Radiofree West Hartford - THEY DID THEIR JOB WELL by Tim Siggia

THEY DID THEIR JOB WELL

By Tim Siggia

November 14, 2006

Obviously, the title of this which some may call Tim Siggia's latest harangue does not refer to the Republican Party. Had they done their job well, they would have been reelected and neither house of Congress would have changed majorities. In 1994, the Republicans scored not only a home run but a grand slam in the Contract With America. The Democrats tried calling it a "Contract On America", but the clever wording was not bought by the American people. The Contract With America spelled out in specific terms exactly what America seemed to want at the time. It was a positive message which told them not only why they should not vote for the Democrats, but why they should vote for the Republicans. All the Republicans had to do was stick to the Contract With America, and America would have stuck with them. Unfortunately, even with a 12-year opportunity, they could not do that.

Ronald Reagan had shown them how, back in the eighties. Despite resistance from the Democrats and their allies in the news media, Reagan stuck to his conservative principles, and in the end not only won over America, but, had he not been term-limited in 1988, in all likeliness would have been elected to a third term. What did the Republican Congress do once they had the power? They failed to use it. They allowed themselves to be browbeaten by the Democrats, the news media, and, it must be added, the RINOs in their own ranks. When met with resistance, they caved -- not just once, but again and again. They rate a grade of F.

The title does not apply to President Bush, either: first, obviously, because there is only one of him (actually there are two, but only one is currently in the White House), and second, because, like the Republican Congress, he abandoned his conservative principles. Before he was even elected, more than a few of us, I am sure, scratched our heads over the phrase, "compassionate conservative." This was certainly anything but Reagan-esque. Ronald Reagan had been simply a conservative, with no modifiers attached. "Compassionate conservative" implies some sort of apology for that which no apology should have been deemed necessary.

Bush started out with some great ideas, then failed to follow through on them. The one that he did see through, to his credit, was the tax cuts. Our current solid economy and low rate of unemployment is testament to that. But even here, he did not go all the way, allowing time limits to be placed on those cuts in order to put them through Congress. This is not entirely his fault, of course. Congress is largely to blame on this one. In a Congress where Republicans had control of the House of Representatives for 12 years, and of both House and Senate for 10 of those 12, why couldn't have those tax cuts been made permanent? The Republicans had the power, but were apparently so afraid of offending the Democrats and the news media that they failed to use that power. Now that Democrats will take over both houses of Congress in less than two months, the tax cuts will expire in 2010, leaving the Democratic majority free to impose tax hikes at their pleasure.

Bush had other promising ideas as well, however, including Social Security reform, school vouchers, and medical savings accounts -- all of which ended up being scuttled for fear of opposition and backlash by the Democrats and the media. Then too, he had some not-so-great ideas, which of course got enacted. The "No Child Left Behind Act," for example, was largely the brainchild of that great conservative legislator, Ted Kennedy, to whom Bush virtually gave a free hand in authoring the bill. The 9-11 attacks, which were foreseen by nobody, resulted in the formation of yet another government bureaucracy: the Department of Homeland Security, which no doubt left more than a few conservatives scratching their heads again. We already had a Defense Department. Now we needed a Homeland Security Department as well? Is this what "compassionate conservatism" was all about?

It didn't stop there, of course. Under the administration of George W. Bush we also got enacted the biggest government entitlement since Medicare: the Medicare Prescription Drug Plan, which, with its many convoluted options that even pharmaceutical professionals had a hard time making sense of, left the taxpayers with yet another multi-billion-dollar boondoggle with which to deal. So what happened to such traditionally conservative ideas as limited government and fiscal prudence? Somehow, it seems they simply evaporated once conservatism became "compassionate." Earth to Bush: There is no such thing as a big-government conservative. The phrase is an oxymoron. You are either one or the other, you cannot be both.

George W. Bush must be credited, of course, for the tax cuts and for his decisive action after 9-11. His failure, however, seems twofold. First, he should know by now that he cannot be all things to all people. That those who take positive stands on anything will have enemies is an inevitability. Second is in his apparent identity crisis when it comes to ideology. A conservative should be a conservative, period, without any qualifiers. This means things like keeping the range and scope of government within its specified constitutional boundaries, and keeping federal spending to a minimum. It also means not getting in the way of conservative candidates in primaries by endorsing and campaigning for their liberal opponents, especially when House chairmanships are at stake. Nearly all true conservatives would agree that Arlen Specter was the worst possible Republican choice to chair the House Judiciary Committee. Sorry, Mr. President. Your grade is D-minus.

No, the title in this case refers to the news media. They did their job well. Not their official job, of course, which supposedly is to report the news of the moment fairly, accurately, and completely. For that they get an F-minus. The job in question here is their unofficial -- read real -- job, which is to manipulate public opinion in such a manner as to keep all political power in the hands of Democrats and out of the hands of Republicans. Some understanding of media thinking is necessary here in order to fully appreciate the importance of this job. The first requirement is to understand that the news media and the Democratic Party are, and for the most part always have been, one and the same. This makes it easier to understand the second requirement, which is to acknowledge that political power is not merely the result of a given election, but is the birthright and exclusive entitlement of Democrats. Republicans exist only to reaffirm this principle every two, four or six years. When Democrats are elected, it means all is right with the world and the natural order of things has been allowed to prevail. When Republicans win, it means the voters, for whatever reason, failed to vote the way they are supposed to -- or, in the words of the late ABC news anchor, Peter Jennings, "had a temper tantrum."

