Why you can't trust the media: The New York Times Endorses John Kerry

Herein lies the entirety of the New York Times OpEd endorsing John Kerry as President. In red are my comments:

John Kerry for President

What a wonderfully original title.

Senator John Kerry goes toward the election with a base that is built more on opposition to George W. Bush than loyalty to his own candidacy. But over the last year we have come to know Mr. Kerry as more than just an alternative to the status quo. We like what we've seen. He has qualities that could be the basis for a great chief executive, not just a modest improvement on the incumbent.

Over the last year, the NYT has made the determination that Kerry is able to lead this country? With a record of multiple terms in the senate, the NYT fails to find any past efforts of Kerry that would make him that valued of a leader. A record that shows him to be a socialist-leaning, military-scoffing senator, he would be a danger to military morale and shake the very foundation of this country's libertarian roots.

We have been impressed with Mr. Kerry's wide knowledge and clear thinking - something that became more apparent once he was reined in by that two-minute debate light. He is blessedly willing to re-evaluate decisions when conditions change. And while Mr. Kerry's service in Vietnam was first over-promoted and then over-pilloried, his entire life has been devoted to public service, from the war to a series of elected offices. He strikes us, above all, as a man with a strong moral core.

Speaking to an audience of 50+ million people was never an easy task. More people are suited to do it than others, and some past presidents of this nation that never had to deal with the microscope of public attention or media scorn as this administration would have fared worse. And having "wide knowledge" and "clear thinking" is no guarantee of success in an office such as this. Many successful businessmen in this nation did not succeed by their own personal virtues alone, but by the fact that they surrounded themselves with an impressive array of advisors who were not only brilliant, but would not be a subservient bunch of "yes-men". And calling Kerry "blessedly willing to re-evaluate decisions when conditions change" is perhaps the grandest euphamism of describing a flip-flop that I have ever seen. A life entirely devoted to public service should make the public wary, especially one so devoid of any significant accomplishments. And to briefly repudiate the notion of Kerry having a "strong moral core", I can mention that Sen. Kerry has admitted in his testifying before Congress in the early 1970's to performing brutal acts against Vietnamese civilians during the Vietnam war and grouped his fellow soldiers and sailors into the very same category as his. Strong moral core, indeed. He is either a war criminal, a liar, or both. And to someone who made the very foundation of his campaign the Vietnam War, John Kerry should make people think twice about casting a ballot in his favor. Additionally, Kerry's divorce after six years of separation from a wife battling depression should also make some people question his belief in the sanctity of marriage. This in particular is not something I pay excessive attention to, but the fact that Newt Gingrich and John McCain were hammered by the media for similar acts, makes me wonder about the double standard the mainstream media has in its criticism of certain public figures.

There is no denying that this race is mainly about Mr. Bush's disastrous tenure. Nearly four years ago, after the Supreme Court awarded him the presidency, Mr. Bush came into office amid popular expectation that he would acknowledge his lack of a mandate by sticking close to the center. Instead, he turned the government over to the radical right.

The NYT is disenfranchising the millions of voters who cast a vote in Bush's favor by this paragraph alone. People are notoriously fickle. Indeed, if the election was held just one month earlier in October of 2000 according to Gallup Poll numbers, President Bush may have been elected by a margin of 13 points. Is that a sufficient number for a mandate? The president had an approval rating of 87% two months after 9-11. Is that a sufficient number for a mandate? Sticking close to the center would have brought on accusations of President Bush being a lame-duck president. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Mr. Bush installed John Ashcroft, a favorite of the far right with a history of insensitivity to civil liberties, as attorney general. He sent the Senate one ideological, activist judicial nominee after another. He moved quickly to implement a far-reaching anti-choice agenda including censorship of government Web sites and a clampdown on embryonic stem cell research. He threw the government's weight against efforts by the University of Michigan to give minority students an edge in admission, as it did for students from rural areas or the offspring of alumni.

Insensitivity to civil liberties? Why is it "insensitivity" to a civil liberty when someone fights for the right of an unborn child? Why is it "insensitivity" to a civil liberty when someone fights for Second Amendment rights? And again, what is with this misconception about the government clamping down on embryonic stem cell research? When is the government not using taxpayer funds called a "clampdown"? President Bush is the first president in history to start federal funding of stem cell research for pre-existing lines. Private funding has no restriction on stem cell research. The government does not penalize companies who do either. And whether you believe it or not, voting for John Kerry isn't going to make people with spinal cord injuries get up and walk again. Stem cells have not been proven to help people at all, rats not included.

