No offense to Terry Turner of the Watching Washington blog, but Ron Suskind, former Wall Street Journal reporter, is full of crap! For that matter, so are others in the MSM who think there is some conspiracy theory to “silence the media.”

The problem for liberals is that the media is more democratic now than it ever has been. What was once a medium dominated by liberals has been blown wide open, first by “New Media,” and now by conservative bloggers across the country.

Before the election this past November, the MSM threw everything it had at President Bush. Dan Rather threw his entire career and the reputation of CBS News to the wind in an effort to hurt the President. And now it seems that another formerly reputable member of the MSM, Newsweek, has chosen to make it’s leap into the abyss. This time, however, the cost has been considerably higher.

The Newsweek story, originally published in the “Periscope” section of the mag on May 9, reported that a forthcoming Pentagon investigation was going to reveal that US soldiers desecrated the Quran in an effort to get prisoners to talk. Never mind that it’s SOP for a terrorist to say something like this in order to stir passions, the report itself wound up causing 15 deaths, riots in at least five seperate countries, and who knows how much damage in the form of destroyed vehicles, burned buildings, etc. All on a story that, as it turns out, is not true at all.

Why?!

I think Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.com nailed this whole thing with a sledgehammer:

Two points: (1) If they had wrongly reported the race of a criminal and produced a lynching, they’d feel much worse — which is why they generally don’t report such things, a degree of sensitivity they don’t extend to reporting on, you know, minor topics like wars; and (2) If a blogger had made a similar mistake, with similar consequences, we’d be hearing about Big Media’s superior fact-checking and layers of editors.

People died, and U.S. military and diplomatic efforts were damaged, because — let’s be clear here — Newsweek was too anxious to get out a story that would make the Bush Administration and the military look bad.

Here’s the thing that makes this so terribly bad in my mind… PEOPLE DIED!!!!

Human beings lost their lives because of Newsweek’s rush to press on something which, they now admit, had not been properly fact-checked. And almost as bad is the fact that the Islamofascists will use this information to try and convince their followers to kill even more people, perhaps even undermining the significant strides that nations have made in that area towards democracy.

And this is precisely the point of my post… Blogs are effective today and have gained respect in such a short space of time, not necessarily because they are all that, but because liberals in the MSM are SO biased, and SO reckless, and SO dead set on turning the clock back to the days when THEY controlled what Americans heard, saw, and read, that they are making us pajama-wearing amateurs look really good.

These folks are pitiful. They are pathetic.

Worse even is the fact that the editors at Newsweek had the unmitigated gall to try and pass this whole thing off as someone else’s fault:

The spark was apparently lit at a press conference held on Friday, May 6, by Imran Khan, a Pakistani cricket legend and strident critic of Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf. Brandishing a copy of that week’s NEWSWEEK (dated May 9), Khan read a report that U.S. interrogators at Guantánamo prison had placed the Qur’an on toilet seats and even flushed one. “This is what the U.S. is doing,” exclaimed Khan, “desecrating the Qur’an.”

So, you see, it’s not the editors at Newsweek who caused this trouble, it’s the radicals who decided to use that information to foment these riots. I’m not saying that Imram Khan is blameless, clearly he used the information, and the resultant violence, to promote his own agenda, but The ACTUAL problem started with Newsweek, not with Khan.

I wonder, when the editors over at Newsweek look down, do they see blood on their hands?

They should.

David Flanagan
Viewpointjournal.com

What do recently crowned DNC leaders Howard Dean (DNC Chair) and Harry Reid (Senate Minority Leader) have in common? Apparently, they both love to “shoot from the lip.” Howard Dean was the first to earn this stylistic distinction during the Democratic Primaries way back in 2003. Senator Reid, on the other hand, began his reign of terror in December of 2004, just before ascending to the Senate Minority Leader post.

The mere fact that Reid was voted in as the new Senate Minority Leader by members of his party says everything about the DNC’s lack of vision and professionalism.

Much of the MSM continues to report — endlessly I might add — that the Republican Party is on an inexorably rightward-slide. But nothing could be farther from the truth.

