media bias poses here.
The examples below should serve as a vital wake up call to conservatives to relentlessly point out the biases of the media at every turn so as to prevent our voices from being wiped out of the public debate. Certainly, the lengths that the dominant media of left leaning cities goes to in trumpeting their point of view (while fervidly quashing out all others) gives us a prelude to the dangers of unopposed media bias anywhere.
Toronto is a major metropolitan, one that is home to a large number of hard working people, businesses and corporations. It has its own stock exchange. The city’s most widely read newspaper is the Toronto Star and anyone who is familiar with that paper knows one thing: The Toronto Star isn’t only biased. Its one sidedness rivals that of the Pravda of the 1970s. What makes it even more dangerous is its pretense of neutrality.
The Toronto Star takes great pleasure in playing fast and loose with the truth. While it purports to be a news service, the fact that it is no better than any propagandist journal that was ever printed in the Soviet Union is provable. You can point to it. Unlike most papers, this reality becomes obvious upon reading just a few issues. And the more you familiarize yourself with the paper, the greater your disgust at its dishonesty, its falsification of facts and the agenda driven manipulations that grace not only its op-eds, but also its front pages on a daily basis.
Years ago, when I lived in Toronto, I was a short time subscriber of the Star. Never before had I seen a paper in which the other side of any issue isn’t only attacked, its points are rendered non-existent. In the narrow minded and false world of the Star there are no conservatives. Unless, that is, there’s a need to incite hatred or disdain among readers. That’s where conservatives make for very useful fodder.
Attacks range from the comical to the obscene. Star columnist Richard Gwyn once opined an entire piece on how Canadian conservatives aren’t Canadian at all. That column, while audacious, was actually mild by the Star’s standards, by which Conservatives have routinely been maligned and falsely ascribed character traits that would be unkind if said of a vampire bat.
The reasons for conservative views are never published. All that the Star will tell its readers is that conservatives are “dangerous,” “extremists,” and so forth (and those are mild examples of what’s written in its pages). In doing so, they refer not to third world revolutionists, but rather to those who espouse opinions that are shared by the majority of Americans, Western Canadians and indeed many Eastern Canadians as well. Simply put, what the Star is doing isn’t just keeping their readers ignorant of any other point of view. Their tactics are fanning the flames of hatred against a large segment of Canadians on a daily basis.
If a conservative were to write of liberals with one iota of the smears, jears and slurs that regularly grace the Star’s hallowed pages, he or she would find themselves in front of a Human Rights Tribunal. Yet in the minds of the Star’s editors, their unending attacks on conservatives are just the way things are.
Liberals who get their opinions of conservatives from news sources such as the Star are as clueless to what we think as were citizens of the Soviet Union of the Western world and of the mechanics of a free market economy. (The Pravda, the Star’s East Block soul mate, routinely described Western countries as places where people are left dying on the street as others pass by and laugh.) And while such one sidedness is not the exclusive domain of the Star, the Star is alone in the viciousness, vindictiveness and obsessive drumbeat of its attacks. What’s more, it also plays fast and loose with hard facts.
One tactic the Star uses is page placement. When a poll, not matter how dubious or singular in nature, shows the Liberals leading in public opinion, you can expect to see it reported as a front page story. By contrast, Conservative leads are relegated much farther to the back. The same is true with regard to favorable and unfavorable news about the respective parties.
This juxtaposition was best seen when former Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien famously offered up what he claimed to be a two year old napkin to show that he had no interest in a golf course that benefited from government funding (official records told a different story than the napkin). That story was sent to the inside pages of the Star. The fact that the then Canadian Alliance, the conservative opposition party, had accepted a perfectly legal anonymous donation was page one news. Yes, the party had passed a resolution that all donations be public, the only party to do so at the time, but an oversight by the opposition involving no impropriety hardly trumps a willfully effected prime ministerial scandal.
But that’s just how Liberals play politics. That’s no excuse, but it’s to be expected. What transpired only shows the Toronto Star to be a non-independent political mouthpiece, a spin paper, not a news source. What’s shocking about the Star is best illustrated by another example that happened in the same year.
When the 2000 intifada broke out among Palestinian militants, much of the world was appalled. It grew worse when innocent children were targeted for assassination by Islamic extremists. The Star, which had long been a ridiculously one sided advocate for the Palestinian side also condemned the baby slaughter, but said that it makes the world not care what happens to either side.
In the Star’s world, Israel’s self defense was as disdainful as the Palestinian targeting of children. And isn’t that the extent of how the radical left views the military, even with regard to measures needed for self defense? They view self protection with disdain and those who engage in it as second class (at best) to the supine quasi-Marxists that make up the so-called intelligentsia, a misnomer with no better meaning of the latter word. In the eyes of the Star, it does not matter that Israel only took possession of the territories in an unprovoked war in which enemies that had attacked it since the first day of its existence sought to wipe it off the face of the map. Nor did it matter that it was Israel, and only Israel, that initiated all peace measures in the hopes of securing a real peace and was the only party to ever give any concessions, wishful acts that were instead viewed as signs of weakness by the terrorists and therefore led to more attacks against the West’s only reliable ally in the Middle East. Israel did what it needed to in its defense.
Although Israel did not start the shootings, defensive actions taken by Western allies are typically viewed with condescension by the Star, that would instead have Israel host a big kumbaya for all sworn enemies surrounding it. This disdain of Western self preservation is also what leads the Star to largely ignore Chinese communist brutality, Chavez’ attacks on individual rights, acts of brutality that are par for the course in fundamentalist Iran and China and Iran’s overtures to Venezuela, which may well be the beginnings of a Cuban Missile Crisis-like situation.
Similarly, the Star has taken great liberties with its nonsensical portrayals of revisionist history. In the run up to the 2006 Canadian election, the Star featured an op-ed penned by a Toronto high school teacher that Canada’s first Prime Minister, Sir John. A. MacDonald, would be a Liberal if he were alive today. The fact that even the most cursory glance of policy and political philosophy shows that all prime ministers up until Louis St. Laurent were much to the right of today’s Conservatives (with Lester Pearson having the most in common with today’s Stephen Harper) was apparently lost on the Star. And par for the course, no opposing op-ed was allowed.
In another case of political spin disguised as journalism, the Star also offered up a pre-election whopper that the Conservative platform would reverse Canada’s social programs to pre 1919 levels. I may not have read all of the Conservative Party platform, but certainly doing away with Medicare, the Canada Pension Plan, disability and unemployment benefits would have caught the attention of more than the Star’s hysterical op-ed page.
And it gets worse. Even fallen war heroes are not immune from the Star’s political skew. As Michael Petrou pointed out on Macleans’ blog, just a few weeks ago the Star ran a headline that highlighted the uncle of a fallen soldier’s claim that Afghanistan was a lost war. The Star had interviewed the soldier’s mother, who had mentioned that her son, Cpl. Thomas James Hamilton, believed strongly in the cause and had volunteered for three tours of duty. The Star buried those facts inside the story and ran with the politicized headline instead, giving readers an overall impression that stood in stark contrast to the fallen soldier’s beliefs. Fortunately their online editors had the decency to change the headline for the web.
The Star has also found a creative way to defend their bias. Years ago, after a few short months as a reader, I canceled my subscription due to their anti-conservative and anti-Israel bias. I told them as much. That got me a letter, supposedly from their publisher, stating that they have no bias as they regularly host a citizen advisory board. The fact that they had such a form letter available was a testament to the fact that more than one person had canceled their subscription for the same reason. But I found the cover/excuse to be an interesting one. To be sure, no one who cancelled their patronage of the paper was invited to take part in the advisory panel. The panel was filled with good likeminded leftists, brainwashed academics (another misnomer) and activists for groups that have little regard for the safety of the Western world. What the publisher was essentially saying was that a room full of leftists and radical activists is the Star’s idea of a diverse group. He didn’t need to send that letter. That much was already apparent from their op-eds (and unfortunately from their “news reporting” as well).
All of the above are pitiful examples of propaganda disguised as journalism. But the magnitude of the Star’s manipulations is most grotesquely displayed in the columns of featured writer Linda McQuaig.
McQuaig writes exclusively about leftist causes. That itself would be fine. But in her defense of logically indefensible positions, she reinvents the rules of math (and just about whatever else she can grasp at). Her end goal is for insane propositions to be taken as fact by readers who don’t care to follow her convoluted reasoning and simply accept her conclusions.