When the nation fell into recession, the president remained fixated not on generating jobs but rather on fighting the right wing's war against taxing the wealthy. As a result, money that could have been used to strengthen Social Security evaporated, as did the chance to provide adequate funding for programs the president himself had backed. No Child Left Behind, his signature domestic program, imposed higher standards on local school systems without providing enough money to meet them.

My despisal of the Social Security system won't be elaborated on at this time. And neither will my similar feelings about the Department of Education, which I believe is a black hole for progress in education. The monetary waste also lies at the city and local level for schools. If people want the schools to improve, the parents have to be involved in the school system, and they have to work with the teachers instead of working against them. Relying upon government alone to educate your child is a recipe for disaster, yet what a lot of teachers are seeing with the current crops going into the introductory grade levels are children devoid of many of the basic skills they should have prior to entering into the schools: When teachers spend time teaching 1st and 2nd graders basic manners and how to recognize letters and numbers instead of what they're supposed to learn, they're always going to be behind. No government program can solve this without turning the children over to the state.

If Mr. Bush had wanted to make a mark on an issue on which Republicans and Democrats have long made common cause, he could have picked the environment. Christie Whitman, the former New Jersey governor chosen to run the Environmental Protection Agency, came from that bipartisan tradition. Yet she left after three years of futile struggle against the ideologues and industry lobbyists Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had installed in every other important environmental post. The result has been a systematic weakening of regulatory safeguards across the entire spectrum of environmental issues, from clean air to wilderness protection.

Exactly how wise is it to hold ourselves to drastically higher environmental standards than the up-and-coming industrial powerhouses of India and China? Environmental improvements are steadily occurring. Air and water quality are better now than they were four years ago in the United States. And in another example of media's distortion of the facts, the NYT is hoping that people will have forgotten what actually happened with Christie Whitman. Nowhere in her resignation statement did she say that she was disgruntled with the administration. Instead, her letter highlighted the administration's successful efforts to clean the country's air, water and land.

The president who lost the popular vote got a real mandate on Sept. 11, 2001. With the grieving country united behind him, Mr. Bush had an unparalleled opportunity to ask for almost any shared sacrifice. The only limit was his imagination.

He asked for another tax cut and the war against Iraq.

*sigh* Tax cuts spur consumer confidence and spending; necessary after such a disastrous day in American history. And I won't get into Iraq at this time...

The president's refusal to drop his tax-cutting agenda when the nation was gearing up for war is perhaps the most shocking example of his inability to change his priorities in the face of drastically altered circumstances. Mr. Bush did not just starve the government of the money it needed for his own education initiative or the Medicare drug bill. He also made tax cuts a higher priority than doing what was needed for America's security; 90 percent of the cargo unloaded every day in the nation's ports still goes uninspected.

The alternative: RAISE taxes? The millions of jobs lost after 9-11 would have been compounded without the tax cuts. There is very little else a government can do to turn an entire economy around short of a second "New Deal" program...and thankfully, our situation never became that serious. Lowering taxes was a smart move.

Along with the invasion of Afghanistan, which had near unanimous international and domestic support, Mr. Bush and his attorney general put in place a strategy for a domestic antiterror war that had all the hallmarks of the administration's normal method of doing business: a Nixonian obsession with secrecy, disrespect for civil liberties and inept management.

I know some people who would call it "disciplined" instead. It's only a secret when someone else covets that secret. With a mainstream-media so uncooperative and filled with hate, I would probably do the same thing if put into the shoes of this administration. The media should do their jobs and focus on reporting the news instead of creating government exposés.

American citizens were detained for long periods without access to lawyers or family members. Immigrants were rounded up and forced to languish in what the Justice Department's own inspector general found were often "unduly harsh" conditions. Men captured in the Afghan war were held incommunicado with no right to challenge their confinement. The Justice Department became a cheerleader for skirting decades-old international laws and treaties forbidding the brutal treatment of prisoners taken during wartime.