The fact is, Democratic leaders are the ones on the slide, growing increasingly fringe with each passing year. Senator Reid is just one simple case in point.

Unfortunately, the MSM continues to offer favorable press coverage to DNC leaders in general and Senator Reid in particular. Are DNC leaders moving left? “No,” says the MSM, “they are simply responding to the increasingly radical right-wing GOP agenda, which, among other things, has chosen to champion issues that are central to most Americans.” “Those damned Republicans, cow-towing to the American people like that… Outrageous!”

But I digress.

We were talking about Senator Reid, so, let’s take a look at the litany of Reid gaffes, uttered since December of 2004 even as he was preparing to take the Minority Leader position for his party. Reid has, among other things:

1. Accused Justic Thomas of being an “embarrassment,” saying, among other things, that Justice Thomas cannot write well.
2. Called Fed Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan, a “hack” for “urging Congress to deal quickly with the financial problems facing Social Security and Medicare.”
3. Called President Bush a “loser” in front of school children and while the President was on foreign soil no less!
4. Shocked both his fellow Democrats as well as Republicans when he publicly hinted that he may have had illegal access to and was disturbed by the top secret FBI files of one of President Bush’s Appellate Court nominees, Henry Saad.
5. And, even, as reported by Robert Novak in the Chicago Sun-Times today, that he might be behind an unprecendented push to investigate the financial records of every possible Supreme Court nominee!

Never mind the fact that this is the type of leadership I might expect from, say, an Enron executive. Really, next to Reid, Newt Gingrich, [a man Democrats LOVE to hate] looks like Mother Theresa!

Is there some kind of big plan that I’m missing here? Perhaps Senator Reid is the bad cop to Senator Clinton’s good cop? Or maybe the goal is to look so desperate and clueless that people will actually begin to feel sorry for Reid and his fellow Democrats.

Whether a plan or merely a spasm, I’ve got to think that this behaviour is going to cost Democrats in Washington, and cost them big!

Every one of President Bush’s candidates has been rated “Well Qualified” by the ABA, their highest rating. In addition, these judges really have no clear record of bias in any particular direction. Senate Democrats have been filibustering these candidates, not because they are extreme, but because they suspect them of being more pro-life than other candidates; and abortion lobbies will not stand for it.

In Washington, the abortion lobbies have more than just the DNC’s ear, they have them BY the ear! And wherever lobbies like NARAL tell the DNC to go, they go!

I’m not saying that the GOP remains uninfluenced by lobbies, but the DNC has a few lobbies that, in recent decades, have gained a huge influence over their actions. One is the abortion lobby, another is the legal establishment.

Why? Because the GOP is much more moderate on issues relating to abortions and legal reforms.

But here’s the dilemma… In following so closely along with the abortion lobby, the DNC is disrespecting the ABA in a major way. How so? Because the ABA has given every one of the ten filibustered appellate judges it’s highest rating.

So, in a sense, the DNC is doing a “Bork X 10″ with the President’s appellate judge recommendations; doing everything in their power to kill the ten most likely conservative-leaning judges who could one day be recommended for the Supreme Court by President Bush. Everything that Democrats have said in the past regarding the right of the President to get an “up or down vote” on their candidates has been tossed out the window.

At the same time, Democratic leaders are telling those in the legal industry that a recommendation from one of their most respected bodies, the ABA, matters little to them. Is that REALLY a good idea?

I guess for DNC leaders, there is no past (the traditional right to an up or down vote for appellate judges nominated by the President), and there is no future (the 2006 election cycle), there is only the here and now. Democrats in Washington have been given their marching orders by groups like NARAL, “stop those candidates who might, over the next 30 or 40 years, uphold constitutional principles rather than rewrite them (i.e., impose reasonable restrictions upon the abortion industry).

A scary thing, I guess, if you are a liberal and want judges who legislate from the bench. Encouraging, however, for those of us who believe that voters and legislators make law through consensus rather than by judicial fiat.

David Flanagan
Viewpointjournal.com