In a previous post, I talked about the McCain-Feingold Act and how it may be extended to the internet and to blogs in particular. In a comment in repsonse to another comment, I mentioned that it was because of McCain-Feingold that a group like moveon.org was able to hijack the Democratic party. That got me thinking of a mostly unrelated double standard between left and right. When the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth had their day in the news, they were decried as part of the right wing attack machine, with their every move plotted by Karl Rove. In other words, the media and the left wing refused to allow the thought that any group might independently favor Bush, that the only groups that favored Bush were under the control of Karl Rove and/or the GOP. The double standard comes in with groups like moveon.org, who, among other things, had videos on their website comparing Bush to Hitler. When Kerry was criticized for this by the right, the mantra was that moveon.org was not affiliated with John Kerry or the Democratic Party, and they got off with little harm. Why is it that anyone who agrees with the right wing or the GOP is attacked by most of the mainstream media as either a religious fanatic or controlled by Karl Rove, but when someone leans left and attacks Bush with lies and slander and is caught, they have no relation to the Democratic Party?
On another topic, Sandy Berger confessed today that the documents he took from the National Archives were taken deliberately, not by accident, and they were taken to hide things Clinton did or did not know and do about terrorism in the US, and specifically Osama and friends in 2000, which would have been a great time to prevent 9/11 if they hadn't decided to leave it alone. Do I blame them? No, who would have imagined what happened? But ont eh same not, you either have to villify Clinton for the same thing that Bush was villified for (not being able to read minds and predict the future) or you have to let Bush off the hook. Otherwise you are a hypocrite. Unfortunately that doesn't matter. The mainstream media and the left wing will continue to act as if Clinton was a saint and that everything in the world was perfect until Bush was elected. It's funny how ignorant people like to blame Bush for things like Enron (Bush loves big business!!) when most of the accounting scandals happened under Clinton, and the bad guys were caught under Bush. Unlike much of the left wing, however, I realize that the attitude of several left wing extremists is not neccesarily the attitude of the Democratic party leadership (though I'm sure Cynthia McKinney agrees with the left wing nutjobs).
3 Comments:
You forgot the part where the Swift Boat Veterans lied, slandered, and then hid their extensive connections to the official Bush-Cheney campaign, including an advisor to the campaign who appeared in a SBVT ad. Some of the other connections may seem spurious or inconsequential, but they are real and they provide the reason the group's validity has been questioned.
Did you have some secret list of official Kerry campaign links to moveon.org? Or did you just hate the fact that they were liberal?
Oh yeah, there's also that minor little detail that Bush started a war without the evidence he claimed he had, which has resulted in over 1500 American soldiers dead, thousands more wounded (many permanently disfigured or paralyzed). I don't even want to think how many Iraqi civilians are dead or wounded. Before you make all these assumptions and generalizations about what all liberals think, I can speak for myself and say I am far more angry at Bush over the Iraq war than his failure to do anything about Osama (pre-9/11).
How about the fact that John Kerry still never released all his military records, despite promising to do so. If there's nothing to hide, why haven't they been released.
What evidence is there that the SBVT lied? None that I've seen. The only proven lie so far was that Kerry said he was in Cambodia (it was seared in to his memory, as he said on the floor of congress), and now he admits he was never in Cambodia.
And Dave, far less INNOCENT Iraqis died from this war than died in any period of similar length previous due to Saddam killing his own people. And that Lancet study that said 100k Iraqis have died since the beginning of the war has been widely discredited as really bad statistical analysis.
And soldiers get hurt, they know that when they join. They also know that millions of Iraqis for many years to come will have better lives because of their sacrifice. Very few soldiers returning from Iraq have anything but love for their commander-in-chief.
Bush used the same evidence that most every major world leader, and Bill Clinton, used when they said they believed that Iraq had WMDs. If they didn't believe it, then why were there 18 UN resolutions on the subject? I love how you conveniently forget that fact. There's certainly no lie when you say something you believe to be true. A mistake, perhaps, but that mistake has turned in to a whole lot of good. But I guess democracy and a chance at peace and freedom in the Middle East isn't worth having to give Bush credit for anything to you?
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