In 1861, President Lincoln declared martial law, suspended Habeas Corpus, had tens of thousands of US citizens arrested, and ignored the decisions of the US Supreme Court, yet is arguably the greatest president in American History.

Mr. Ashcroft appeared on TV time and again to announce sensational arrests of people who turned out to be either innocent, harmless braggarts or extremely low-level sympathizers of Osama bin Laden who, while perhaps wishing to do something terrible, lacked the means. The Justice Department cannot claim one major successful terrorism prosecution, and has squandered much of the trust and patience the American people freely gave in 2001. Other nations, perceiving that the vast bulk of the prisoners held for so long at Guantánamo Bay came from the same line of ineffectual incompetents or unlucky innocents, and seeing the awful photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, were shocked that the nation that was supposed to be setting the world standard for human rights could behave that way.

The Abu Ghraib prison scandal was entirely the fault of the media. The military was already conducting an investigation and about the adjudicate the matter when the photos were leaked, and all hell broke loose. The unfortunate truth is that when you have 18-20 year olds doing a job, despite the best efforts to get them to act and perform their job properly, things like this happen. It is not tolerated, but ask anyone who has served in the military, and they will tell you it is unavoidable.

Like the tax cuts, Mr. Bush's obsession with Saddam Hussein seemed closer to zealotry than mere policy. He sold the war to the American people, and to Congress, as an antiterrorist campaign even though Iraq had no known working relationship with Al Qaeda. His most frightening allegation was that Saddam Hussein was close to getting nuclear weapons. It was based on two pieces of evidence. One was a story about attempts to purchase critical materials from Niger, and it was the product of rumor and forgery. The other evidence, the purchase of aluminum tubes that the administration said were meant for a nuclear centrifuge, was concocted by one low-level analyst and had been thoroughly debunked by administration investigators and international vetting. Top members of the administration knew this, but the selling went on anyway. None of the president's chief advisers have ever been held accountable for their misrepresentations to the American people or for their mismanagement of the war that followed.

Being misrepresented is a matter of interpretation. I never felt misrepresented, but of course, I was privvy to military intelligence at the time, as was John Kerry (who knew much more than I did, being on the Senate Intelligence Committee). Everyone was duped into believing Iraq had WMD. And as I've said before, terrorism is like a cancer. Only attacking the biggest tumor (Afghanistan), and you'll leave the others growing until they're too big for you to handle. What did we know? Iran and North Korea were already too hot to handle when 9/11 came around. Iraq? They were desperately trying to obtain WMD, and the threat wasn't going away. Saddam provided $20,000 rewards to Palestinian suicide bombers' families, among a host of other infamous actions during his rule. Uday and Qusay were thought in some circles to be even more dangerous than their father before them. No, Iraq was stopped before they became too big to handle.

The international outrage over the American invasion is now joined by a sense of disdain for the incompetence of the effort. Moderate Arab leaders who have attempted to introduce a modicum of democracy are tainted by their connection to an administration that is now radioactive in the Muslim world. Heads of rogue states, including Iran and North Korea, have been taught decisively that the best protection against a pre-emptive American strike is to acquire nuclear weapons themselves.

The results of the effort are arguable. The news media tends to ignore achievements, but magnify the few failures, playing into the hands of the enemies of the United States. When power levels in Baghdad finally surpassed pre-war levels, I had to read it on an independent web site; I heard nothing about the achievement in the mainstream media. Is it not irresponsible to constantly report about power failures, yet laud the achievement when the Americans and Iraqis, working together against all odds, restore the power grid? Americans have always been villified, especially magnified since the fall of the Soviet Union. Call it jealousy, call it hatred...when you're the king of the hill, there is no other potential energy but downwards. And rogue states have always strived for nuclear weapons. Calling the efforts of rogue nations to obtain nuclear weapons primarily because of the United States' pre-emptive strike against Iraq is pathetically glib. What about the competing argument regarding Libya and its forfeiture of nuclear weapons and other WMD? I'd call that a successful example of the Bush Doctrine.

We have specific fears about what would happen in a second Bush term, particularly regarding the Supreme Court. The record so far gives us plenty of cause for worry. Thanks to Mr. Bush, Jay Bybee, the author of an infamous Justice Department memo justifying the use of torture as an interrogation technique, is now a federal appeals court judge. Another Bush selection, J. Leon Holmes, a federal judge in Arkansas, has written that wives must be subordinate to their husbands and compared abortion rights activists to Nazis.