A prime example of this is her past assertion that Canada has, in essence, a flat tax. Despite all studies showing that Canadians pay an average of 50% of their revenues in some form of government taxation (income, sales, capital gains, etc.) and despite the even clearer fact that lower income earners pay less and those who earn more pay more, McQuaig single handedly reinvented the laws of arithmetic to argue that all Canadians really pay between 30-35% in taxes. If Canada does indeed have a flat rate, she argued (the point of her reinventing math in the first place), then any tax cuts would amount to the poor paying the greatest percentage. Of course, both a cursory glance and a substantive look at actual tax rates shows otherwise and even the EU has largely adopted tax cuts as a way to stimulate jobs and investment. But why write the truth when rubbish is a good substitute? After all, the Star won’t report the truth.
Similarly, in various columns, McQuaig has blamed former Ontario Premier Mike Harris for that province’s young offenders, written that Harper will cut social spending so drastically that, from the way she describes it, he’ll send Canada back to the middle ages (I guess the Prime Minister’s Office never got the note) and otherwise fills her columns with tales of vast and abundant conspiracies. Again, if it were a conservative making such claims of the opposite side, the outcry from the left would be audible 100 miles away. Either that or they’d be wholly ignored. No paper would print their unsubstantiated ramblings. No such luck with the Toronto Star.
McQuaig also has another trait. Like so many of the radical left, her sympathies lie with terrorists who she sides with, always, against Israel. There are simply no radical leftist fads or causes celebres that escape her narrow minded world view. Unlike many on her side, she tries to support these fancifully misbegotten notions with logic. As with math, when the logic or facts don’t fit, she invents them or quotes others who do it for her.
No where is there a better example of this than in her latest column, one in which she decries Canada’s support for Israel. (It should be of note that Canada’s support for Taiwan, India or any other allies fighting a dictatorial enemy may also not meet with McQuaig’s approval. But I assume she’ll have to confer with her “professors” before she issues a pronouncement on same one way or another.) Again, she does not find it sufficient to merely state her opinion and move on. In this case too, she must manipulate reality in a way that combines the talents of a communist propaganda minister with those of an acrobatic contortionist.
McQuaig does not once make mention of the 80 rockets that Hamas lobbed into populated areas of Israel. The fact that Israel and Hamas signed a six month truce, which Hamas refused to resign is also ignored. In fact, McQuaig quotes Richard Falk, a man she refers to as a “Jewish-American professor,” as saying that the situation was Israel’s fault for having entered into Gaza a month ago on a military incursion.
The truth is that intermittent attacks coming from Gaza were commonplace even after the ceasefire was signed. Hamas continually broke the terms and conditions throughout its six month duration. Last month, the Israeli Army found that Hamas supporters were digging a tunnel toward Israel that presented a clear security risk. Israel destroyed the tunnel and left.
As her column progresses, her other claims continue to decry incredulity. She blames Israel for sectioning off Gaza. The problem is that Gaza also has an equally long border with Egypt, so Israel could not unilaterally section it off. McQuaig knows this, so she again relies on Falk as the source of her seemingly (as well as actually) incredulous claim. To be sure, Israel did block off Gaza after rocket attacks persisted. But if Gaza was at all reasonable, why would both Israel and Egypt see the need to block it off? Israel still allowed food and vital supplies in, McQuaig’s reference to food shortages (for which she again quotes Falk, as only he and Hamas have made this claim) is unsubstantiated and probably countered by the mere fact that all Hamas fighters have clearly had ample strength and resources to continue fighting over the past few days.
What’s also missing from the picture is that Israel gave the Palestinian Authority in Gaza its autonomy in the hopes that a lasting peace could be cemented. Had they not done so, the Israelis would still be there and there’d be no argument over border crossings. So the argument that Israel has some kind of desire to reenter Gaza is scurrilous. They could have kept it in the first place.
But who is this Richard Falk who McQuaig so relies on, and whose singular claims are taken by McQuaig as fact? Well, a simple google search immediately exposes who Falk is and shows him to be little more than a Hamas mouthpiece, albeit one with other very interesting ties as well.
Falk is a professor emeritus. He is also a Special Rapporteur for the UN. But as Pajama Media’s Ron Radosh succinctly puts it: “Falk’s appointment was made, not surprisingly, by the chairman of the UN General Assembly, Father Miguel D’escoto Brockman of Nicaragua, the Sandinista liberation theologian who was himself appointed by Daniel Ortega. Throughout D’escoto’s entire career, he has been a left-wing ideologue, whose anti-Americanism is legendary.”
Yes, Nicaragua is on the UN Human Rights Commission, as is Saudi Arabia. They do not designate all appointees, but one prominent Ortega ally found Falk to be just the man for a Special Rapporteur position. Perhaps Father D’escoto is a McQuaig fan too. But aside from being a pal to Ortega’s pals, Falk also has some opinions about Hamas that would shock even their Palestinian counterpart Fatah (which has also engaged in terror and has yet to renounce the “Jerusalem Martyrs Brigade” of suicide bombers with allegiance to Fatah).
Among Falk’s pronouncements is that Hamas should not be branded a terrorist organization (what a man who thinks that an unrenounced past history of targeting infants doesn’t qualify a group as terrorist is doing working for the UN Human Rights Commission is a question best left to them) and that Hamas’ legitimacy is recognized by other Palestinian groups. He also views the suicide bombings and the targeting of civilians as the “right of resistance.” By contrast, he compares the Israelis, (who have taken precaution after precaution not to target civilians, and seek to minimize casualties even when Hamas terrorists barricade themselves in civilian areas – Israel is, again, also the only side ever to have given real concessions) to Nazis.
Yes, Richard Falk may be Jewish, but he’s probably one of the only Jews aside from Meir Lansky to be denied entry into Israel. The reason he was turned back at Ben Gurion airport was due to the fact that even before he started his investigation, he was making the above listed pronouncements and blaming Israel once again for the current crisis. In the words of the Israeli foreign ministry, Falk’s mission was “profoundly distorted and conceived as an anti-Israeli initiative.”
Falk has no first hand knowledge of the situation. In short, not only is a he a Hamas mouthpiece (who, again, makes statements that would even be countered by Abbas), he’s also a fraud. There’s no way he could have known what was happening on the ground. His ridiculous assertions and public statements were made before he arrived, and because of them, he was turned back. Israel has let in scores of international observers, just not elderly professors emeriti who call them Nazis and glorify Hamas terrorists as “resistance fighters.” Even then, they’d have let him in if not for his statements of “fact” before he arrived.
Is that all? Unfortunately not. Falk is also a 9/11 conspiracy theorist who is sad that the issue did not receive prominence during the presidential election. According to Falk, not only did the US government quite possibly arrange 9/11, Barack Obama should have made it a campaign issue as well!
In other words, McQuaig and the Star (that prints her trash) may as well have used a guy who claims to get his information from a large bunny named Harvey who sits at his left side as their source.
As Falk, with no first hand knowledge of the situation, must have been getting his “information” from Hamas (unless he made it up himself – I’m discounting Harvey from the picture), McQuaig was more than likely quoting Hamas when quoting Falk. And of course, the fact checkers at the Star couldn’t be bothered to notice this. They were probably too busy rereading George Orwell’s 1984, or as the Star might call it “the Employee Training Manual.”
McQuaig ends off her column by sanctimoniously opining that Israel does have a right to defend itself. The only problem for McQuaig, seemingly, is that when it does, it should be mindful of the accusations of an indirectly Ortega appointed Hamas sympathizer. If he suspects impropriety then all defensive measures must stop.
It’s one thing to be a crazy leftist who fumbles with the truth on taxes and spending policy and who views math as her own personal lump of molding clay, ready to twist and contort at her leisure. It’s another thing entirely to print falsehoods in defense of avowed terror organizations that recruit young children to their causes and target infants for slaughter, while smearing those who were attacked and blaming them for it. Yet all those traits fit neatly into the package that is Linda McQuaig.
As for the Star’s consistent pounding of these same views, it’s finally time to call a spade a spade. The anti-Semitism that it and columnists like McQuaig engage in is covert. As in the most recent example: Find one lone radical professor who makes a false claim which decries incredulity and report it as the “statement of a Jewish-American professor,” instead of that of a Marxist and terrorist sympathizer whose views represent the same lunatic fringe that has turned Mideast Studies programs in universities such as Columbia into hotbeds of anti-Semitism.
Promotion of radically leftist myths at the expense of logic is the central mission of the Toronto Star. We get it. But if that’s the case then be upfront about it. There are many liberal and conservative publications that market themselves accordingly. They do not pretend to be unbiased conveyors of news. Their purpose is to share thoughts and opinions. That would be a hard task for an outfit like the Star that is short on facts and long on insults, diatribes and unsubstantiated pronouncements. But that’s no excuse for it to dress itself up as a news organization.
The examples below should serve as a vital wake up call to conservatives to relentlessly point out the biases of the media at every turn so as to prevent our voices from being wiped out of the public debate. Certainly, the lengths that the dominant media of left leaning cities goes to in trumpeting their point of view (while fervidly quashing out all others) gives us a prelude to the dangers of unopposed media bias anywhere.