Media thinking dictates that the only media outlet which is not "fair and balanced" is, ironically, the one that claims to be: the Fox News Channel. Being fair and balanced, in media terms, means following the example of the New York Times, which hasn't endorsed a Republican candidate for president since Dwight D. Eisenhower. (That's fifty years, for those who are counting.) It means approving of the regular practice of the Hartford Courant in printing the opinion pieces of their liberal Washington bureau chief, David Lightman, on the front page as news rather than on the editorial page where opinion belongs. It means understanding that the refusal of mainstream broadcast news anchors to wear American flag lapel pins after 9-11 shows that they are impartial and above-the-fray in their newscasting, and that when Dan Rather shows up at Democratic Party fund raisers he is merely exercising his constitutional rights. It also means believing that Rather was somehow justified in using forged documents in an effort to discredit President Bush, and maintaining afterward that he believed those documents authentic when the truth was obvious to just about everyone but him.

Even before the election (some continue to say "selection") of President Bush in 2000, the mainstream media understood their mission in clear and unmistakable terms: Keep Bush from being elected by any means possible. This resulted in things like the premature projection of Democratic candidate Al Gore in Florida, the totally ludicrous "Hanging Chad" controversy, and the seemingly endless demands for recounts in Florida in which the news media actively collaborated with Democrats in their effort to orchestrate the outcome. When in the end they failed at that, what with the Supreme Court finally having to weigh in on the process and compel the state of Florida to abide by its own constitution and end the recounts, Bush was elected and the Democrats reacted by howling, "Selected, not elected!"

For the next six years, the news media labored on in their effort to discredit the president any way they could. They were temporarily stymied by the events of 9-11, which they were forced to report as they actually happened. Then later, when Bush proposed a pre-emptive strike on Iraq based on the long-standing belief among nearly all the world's intelligence agencies that Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was manufacturing weapons of mass destruction and planning to use those weapons against certain countries, including the United States, the hapless efforts of United Nations weapons inspectors having proven ineffective, the news media gave much air time to Democratic opposition to Bush's plan. Congress voted to give Bush the authority to attack, however, and the war on Iraq was underway. When no weapons of mass destruction were found, as a result, the media saw their chance, and jumped on it.

What happened afterward had the precision of a well-oiled machine. Day after day, reports of body counts were given unlimited air time and covered much of the news in print. The activities of Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq and an obvious Bush hater, were given so much publicity that even non-conservatives began to tire of hearing about her. Rep. Jack Murtha (D-Penn.), a decorated veteran of the Korean War and a critic of the war in Iraq, went from being a virtual unknown to a household name with his advocacy of immediate withdrawal of our troops from Iraq. Retired generals who opposed the action were trotted out to speak their minds. In the meantime, all good news from Iraq was suppressed by the mainstream media, to surface only in Internet blogs, on talk radio, and from service people who attested to the improved conditions, the schools and hospitals being built, the positive feelings of Iraqi citizens, and their own accomplishments in the field. This was not what the mainstream media wanted to hear or report. They wanted doom-and-gloom, reports of Iraqi demands for American withdrawal, statements from isolated military malcontents, and anything else that would turn heartland America against this war and this president. They had done it before in a previous war, Vietnam, and they even made every effort to liken the current involvement in Iraq to that failed effort -- leaving out, of course, their active role in that failure.

With the approach of mid-term elections this year, the media made every effort to portray Democrats as gaining steam, and Republicans, especially Bush (though he was not running for anything this year), spiraling downward. Poll after poll was published, though the questions used and the percentages of registered Democrats, Republicans and others was generally not, and the process of opinion manipulation began to take place. As Winston Churchill so eloquently put it, "There is no such thing as public opinion, only published opinion." Faced with a preponderance of published opinion, the public tends to go along with what they perceive as a majority, a concept well-understood in the mainstream media. On the eve of the election, what media types really hoped for had become readily apparent. The lead headline in the Hartford Courant read: "Are We In A 'Blue' Mood?"

At the beginning, the majority of Americans were behind President Bush and our effort in Iraq. From the outset, Bush told America that our involvement there would be for the long haul, and would not be over in any short time. But the mainstream media, with its constant emphasis on negativity, methodically turned public opinion in the direction they wanted. When the election came, and Democrats regained control of Congress after a 12-year hiatus, the mission of the media had been accomplished.

They did their job well.

Only one Republican president since Eisenhower has foiled the mainstream media in their efforts to destroy him. That president was Ronald Reagan. His secret? He simply ignored them and stuck to his conservative agenda, knowing the American people in a way that ivory-tower types like Dan Rather and Peter Jennings couldn't begin to know them. The "Nattering Nabobs of Negativism," as the late vice president Spiro Agnew so aptly called them, simply couldn't "get to" Reagan. He handled the notoriously biased Washington press corps with an adroitness and aplomb worthy of Benjamin Franklin. He was always cordial and gallant with veteran correspondent Helen Thomas, for instance, though she seldom if ever returned that courtesy. But Reagan knew that the news media would never be his friends, and he never tried to make pleasing them part of his agenda. The result is history -- and there is something in history to be learned by the Republican Party, if it ever hopes to regain what it lost this year.