The president doesn't confirm the choices of judges, the legislative branch does. If you don't like the choice of a judge, tell your state representative.

Mr. Bush remains enamored of tax cuts but he has never stopped Republican lawmakers from passing massive spending, even for projects he dislikes, like increased farm aid.

Okay, well, I don't like government spending either...but it doesn't make me believe Kerry will not do the same...in fact, I'm less confident about Kerry's spending habits where they matter most. Government funding of social programs frighten me.

If he wins re-election, domestic and foreign financial markets will know the fiscal recklessness will continue. Along with record trade imbalances, that increases the chances of a financial crisis, like an uncontrolled decline of the dollar, and higher long-term interest rates.

Alan Greenspan was part of the Clinton as well as the Bush administration. And trade imbalances were also at their respective record levels during the "bubble market" of the late '90's. Economics is a highly involved, interrelated, and complex study, and is not solely the responsibility of the executive.

The Bush White House has always given us the worst aspects of the American right without any of the advantages. We get the radical goals but not the efficient management. The Department of Education's handling of the No Child Left Behind Act has been heavily politicized and inept. The Department of Homeland Security is famous for its useless alerts and its inability to distribute antiterrorism aid according to actual threats. Without providing enough troops to properly secure Iraq, the administration has managed to so strain the resources of our armed forces that the nation is unprepared to respond to a crisis anywhere else in the world.

I am amused at the media's lack of understanding of the Homeland Security alert structure. Just why is it so useless? Hurricanes have five categories of severity. The military has alert status structures for everything. It does just what it says: IT PUTS US ON ALERT! I haven't heard a better idea that would work for such a large population in the United States. You can't expect a system created a couple years ago to work perfectly from the get-go. The administration has also said repeatedly that they would take the advice of its military commanders with regard to troop numbers, and they have done so. Realize that much like throwing money into a social program, throwing soldiers into a battle does not necessarily equate to success. Nowhere have I seen anyone in the media analyze the drawbacks of adding more troops to a region, of which there are many. And when John Kerry and his media lap dogs cite General Eric Shinseki calling for more troops, they neglect to mention the other generals and admirals in the room recommending the other point of view.

Mr. Kerry has the capacity to do far, far better. He has a willingness - sorely missing in Washington these days - to reach across the aisle. We are relieved that he is a strong defender of civil rights, that he would remove unnecessary restrictions on stem cell research and that he understands the concept of separation of church and state. We appreciate his sensible plan to provide health coverage for most of the people who currently do without.

At this point, I want to smack this guy.

Mr. Kerry has an aggressive and in some cases innovative package of ideas about energy, aimed at addressing global warming and oil dependency. He is a longtime advocate of deficit reduction. In the Senate, he worked with John McCain in restoring relations between the United States and Vietnam, and led investigations of the way the international financial system has been gamed to permit the laundering of drug and terror money. He has always understood that America's appropriate role in world affairs is as leader of a willing community of nations, not in my-way-or-the-highway domination.

Thou shalt not take thy Senator John McCain's name in vain. And I would always support America's role in world affairs as a leader of a community of nations...the unfortunate fact is that they're not willing...they're petty. And if they don't take a tough stand against world terror, they're useless as a unified body.

We look back on the past four years with hearts nearly breaking, both for the lives unnecessarily lost and for the opportunities so casually wasted. Time and again, history invited George W. Bush to play a heroic role, and time and again he chose the wrong course. We believe that with John Kerry as president, the nation will do better.

Here we go again with liberals using military deaths as a political tool. Lives were not unnecessarily lost in Iraq. They were unnecessarily lost on 9/11. Those were the innocent. They were the people this nation has a duty to protect. That is what President Bush promised to do and is doing right now. No attempt to paint a falsely idyllic picture of what could be with John Kerry can change what the world is like today.

Voting for president is a leap of faith. A candidate can explain his positions in minute detail and wind up governing with a hostile Congress that refuses to let him deliver. A disaster can upend the best-laid plans. All citizens can do is mix guesswork and hope, examining what the candidates have done in the past, their apparent priorities and their general character. It's on those three grounds that we enthusiastically endorse John Kerry for president.

And it is on those same grounds that I enthusiastically crap on your choice.