Toronto is a major metropolitan, one that is home to a large number of hard working people, businesses and corporations. It has its own stock exchange. The city’s most widely read newspaper is the Toronto Star and anyone who is familiar with that paper knows one thing: The Toronto Star isn’t only biased. Its one sidedness rivals that of the Pravda of the 1970s. What makes it even more dangerous is its pretense of neutrality.
The Toronto Star takes great pleasure in playing fast and loose with the truth. While it purports to be a news service, the fact that it is no better than any propagandist journal that was ever printed in the Soviet Union is provable. You can point to it. Unlike most papers, this reality becomes obvious upon reading just a few issues. And the more you familiarize yourself with the paper, the greater your disgust at its dishonesty, its falsification of facts and the agenda driven manipulations that grace not only its op-eds, but also its front pages on a daily basis.
Years ago, when I lived in Toronto, I was a short time subscriber of the Star. Never before had I seen a paper in which the other side of any issue isn’t only attacked, its points are rendered non-existent. In the narrow minded and false world of the Star there are no conservatives. Unless, that is, there’s a need to incite hatred or disdain among readers. That’s where conservatives make for very useful fodder.
Attacks range from the comical to the obscene. Star columnist Richard Gwyn once opined an entire piece on how Canadian conservatives aren’t Canadian at all. That column, while audacious, was actually mild by the Star’s standards, by which Conservatives have routinely been maligned and falsely ascribed character traits that would be unkind if said of a vampire bat.
The reasons for conservative views are never published. All that the Star will tell its readers is that conservatives are “dangerous,” “extremists,” and so forth (and those are mild examples of what’s written in its pages). In doing so, they refer not to third world revolutionists, but rather to those who espouse opinions that are shared by the majority of Americans, Western Canadians and indeed many Eastern Canadians as well. Simply put, what the Star is doing isn’t just keeping their readers ignorant of any other point of view. Their tactics are fanning the flames of hatred against a large segment of Canadians on a daily basis.
If a conservative were to write of liberals with one iota of the smears, jears and slurs that regularly grace the Star’s hallowed pages, he or she would find themselves in front of a Human Rights Tribunal. Yet in the minds of the Star’s editors, their unending attacks on conservatives are just the way things are.
Liberals who get their opinions of conservatives from news sources such as the Star are as clueless to what we think as were citizens of the Soviet Union of the Western world and of the mechanics of a free market economy. (The Pravda, the Star’s East Block soul mate, routinely described Western countries as places where people are left dying on the street as others pass by and laugh.) And while such one sidedness is not the exclusive domain of the Star, the Star is alone in the viciousness, vindictiveness and obsessive drumbeat of its attacks. What’s more, it also plays fast and loose with hard facts.
One tactic the Star uses is page placement. When a poll, not matter how dubious or singular in nature, shows the Liberals leading in public opinion, you can expect to see it reported as a front page story. By contrast, Conservative leads are relegated much farther to the back. The same is true with regard to favorable and unfavorable news about the respective parties.
This juxtaposition was best seen when former Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien famously offered up what he claimed to be a two year old napkin to show that he had no interest in a golf course that benefited from government funding (official records told a different story than the napkin). That story was sent to the inside pages of the Star. The fact that the then Canadian Alliance, the conservative opposition party, had accepted a perfectly legal anonymous donation was page one news. Yes, the party had passed a resolution that all donations be public, the only party to do so at the time, but an oversight by the opposition involving no impropriety hardly trumps a willfully effected prime ministerial scandal.
But that’s just how Liberals play politics. That’s no excuse, but it’s to be expected. What transpired only shows the Toronto Star to be a non-independent political mouthpiece, a spin paper, not a news source. What’s shocking about the Star is best illustrated by another example that happened in the same year.
When the 2000 intifada broke out among Palestinian militants, much of the world was appalled. It grew worse when innocent children were targeted for assassination by Islamic extremists. The Star, which had long been a ridiculously one sided advocate for the Palestinian side also condemned the baby slaughter, but said that it makes the world not care what happens to either side.
In the Star’s world, Israel’s self defense was as disdainful as the Palestinian targeting of children. And isn’t that the extent of how the radical left views the military, even with regard to measures needed for self defense? They view self protection with disdain and those who engage in it as second class (at best) to the supine quasi-Marxists that make up the so-called intelligentsia, a misnomer with no better meaning of the latter word. In the eyes of the Star, it does not matter that Israel only took possession of the territories in an unprovoked war in which enemies that had attacked it since the first day of its existence sought to wipe it off the face of the map. Nor did it matter that it was Israel, and only Israel, that initiated all peace measures in the hopes of securing a real peace and was the only party to ever give any concessions, wishful acts that were instead viewed as signs of weakness by the terrorists and therefore led to more attacks against the West’s only reliable ally in the Middle East. Israel did what it needed to in its defense.
Although Israel did not start the shootings, defensive actions taken by Western allies are typically viewed with condescension by the Star, that would instead have Israel host a big kumbaya for all sworn enemies surrounding it. This disdain of Western self preservation is also what leads the Star to largely ignore Chinese communist brutality, Chavez’ attacks on individual rights, acts of brutality that are par for the course in fundamentalist Iran and China and Iran’s overtures to Venezuela, which may well be the beginnings of a Cuban Missile Crisis-like situation.
Similarly, the Star has taken great liberties with its nonsensical portrayals of revisionist history. In the run up to the 2006 Canadian election, the Star featured an op-ed penned by a Toronto high school teacher that Canada’s first Prime Minister, Sir John. A. MacDonald, would be a Liberal if he were alive today. The fact that even the most cursory glance of policy and political philosophy shows that all prime ministers up until Louis St. Laurent were much to the right of today’s Conservatives (with Lester Pearson having the most in common with today’s Stephen Harper) was apparently lost on the Star. And par for the course, no opposing op-ed was allowed.
In another case of political spin disguised as journalism, the Star also offered up a pre-election whopper that the Conservative platform would reverse Canada’s social programs to pre 1919 levels. I may not have read all of the Conservative Party platform, but certainly doing away with Medicare, the Canada Pension Plan, disability and unemployment benefits would have caught the attention of more than the Star’s hysterical op-ed page.
And it gets worse. Even fallen war heroes are not immune from the Star’s political skew. As Michael Petrou pointed out on Macleans’ blog, just a few weeks ago the Star ran a headline that highlighted the uncle of a fallen soldier’s claim that Afghanistan was a lost war. The Star had interviewed the soldier’s mother, who had mentioned that her son, Cpl. Thomas James Hamilton, believed strongly in the cause and had volunteered for three tours of duty. The Star buried those facts inside the story and ran with the politicized headline instead, giving readers an overall impression that stood in stark contrast to the fallen soldier’s beliefs. Fortunately their online editors had the decency to change the headline for the web.
The Star has also found a creative way to defend their bias. Years ago, after a few short months as a reader, I canceled my subscription due to their anti-conservative and anti-Israel bias. I told them as much. That got me a letter, supposedly from their publisher, stating that they have no bias as they regularly host a citizen advisory board. The fact that they had such a form letter available was a testament to the fact that more than one person had canceled their subscription for the same reason. But I found the cover/excuse to be an interesting one. To be sure, no one who cancelled their patronage of the paper was invited to take part in the advisory panel. The panel was filled with good likeminded leftists, brainwashed academics (another misnomer) and activists for groups that have little regard for the safety of the Western world. What the publisher was essentially saying was that a room full of leftists and radical activists is the Star’s idea of a diverse group. He didn’t need to send that letter. That much was already apparent from their op-eds (and unfortunately from their “news reporting” as well).
All of the above are pitiful examples of propaganda disguised as journalism. But the magnitude of the Star’s manipulations is most grotesquely displayed in the columns of featured writer Linda McQuaig.
McQuaig writes exclusively about leftist causes. That itself would be fine. But in her defense of logically indefensible positions, she reinvents the rules of math (and just about whatever else she can grasp at). Her end goal is for insane propositions to be taken as fact by readers who don’t care to follow her convoluted reasoning and simply accept her conclusions.
A prime example of this is her past assertion that Canada has, in essence, a flat tax. Despite all studies showing that Canadians pay an average of 50% of their revenues in some form of government taxation (income, sales, capital gains, etc.) and despite the even clearer fact that lower income earners pay less and those who earn more pay more, McQuaig single handedly reinvented the laws of arithmetic to argue that all Canadians really pay between 30-35% in taxes. If Canada does indeed have a flat rate, she argued (the point of her reinventing math in the first place), then any tax cuts would amount to the poor paying the greatest percentage. Of course, both a cursory glance and a substantive look at actual tax rates shows otherwise and even the EU has largely adopted tax cuts as a way to stimulate jobs and investment. But why write the truth when rubbish is a good substitute? After all, the Star won’t report the truth.
Similarly, in various columns, McQuaig has blamed former Ontario Premier Mike Harris for that province’s young offenders, written that Harper will cut social spending so drastically that, from the way she describes it, he’ll send Canada back to the middle ages (I guess the Prime Minister’s Office never got the note) and otherwise fills her columns with tales of vast and abundant conspiracies. Again, if it were a conservative making such claims of the opposite side, the outcry from the left would be audible 100 miles away. Either that or they’d be wholly ignored. No paper would print their unsubstantiated ramblings. No such luck with the Toronto Star.
McQuaig also has another trait. Like so many of the radical left, her sympathies lie with terrorists who she sides with, always, against Israel. There are simply no radical leftist fads or causes celebres that escape her narrow minded world view. Unlike many on her side, she tries to support these fancifully misbegotten notions with logic. As with math, when the logic or facts don’t fit, she invents them or quotes others who do it for her.
No where is there a better example of this than in her latest column, one in which she decries Canada’s support for Israel. (It should be of note that Canada’s support for Taiwan, India or any other allies fighting a dictatorial enemy may also not meet with McQuaig’s approval. But I assume she’ll have to confer with her “professors” before she issues a pronouncement on same one way or another.) Again, she does not find it sufficient to merely state her opinion and move on. In this case too, she must manipulate reality in a way that combines the talents of a communist propaganda minister with those of an acrobatic contortionist.
McQuaig does not once make mention of the 80 rockets that Hamas lobbed into populated areas of Israel. The fact that Israel and Hamas signed a six month truce, which Hamas refused to resign is also ignored. In fact, McQuaig quotes Richard Falk, a man she refers to as a “Jewish-American professor,” as saying that the situation was Israel’s fault for having entered into Gaza a month ago on a military incursion.
The truth is that intermittent attacks coming from Gaza were commonplace even after the ceasefire was signed. Hamas continually broke the terms and conditions throughout its six month duration. Last month, the Israeli Army found that Hamas supporters were digging a tunnel toward Israel that presented a clear security risk. Israel destroyed the tunnel and left.
As her column progresses, her other claims continue to decry incredulity. She blames Israel for sectioning off Gaza. The problem is that Gaza also has an equally long border with Egypt, so Israel could not unilaterally section it off. McQuaig knows this, so she again relies on Falk as the source of her seemingly (as well as actually) incredulous claim. To be sure, Israel did block off Gaza after rocket attacks persisted. But if Gaza was at all reasonable, why would both Israel and Egypt see the need to block it off? Israel still allowed food and vital supplies in, McQuaig’s reference to food shortages (for which she again quotes Falk, as only he and Hamas have made this claim) is unsubstantiated and probably countered by the mere fact that all Hamas fighters have clearly had ample strength and resources to continue fighting over the past few days.
What’s also missing from the picture is that Israel gave the Palestinian Authority in Gaza its autonomy in the hopes that a lasting peace could be cemented. Had they not done so, the Israelis would still be there and there’d be no argument over border crossings. So the argument that Israel has some kind of desire to reenter Gaza is scurrilous. They could have kept it in the first place.
But who is this Richard Falk who McQuaig so relies on, and whose singular claims are taken by McQuaig as fact? Well, a simple google search immediately exposes who Falk is and shows him to be little more than a Hamas mouthpiece, albeit one with other very interesting ties as well.
Falk is a professor emeritus. He is also a Special Rapporteur for the UN. But as Pajama Media’s Ron Radosh succinctly puts it: “Falk’s appointment was made, not surprisingly, by the chairman of the UN General Assembly, Father Miguel D’escoto Brockman of Nicaragua, the Sandinista liberation theologian who was himself appointed by Daniel Ortega. Throughout D’escoto’s entire career, he has been a left-wing ideologue, whose anti-Americanism is legendary.”
Yes, Nicaragua is on the UN Human Rights Commission, as is Saudi Arabia. They do not designate all appointees, but one prominent Ortega ally found Falk to be just the man for a Special Rapporteur position. Perhaps Father D’escoto is a McQuaig fan too. But aside from being a pal to Ortega’s pals, Falk also has some opinions about Hamas that would shock even their Palestinian counterpart Fatah (which has also engaged in terror and has yet to renounce the “Jerusalem Martyrs Brigade” of suicide bombers with allegiance to Fatah).
Among Falk’s pronouncements is that Hamas should not be branded a terrorist organization (what a man who thinks that an unrenounced past history of targeting infants doesn’t qualify a group as terrorist is doing working for the UN Human Rights Commission is a question best left to them) and that Hamas’ legitimacy is recognized by other Palestinian groups. He also views the suicide bombings and the targeting of civilians as the “right of resistance.” By contrast, he compares the Israelis, (who have taken precaution after precaution not to target civilians, and seek to minimize casualties even when Hamas terrorists barricade themselves in civilian areas – Israel is, again, also the only side ever to have given real concessions) to Nazis.
Yes, Richard Falk may be Jewish, but he’s probably one of the only Jews aside from Meir Lansky to be denied entry into Israel. The reason he was turned back at Ben Gurion airport was due to the fact that even before he started his investigation, he was making the above listed pronouncements and blaming Israel once again for the current crisis. In the words of the Israeli foreign ministry, Falk’s mission was “profoundly distorted and conceived as an anti-Israeli initiative.”
Falk has no first hand knowledge of the situation. In short, not only is a he a Hamas mouthpiece (who, again, makes statements that would even be countered by Abbas), he’s also a fraud. There’s no way he could have known what was happening on the ground. His ridiculous assertions and public statements were made before he arrived, and because of them, he was turned back. Israel has let in scores of international observers, just not elderly professors emeriti who call them Nazis and glorify Hamas terrorists as “resistance fighters.” Even then, they’d have let him in if not for his statements of “fact” before he arrived.
Is that all? Unfortunately not. Falk is also a 9/11 conspiracy theorist who is sad that the issue did not receive prominence during the presidential election. According to Falk, not only did the US government quite possibly arrange 9/11, Barack Obama should have made it a campaign issue as well!
In other words, McQuaig and the Star (that prints her trash) may as well have used a guy who claims to get his information from a large bunny named Harvey who sits at his left side as their source.
As Falk, with no first hand knowledge of the situation, must have been getting his “information” from Hamas (unless he made it up himself – I’m discounting Harvey from the picture), McQuaig was more than likely quoting Hamas when quoting Falk. And of course, the fact checkers at the Star couldn’t be bothered to notice this. They were probably too busy rereading George Orwell’s 1984, or as the Star might call it “the Employee Training Manual.”
McQuaig ends off her column by sanctimoniously opining that Israel does have a right to defend itself. The only problem for McQuaig, seemingly, is that when it does, it should be mindful of the accusations of an indirectly Ortega appointed Hamas sympathizer. If he suspects impropriety then all defensive measures must stop.
It’s one thing to be a crazy leftist who fumbles with the truth on taxes and spending policy and who views math as her own personal lump of molding clay, ready to twist and contort at her leisure. It’s another thing entirely to print falsehoods in defense of avowed terror organizations that recruit young children to their causes and target infants for slaughter, while smearing those who were attacked and blaming them for it. Yet all those traits fit neatly into the package that is Linda McQuaig.
As for the Star’s consistent pounding of these same views, it’s finally time to call a spade a spade. The anti-Semitism that it and columnists like McQuaig engage in is covert. As in the most recent example: Find one lone radical professor who makes a false claim which decries incredulity and report it as the “statement of a Jewish-American professor,” instead of that of a Marxist and terrorist sympathizer whose views represent the same lunatic fringe that has turned Mideast Studies programs in universities such as Columbia into hotbeds of anti-Semitism.
Promotion of radically leftist myths at the expense of logic is the central mission of the Toronto Star. We get it. But if that’s the case then be upfront about it. There are many liberal and conservative publications that market themselves accordingly. They do not pretend to be unbiased conveyors of news. Their purpose is to share thoughts and opinions. That would be a hard task for an outfit like the Star that is short on facts and long on insults, diatribes and unsubstantiated pronouncements. But that’s no excuse for it to dress itself up as a news organization.
Linda McQuaig's Latest Piece Is Provably False
(The following is the already published portion of the column featured above. It deals specifically with her latest - and perhaps greatest - example of bias and lack of integrity:)
Like many who are familiar with Linda McQuaig, I’ve found the great liberties that she takes with the truth to be startling. McQuaig writes exclusively about leftist causes. That itself would be fine. But in her defense of logically indefensible positions, she has at times reinvented the rules of math and just about whatever else she can grasp at. Her end goal is for insane propositions to be taken as fact by readers who don’t care to follow her convoluted reasoning and simply accept her conclusions.
A prime example of this is her past assertion that Canada has, in essence, a flat tax. Despite all studies showing that Canadians pay an average of 50% of their revenues in some form of government taxation (income, sales, capital gains, etc.) and despite the even clearer fact that lower income earners pay less and those who earn more pay more, McQuaig single handedly reinvented the laws of arithmetic to argue that all Canadians really pay between 30-35% in taxes. If Canada does indeed have a flat rate, she argued (the point of her reinventing math in the first place), then any tax cuts would amount to the poor paying the greatest percentage. Of course, both a cursory glance and a substantive look at actual tax rates shows otherwise and even the EU has largely adopted tax cuts as a way to stimulate jobs and investment. But why write the truth when absolute rubbish is as good a substitute?
Similarly, in various columns, McQuaig has blamed former Ontario Premier Mike Harris for that province’s young offenders, written that Harper will cut social spending so drastically that, from the way she describes it, he’ll send Canada back to the middle ages (I guess the Prime Minister's Office never got the note) and otherwise fills her columns with tales of vast and abundant conspiracies. Again, if it were a conservative making such claims of the opposite side, the outcry from the left would be audible 100 miles away. Either that or they’d be wholly ignored. No paper would print their unsubstantiated ramblings.
McQuaig also has another trait. Like so many of the radical left, her sympathies lie with terrorists who she sides with, always, against Israel. There are simply no radical leftist fads or causes celebres that escape her narrow minded world view. Unlike many on her side, she tries to support these fancifully misbegotten notions with logic. As with math, when the logic or facts don’t fit, she invents them or quotes others who do it for her.
No where is there a better example of this than in her latest column, one in which she decries Canada’s support for Israel. (It should be of note that Canada’s support for Taiwan, India or any other allies fighting a dictatorial enemy may also not meet with McQuaig’s approval. But I assume she’ll have to confer with her “professors” before she issues a pronouncement on same one way or another.) Again, she does not find it sufficient to merely state her opinion and move on. In this case too, she must manipulate reality in a way that combines the talents of a communist propaganda minister with those of an acrobatic contortionist.
McQuaig does not once make mention of the 80 rockets that Hamas lobbed into populated areas of Israel. The fact that Israel and Hamas signed a six month truce, which Hamas refused to resign is also ignored. In fact, McQuaig quotes Richard Falk, a man she refers to as a “Jewish-American professor,” as saying that the situation was Israel’s fault for having entered into Gaza a month ago on a military incursion.
The truth is that intermittent attacks coming from Gaza were commonplace even after the ceasefire was signed. Hamas continually broke the terms and conditions throughout its six month duration. Last month, the Israeli Army found that Hamas supporters were digging a tunnel toward Israel that presented a clear security risk. Israel destroyed the tunnel and left.
As her column progresses, her other claims continue to decry incredulity. She blames Israel for sectioning off Gaza. The problem is that Gaza also has an equally long border with Egypt, so Israel could not unilaterally section it off. McQuaig knows this, so she again relies on Falk as the source of her seemingly (as well as actually) incredulous claim. To be sure, Israel did block off Gaza after rocket attacks persisted. But if Gaza was at all reasonable, why would both Israel and Egypt see the need to block it off? Israel still allowed food and vital supplies in, McQuaig’s reference to food shortages (for which she again quotes Falk, as only he and Hamas have made this claim) is unsubstantiated and probably countered by the mere fact that all Hamas fighters have clearly had ample strength and resources to continue fighting over the past few days.
What’s also missing from the picture is that Israel gave the Palestinian Authority in Gaza its autonomy in the hopes that a lasting peace could be cemented. Had they not done so, the Israelis would still be there and there’d be no argument over border crossings. So the argument that Israel has some kind of desire to reenter Gaza is scurrilous. They could have kept it in the first place.
But who is this Richard Falk who McQuaig so relies on, and whose singular claims are taken by McQuaig as fact? Well, a simple google search immediately exposes who Falk is and shows him to be little more than a Hamas mouthpiece, albeit one with other very interesting ties as well.
Falk is a professor emeritus. He is also a Special Rapporteur for the UN. But as Pajama Media’s Ron Radosh succinctly puts it: “Falk’s appointment was made, not surprisingly, by the chairman of the UN General Assembly, Father Miguel D’escoto Brockman of Nicaragua, the Sandinista liberation theologian who was himself appointed by Daniel Ortega. Throughout D’escoto’s entire career, he has been a left-wing ideologue, whose anti-Americanism is legendary.”
Yes, Nicaragua is on the UN Human Rights Commission, as is Saudi Arabia. They do not designate all appointees, but one prominent Ortega ally found Falk to be just the man for a Special Rapporteur position. Perhaps Father D’escoto is a McQuaig fan too. But aside from being a pal to Ortega’s pals, Falk also has some opinions about Hamas that would shock even their Palestinian counterpart Fatah (which has also engaged in terror and has yet to renounce the “Jerusalem Martyrs Brigade” of suicide bombers with allegiance to Fatah).
Among Falk’s pronouncements is that Hamas should not be branded a terrorist organization (what a man who thinks that an unrenounced past history of targeting infants doesn’t qualify a group as terrorist is doing working for the UN Human Rights Commission is a question best left to them) and that Hamas’ legitimacy is recognized by other Palestinian groups. He also views the suicide bombings and the targeting of civilians as the “right of resistance.” By contrast, he compares the Israelis, (who have taken precaution after precaution not to target civilians, and seek to minimize casualties even when Hamas terrorists barricade themselves in civilian areas – Israel is, again, also the only side ever to have given real concessions) to Nazis.
Yes, Richard Falk may be Jewish, but he’s probably one of the only Jews aside from Meir Lansky to be denied entry into Israel. The reason he was turned back at Ben Gurion airport was due to the fact that even before he started his investigation, he was making the above listed pronouncements and blaming Israel once again for the current crisis. In the words of the Israeli foreign ministry, Falk’s mission was “profoundly distorted and conceived as an anti-Israeli initiative.”
Falk has no first hand knowledge of the situation. In short, not only is a he a Hamas mouthpiece (who, again, makes statements that would even be countered by Abbas), he’s also a fraud. There’s no way he could have known what was happening on the ground. His ridiculous assertions and public statements were made before he arrived, and because of them, he was turned back. Israel has let in scores of international observers, just not elderly professors emeriti who call them Nazis and glorify Hamas terrorists as “resistance fighters.” Even then, they’d have let him in if not for his statements of “fact” before he arrived.
Is that all? Unfortunately not. Falk is also a 9/11 conspiracy theorist who is sad that the issue did not receive prominence during the presidential election. According to Falk, not only did the US government quite possibly arrange 9/11, Barack Obama should have made it a campaign issue as well!
In other words, McQuaig and may as well have used a guy who claims to get his information from a large bunny named Harvey who sits at his left side as their source.
As Falk, with no first hand knowledge of the situation, must have been getting his “information” from Hamas (unless he made it up himself – I’m discounting Harvey from the picture), McQuaig was more than likely quoting Hamas when quoting Falk. And of course, there was no need for her to run a basic fact. Not when you’re using George Orwell’s 1984 as a journalists’ training manual.
McQuaig ends off her column by sanctimoniously opining that Israel does have a right to defend itself. The only problem for McQuaig, seemingly, is that when it does, it should be mindful of the accusations of an indirectly Ortega appointed Hamas sympathizer. If he suspects impropriety then all defensive measures must stop.
The spin and, honestly, the anti-Semitism that columnists like McQuaig engage in is covert. As in the most recent example: Find one lone radical professor who makes a false claim which decries incredulity and report it as the “statement of a Jewish-American professor,” instead of that of a Marxist and terrorist sympathizer whose views represent the same lunatic fringe that has turned Mideast Studies programs in universities such as Columbia into hotbeds of anti-Semitism.
It’s one thing to be a crazy leftist who fumbles with the truth on taxes and spending policy and who views math as her own personal lump of molding clay, ready to twist and contort at her leisure. It’s another thing entirely to print falsehoods in defense of avowed terror organizations that recruit young children to their causes and target infants for slaughter, while smearing those who were attacked and blaming them for it. Yet all those traits fit neatly into the package that is Linda McQuaig.
Like many who are familiar with Linda McQuaig, I’ve found the great liberties that she takes with the truth to be startling. McQuaig writes exclusively about leftist causes. That itself would be fine. But in her defense of logically indefensible positions, she has at times reinvented the rules of math and just about whatever else she can grasp at. Her end goal is for insane propositions to be taken as fact by readers who don’t care to follow her convoluted reasoning and simply accept her conclusions.
A prime example of this is her past assertion that Canada has, in essence, a flat tax. Despite all studies showing that Canadians pay an average of 50% of their revenues in some form of government taxation (income, sales, capital gains, etc.) and despite the even clearer fact that lower income earners pay less and those who earn more pay more, McQuaig single handedly reinvented the laws of arithmetic to argue that all Canadians really pay between 30-35% in taxes. If Canada does indeed have a flat rate, she argued (the point of her reinventing math in the first place), then any tax cuts would amount to the poor paying the greatest percentage. Of course, both a cursory glance and a substantive look at actual tax rates shows otherwise and even the EU has largely adopted tax cuts as a way to stimulate jobs and investment. But why write the truth when absolute rubbish is as good a substitute?
Similarly, in various columns, McQuaig has blamed former Ontario Premier Mike Harris for that province’s young offenders, written that Harper will cut social spending so drastically that, from the way she describes it, he’ll send Canada back to the middle ages (I guess the Prime Minister's Office never got the note) and otherwise fills her columns with tales of vast and abundant conspiracies. Again, if it were a conservative making such claims of the opposite side, the outcry from the left would be audible 100 miles away. Either that or they’d be wholly ignored. No paper would print their unsubstantiated ramblings.
McQuaig also has another trait. Like so many of the radical left, her sympathies lie with terrorists who she sides with, always, against Israel. There are simply no radical leftist fads or causes celebres that escape her narrow minded world view. Unlike many on her side, she tries to support these fancifully misbegotten notions with logic. As with math, when the logic or facts don’t fit, she invents them or quotes others who do it for her.
No where is there a better example of this than in her latest column, one in which she decries Canada’s support for Israel. (It should be of note that Canada’s support for Taiwan, India or any other allies fighting a dictatorial enemy may also not meet with McQuaig’s approval. But I assume she’ll have to confer with her “professors” before she issues a pronouncement on same one way or another.) Again, she does not find it sufficient to merely state her opinion and move on. In this case too, she must manipulate reality in a way that combines the talents of a communist propaganda minister with those of an acrobatic contortionist.
McQuaig does not once make mention of the 80 rockets that Hamas lobbed into populated areas of Israel. The fact that Israel and Hamas signed a six month truce, which Hamas refused to resign is also ignored. In fact, McQuaig quotes Richard Falk, a man she refers to as a “Jewish-American professor,” as saying that the situation was Israel’s fault for having entered into Gaza a month ago on a military incursion.
The truth is that intermittent attacks coming from Gaza were commonplace even after the ceasefire was signed. Hamas continually broke the terms and conditions throughout its six month duration. Last month, the Israeli Army found that Hamas supporters were digging a tunnel toward Israel that presented a clear security risk. Israel destroyed the tunnel and left.
As her column progresses, her other claims continue to decry incredulity. She blames Israel for sectioning off Gaza. The problem is that Gaza also has an equally long border with Egypt, so Israel could not unilaterally section it off. McQuaig knows this, so she again relies on Falk as the source of her seemingly (as well as actually) incredulous claim. To be sure, Israel did block off Gaza after rocket attacks persisted. But if Gaza was at all reasonable, why would both Israel and Egypt see the need to block it off? Israel still allowed food and vital supplies in, McQuaig’s reference to food shortages (for which she again quotes Falk, as only he and Hamas have made this claim) is unsubstantiated and probably countered by the mere fact that all Hamas fighters have clearly had ample strength and resources to continue fighting over the past few days.
What’s also missing from the picture is that Israel gave the Palestinian Authority in Gaza its autonomy in the hopes that a lasting peace could be cemented. Had they not done so, the Israelis would still be there and there’d be no argument over border crossings. So the argument that Israel has some kind of desire to reenter Gaza is scurrilous. They could have kept it in the first place.
But who is this Richard Falk who McQuaig so relies on, and whose singular claims are taken by McQuaig as fact? Well, a simple google search immediately exposes who Falk is and shows him to be little more than a Hamas mouthpiece, albeit one with other very interesting ties as well.
Falk is a professor emeritus. He is also a Special Rapporteur for the UN. But as Pajama Media’s Ron Radosh succinctly puts it: “Falk’s appointment was made, not surprisingly, by the chairman of the UN General Assembly, Father Miguel D’escoto Brockman of Nicaragua, the Sandinista liberation theologian who was himself appointed by Daniel Ortega. Throughout D’escoto’s entire career, he has been a left-wing ideologue, whose anti-Americanism is legendary.”
Yes, Nicaragua is on the UN Human Rights Commission, as is Saudi Arabia. They do not designate all appointees, but one prominent Ortega ally found Falk to be just the man for a Special Rapporteur position. Perhaps Father D’escoto is a McQuaig fan too. But aside from being a pal to Ortega’s pals, Falk also has some opinions about Hamas that would shock even their Palestinian counterpart Fatah (which has also engaged in terror and has yet to renounce the “Jerusalem Martyrs Brigade” of suicide bombers with allegiance to Fatah).
Among Falk’s pronouncements is that Hamas should not be branded a terrorist organization (what a man who thinks that an unrenounced past history of targeting infants doesn’t qualify a group as terrorist is doing working for the UN Human Rights Commission is a question best left to them) and that Hamas’ legitimacy is recognized by other Palestinian groups. He also views the suicide bombings and the targeting of civilians as the “right of resistance.” By contrast, he compares the Israelis, (who have taken precaution after precaution not to target civilians, and seek to minimize casualties even when Hamas terrorists barricade themselves in civilian areas – Israel is, again, also the only side ever to have given real concessions) to Nazis.
Yes, Richard Falk may be Jewish, but he’s probably one of the only Jews aside from Meir Lansky to be denied entry into Israel. The reason he was turned back at Ben Gurion airport was due to the fact that even before he started his investigation, he was making the above listed pronouncements and blaming Israel once again for the current crisis. In the words of the Israeli foreign ministry, Falk’s mission was “profoundly distorted and conceived as an anti-Israeli initiative.”
Falk has no first hand knowledge of the situation. In short, not only is a he a Hamas mouthpiece (who, again, makes statements that would even be countered by Abbas), he’s also a fraud. There’s no way he could have known what was happening on the ground. His ridiculous assertions and public statements were made before he arrived, and because of them, he was turned back. Israel has let in scores of international observers, just not elderly professors emeriti who call them Nazis and glorify Hamas terrorists as “resistance fighters.” Even then, they’d have let him in if not for his statements of “fact” before he arrived.
Is that all? Unfortunately not. Falk is also a 9/11 conspiracy theorist who is sad that the issue did not receive prominence during the presidential election. According to Falk, not only did the US government quite possibly arrange 9/11, Barack Obama should have made it a campaign issue as well!
In other words, McQuaig and may as well have used a guy who claims to get his information from a large bunny named Harvey who sits at his left side as their source.
As Falk, with no first hand knowledge of the situation, must have been getting his “information” from Hamas (unless he made it up himself – I’m discounting Harvey from the picture), McQuaig was more than likely quoting Hamas when quoting Falk. And of course, there was no need for her to run a basic fact. Not when you’re using George Orwell’s 1984 as a journalists’ training manual.
McQuaig ends off her column by sanctimoniously opining that Israel does have a right to defend itself. The only problem for McQuaig, seemingly, is that when it does, it should be mindful of the accusations of an indirectly Ortega appointed Hamas sympathizer. If he suspects impropriety then all defensive measures must stop.
The spin and, honestly, the anti-Semitism that columnists like McQuaig engage in is covert. As in the most recent example: Find one lone radical professor who makes a false claim which decries incredulity and report it as the “statement of a Jewish-American professor,” instead of that of a Marxist and terrorist sympathizer whose views represent the same lunatic fringe that has turned Mideast Studies programs in universities such as Columbia into hotbeds of anti-Semitism.
It’s one thing to be a crazy leftist who fumbles with the truth on taxes and spending policy and who views math as her own personal lump of molding clay, ready to twist and contort at her leisure. It’s another thing entirely to print falsehoods in defense of avowed terror organizations that recruit young children to their causes and target infants for slaughter, while smearing those who were attacked and blaming them for it. Yet all those traits fit neatly into the package that is Linda McQuaig.
Obama’s Economic Team Does Not Bode Well for the Interests of America
By Yomin Postelnik
Featured on CFP: 12/30/08
On Nov.5, the day after the election of Barack Obama, in an article titled “Obama win met with urgent call for global action,” Reuters reported, “Political leaders urged U.S. President-elect Barack Obama on Wednesday to help forge a new economic order to lead the world out of its worst financial crisis since the 1930s.”
If you read that line carefully, the intent of Europe’s leaders is clear. Barack Obama should “lead” America to follow their plan, one that will be focused on bringing about the resurgence of European economic dominance. Or as European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso put it, "I sincerely hope that with the leadership of President Obama, the United States of America will join forces with Europe to drive this new deal."
When European powers ask the United States to “join forces” with them, their intent is for America to act in a supportive role, not one in which it takes the lead. To believe otherwise is to suggest that Europe places America’s interests above its own. And though they may suggest such commitment from us, they are not so reckless as to entertain pursuing a similar course themselves.
Yet the fact that Obama was being asked, in essence, to do little more than to heed the EU’s beckoning was lost in the nuance of Reuters’ reporting. To the average reader, the article featured only praise and hope for Obama’s leadership. With statements such as “help forge a new economic order” and “lead the world out of financial crisis,” 90% of readers saw the piece as a plea on the part of world leaders for Obama to lead the way out of economic doom. Indeed, over 90% of Democrats subscribe to this “Super-O” theory, so why shouldn’t the rest of the world?
In actuality, the insinuations of the Reuters piece were an obscene case of misplaced journalistic optimism, a rare trait that only makes an appearance on the occasion of a Democrat being elected to the White House. The fact that its lines were penned mere hours after Russian President Dmitri Medvedev’s deployment of Iskander missiles to the Polish border (in protest of the US Missile Defense Shield) and the leaking of “Prime Minister” Putin’s plan for consolidation of power (showing at least how seriously Russia takes the new President-elect) should give us pause at the incredulity of the article’s insinuations.
The EU is made up of world leaders who have led the way in global economic affairs since well before Barack Obama was elected to the Illinois State Senate. They are not looking for him to lead them in a new direction. Their statements, when read properly, are clear. They see Obama as easy pickings in their effort to get America to follow the path that they prefer.
The only question that Americans should be asking is whether the hopes of Europe’s leaders are founded. Unfortunately for America, everything about the transitioning Administration indicates that they are.
To date, President-elect Obama has made a series of economic appointments. While appointees are diverse in age, background and geography, most share a common thread: extensive foreign policy experience.
This is especially true of the most important member of Obama’s economic team, Treasury Secretary-designate Timothy Geithner. Geithner spent many of his formative years in Zimbabwe, India (which is a staunch ally and would be a plus in any foreign policy role, but not in a position charged exclusively with protecting American interests), and Thailand, where he graduated from high school. His bachelors degree was in governmental and Asian studies and his masters was similarly in international economics and East Asian studies. Geither is a Council of Foreign Relations member, as well as a member of the Group of Thirty. He has also served on the International Monetary Fund. In short, while Geithner has amassed many impressive credentials, much of his training, history and outlook are internationalist in nature.
The same is true of Commerce Secretary-designate Bill Richardson. In fact, one would be hard pressed to indicate why a former UN Ambassador would be a natural fit for Secretary of Commerce in any case. This is especially true of Richardson, who played a prominent role in the strengthening of UNEP, the “United Nations Environment Programme.” Again, a good choice for the EPA, not for US Commerce.
Which brings us to Paul Volcker. Volcker is universally touted for his experience and for having engineered disinflation. Yet Volcker also had a lead role in one of this nation’s most serious economic blunders. In the 1970s, Volcker took a lead role in suspending gold convertibility, resulting in the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, a system by which our dollar was (more or less) pegged to the value of gold, providing it with tangible, long term value. The fact that our dollar has little intrinsic value is because of the decisions of Paul Volcker, Richard Nixon and others in the 1970s.
At the time, Ronald Reagan aptly warned the public that any nation that has gone off the gold standard has met with economic collapse. Volcker does not recognize his actions in suspending gold convertibility to be a mistake, which is quite telling and should be a source of concern for those who are now so eager for his advice.
Furthermore, Volcker is even more internationalist than is Geithner. From 2000 to 2004 Volcker served as Director of the United Nations Association of the United States of America, an organization that seeks to boost the public image of the United Nations among Americans. He is also a member of the Group of Thirty and a founding member of the Trilateral Commission. His knowledge of and experience in dealing with small business, the bedrock of America’s job market, is unfortunately far less extensive.
Lawrence Summers, President-elect Obama’s pick for National Economic Council Director has a more conventional economic background, though he too has an internationalist worldview. His two years as Chief Economist of the World Bank undoubtedly contributed to his outlook, but perhaps only minorly so.
Still, what were Summers’ crowning economic accomplishments during his term as Treasury Secretary: His advocacy to deregulate derivatives and his support of the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act ordinance that prohibited banks from owning other financial institutions. Simply put, as Treasury Secretary, Summers vociferously supported and advocated for the conditions that helped lead to the mortgage meltdown and paved the way for large banks to take over brokerage houses. This is not the man we need to head up the National Economic Council at this time.
One might ask; isn’t it enough that these nominees all possess sharp minds? Won’t such an experienced group of people know what to do? The answer, as shown throughout our history as a nation, is threefold: No, no, and no.
As no American administration has ever had an economic team consisting of members with as many foreign policy credentials, the most reliable barometer of whether a foreign policy outlook has led to national success (including economic success) are the performances of our past presidents. They best serve to indicate how previous international experience affects one’s outlook and shapes the policies of an administration.
Few recent presidents have had international experience prior to taking office. Only George H. W. Bush (UN Ambassador and Liaison to China) and Richard M. Nixon had previous backgrounds in foreign policy (unlike Nixon, Johnson’s vice-presidency was relatively free of international duties and Eisenhower’s foreign roles were military in nature and centered on defending the US). Prior to them, only James Buchanan and Martin Van Buren had notable foreign experience.
As you can see, those who left their most indelible impressions on America, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, the Roosevelts, Lincoln, Truman, Cleveland and Jackson, all did so from uniquely American backgrounds and perspectives. Some would add Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant to this list, both presidents who sought to heal a nation.
The reason why presidents without foreign policy backgrounds make for better leaders is the same as the reason for why governors generally make better presidents than senators. They have first hand knowledge of the problems facing Americans and approach most issues from a standpoint of what is best for the American people. As a result, they care little to make concessions with other countries if they are against our national interests. Sure, they’ll act as benefactors to other countries and cooperate with them, but they will not go to extreme lengths just for the sake of getting along, when the consequences of doing so appear to outweigh the benefits. (Of note, George H. W. Bush stands out among presidents who had previous foreign policy experience, but his accomplishments came from his experience as a congressman, as CIA Director, RNC Chair and as Vice President. Still, his previous diplomatic background hampered his ability to present a bold response to certain problems and often made him conciliatory even when decisive leadership was needed. By contrast, abject failures such as Jimmy Carter were profoundly influenced by internationalist thought, even if they had little actual foreign policy experience.)
Presidents before 1824 who had international experience, approached their foreign roles from an entirely different standpoint than did those who succeeded them. When John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe and John Quincy Adams went to represent the United States in the capitals of Western Europe, their mission was of a singular nature, to raise support for the newly founded America. Still, it is quite possible that Washington, Madison and Jackson (who may be added as a contemporary of the latter part of this period as well) had the most lasting affect on our nation from among its first two generations of leadership. Jefferson himself considered his writing of the Declaration of Independence, written well before he entered into the sphere of diplomacy, as his crowning achievement. And indeed, it is his early work that forms the greatest part of his legacy to the nation.
Furthermore, even the foreign experiences of these foremost presidents may have hampered their leadership in some respects. After all, Jefferson’s affinity toward France and Adam’s previous refusal to declare war on that nation, at a time that such a war seemed to be in the national interest, were primary causes that led to the War of 1812. Both had been touched by their experiences there. Hamilton had no such affinity for France and therefore advocated a very different course, one that would have averted a far greater war with England.
If we are to learn anything from history, it is that decisions regarding what is best for a nation are best made by those whose impressions, points of view and policies are formed by experiences that come from within that nation itself, by those who relate to and appreciate the daily lives of the majority of its citizens. History shows us that, as a general rule, significant foreign experience with the very best of intentions still serves to cloud one’s judgment.
The primary focus of an economic team must be to protect the interests of the nation above all else. Heavy foreign policy credentials among domestic advisors are a bad mix. Our national economic leaders must be in tune with the real needs of the American people. The American economic picture, not the global worldview, must be foremost in their minds and in their thought processes. This is not the case among the current nominees and we can only hope that others will fight for policies that truly benefit the American people. We as a nation need strong voices, be they lone members of Congress or other public leaders, who will stand up and defend the economic interests of the United States of America. And, most importantly, the time to do so is now.
Featured on CFP: 12/30/08
On Nov.5, the day after the election of Barack Obama, in an article titled “Obama win met with urgent call for global action,” Reuters reported, “Political leaders urged U.S. President-elect Barack Obama on Wednesday to help forge a new economic order to lead the world out of its worst financial crisis since the 1930s.”
If you read that line carefully, the intent of Europe’s leaders is clear. Barack Obama should “lead” America to follow their plan, one that will be focused on bringing about the resurgence of European economic dominance. Or as European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso put it, "I sincerely hope that with the leadership of President Obama, the United States of America will join forces with Europe to drive this new deal."
When European powers ask the United States to “join forces” with them, their intent is for America to act in a supportive role, not one in which it takes the lead. To believe otherwise is to suggest that Europe places America’s interests above its own. And though they may suggest such commitment from us, they are not so reckless as to entertain pursuing a similar course themselves.
Yet the fact that Obama was being asked, in essence, to do little more than to heed the EU’s beckoning was lost in the nuance of Reuters’ reporting. To the average reader, the article featured only praise and hope for Obama’s leadership. With statements such as “help forge a new economic order” and “lead the world out of financial crisis,” 90% of readers saw the piece as a plea on the part of world leaders for Obama to lead the way out of economic doom. Indeed, over 90% of Democrats subscribe to this “Super-O” theory, so why shouldn’t the rest of the world?
In actuality, the insinuations of the Reuters piece were an obscene case of misplaced journalistic optimism, a rare trait that only makes an appearance on the occasion of a Democrat being elected to the White House. The fact that its lines were penned mere hours after Russian President Dmitri Medvedev’s deployment of Iskander missiles to the Polish border (in protest of the US Missile Defense Shield) and the leaking of “Prime Minister” Putin’s plan for consolidation of power (showing at least how seriously Russia takes the new President-elect) should give us pause at the incredulity of the article’s insinuations.
The EU is made up of world leaders who have led the way in global economic affairs since well before Barack Obama was elected to the Illinois State Senate. They are not looking for him to lead them in a new direction. Their statements, when read properly, are clear. They see Obama as easy pickings in their effort to get America to follow the path that they prefer.
The only question that Americans should be asking is whether the hopes of Europe’s leaders are founded. Unfortunately for America, everything about the transitioning Administration indicates that they are.
To date, President-elect Obama has made a series of economic appointments. While appointees are diverse in age, background and geography, most share a common thread: extensive foreign policy experience.
This is especially true of the most important member of Obama’s economic team, Treasury Secretary-designate Timothy Geithner. Geithner spent many of his formative years in Zimbabwe, India (which is a staunch ally and would be a plus in any foreign policy role, but not in a position charged exclusively with protecting American interests), and Thailand, where he graduated from high school. His bachelors degree was in governmental and Asian studies and his masters was similarly in international economics and East Asian studies. Geither is a Council of Foreign Relations member, as well as a member of the Group of Thirty. He has also served on the International Monetary Fund. In short, while Geithner has amassed many impressive credentials, much of his training, history and outlook are internationalist in nature.
The same is true of Commerce Secretary-designate Bill Richardson. In fact, one would be hard pressed to indicate why a former UN Ambassador would be a natural fit for Secretary of Commerce in any case. This is especially true of Richardson, who played a prominent role in the strengthening of UNEP, the “United Nations Environment Programme.” Again, a good choice for the EPA, not for US Commerce.
Which brings us to Paul Volcker. Volcker is universally touted for his experience and for having engineered disinflation. Yet Volcker also had a lead role in one of this nation’s most serious economic blunders. In the 1970s, Volcker took a lead role in suspending gold convertibility, resulting in the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, a system by which our dollar was (more or less) pegged to the value of gold, providing it with tangible, long term value. The fact that our dollar has little intrinsic value is because of the decisions of Paul Volcker, Richard Nixon and others in the 1970s.
At the time, Ronald Reagan aptly warned the public that any nation that has gone off the gold standard has met with economic collapse. Volcker does not recognize his actions in suspending gold convertibility to be a mistake, which is quite telling and should be a source of concern for those who are now so eager for his advice.
Furthermore, Volcker is even more internationalist than is Geithner. From 2000 to 2004 Volcker served as Director of the United Nations Association of the United States of America, an organization that seeks to boost the public image of the United Nations among Americans. He is also a member of the Group of Thirty and a founding member of the Trilateral Commission. His knowledge of and experience in dealing with small business, the bedrock of America’s job market, is unfortunately far less extensive.
Lawrence Summers, President-elect Obama’s pick for National Economic Council Director has a more conventional economic background, though he too has an internationalist worldview. His two years as Chief Economist of the World Bank undoubtedly contributed to his outlook, but perhaps only minorly so.
Still, what were Summers’ crowning economic accomplishments during his term as Treasury Secretary: His advocacy to deregulate derivatives and his support of the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act ordinance that prohibited banks from owning other financial institutions. Simply put, as Treasury Secretary, Summers vociferously supported and advocated for the conditions that helped lead to the mortgage meltdown and paved the way for large banks to take over brokerage houses. This is not the man we need to head up the National Economic Council at this time.
One might ask; isn’t it enough that these nominees all possess sharp minds? Won’t such an experienced group of people know what to do? The answer, as shown throughout our history as a nation, is threefold: No, no, and no.
As no American administration has ever had an economic team consisting of members with as many foreign policy credentials, the most reliable barometer of whether a foreign policy outlook has led to national success (including economic success) are the performances of our past presidents. They best serve to indicate how previous international experience affects one’s outlook and shapes the policies of an administration.
Few recent presidents have had international experience prior to taking office. Only George H. W. Bush (UN Ambassador and Liaison to China) and Richard M. Nixon had previous backgrounds in foreign policy (unlike Nixon, Johnson’s vice-presidency was relatively free of international duties and Eisenhower’s foreign roles were military in nature and centered on defending the US). Prior to them, only James Buchanan and Martin Van Buren had notable foreign experience.
As you can see, those who left their most indelible impressions on America, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, the Roosevelts, Lincoln, Truman, Cleveland and Jackson, all did so from uniquely American backgrounds and perspectives. Some would add Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant to this list, both presidents who sought to heal a nation.
The reason why presidents without foreign policy backgrounds make for better leaders is the same as the reason for why governors generally make better presidents than senators. They have first hand knowledge of the problems facing Americans and approach most issues from a standpoint of what is best for the American people. As a result, they care little to make concessions with other countries if they are against our national interests. Sure, they’ll act as benefactors to other countries and cooperate with them, but they will not go to extreme lengths just for the sake of getting along, when the consequences of doing so appear to outweigh the benefits. (Of note, George H. W. Bush stands out among presidents who had previous foreign policy experience, but his accomplishments came from his experience as a congressman, as CIA Director, RNC Chair and as Vice President. Still, his previous diplomatic background hampered his ability to present a bold response to certain problems and often made him conciliatory even when decisive leadership was needed. By contrast, abject failures such as Jimmy Carter were profoundly influenced by internationalist thought, even if they had little actual foreign policy experience.)
Presidents before 1824 who had international experience, approached their foreign roles from an entirely different standpoint than did those who succeeded them. When John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe and John Quincy Adams went to represent the United States in the capitals of Western Europe, their mission was of a singular nature, to raise support for the newly founded America. Still, it is quite possible that Washington, Madison and Jackson (who may be added as a contemporary of the latter part of this period as well) had the most lasting affect on our nation from among its first two generations of leadership. Jefferson himself considered his writing of the Declaration of Independence, written well before he entered into the sphere of diplomacy, as his crowning achievement. And indeed, it is his early work that forms the greatest part of his legacy to the nation.
Furthermore, even the foreign experiences of these foremost presidents may have hampered their leadership in some respects. After all, Jefferson’s affinity toward France and Adam’s previous refusal to declare war on that nation, at a time that such a war seemed to be in the national interest, were primary causes that led to the War of 1812. Both had been touched by their experiences there. Hamilton had no such affinity for France and therefore advocated a very different course, one that would have averted a far greater war with England.
If we are to learn anything from history, it is that decisions regarding what is best for a nation are best made by those whose impressions, points of view and policies are formed by experiences that come from within that nation itself, by those who relate to and appreciate the daily lives of the majority of its citizens. History shows us that, as a general rule, significant foreign experience with the very best of intentions still serves to cloud one’s judgment.
The primary focus of an economic team must be to protect the interests of the nation above all else. Heavy foreign policy credentials among domestic advisors are a bad mix. Our national economic leaders must be in tune with the real needs of the American people. The American economic picture, not the global worldview, must be foremost in their minds and in their thought processes. This is not the case among the current nominees and we can only hope that others will fight for policies that truly benefit the American people. We as a nation need strong voices, be they lone members of Congress or other public leaders, who will stand up and defend the economic interests of the United States of America. And, most importantly, the time to do so is now.
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