State-run AP claims “untruths” by conservatives cause cynicism.

It’s one of those stories that makes you do a double-take.  The AP, bastion of liberal ideas, had the audacity to claim that CPAC is a festival of lies and distortions.  Hey, AP… listened to an Obama speech recently?

by Michael Naragon

We all know now that the media establishment has an agenda and a slant.  But it still struck me that this story, an “analysis” of the CPAC convention, was on my AP list today.

“Untruths have consequences,” the title of the story begins, a statement that could have been used to describe the first year of the Obama administration, the Democratic plummet in the polls, or the elections in New Jersey, Virginia, or Massachusetts.  Sadly, though, the author, Ron Fournier, uses his platform to discuss the “distortions” of conservative leaders, lamenting the fact that the conservative request for government to hold to the Founding Principles and stick to the job for which it was created seems to somehow create a cynicism about government.

Conservatives leapt to their feet when Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney declared Democrats the party of “No!” — no to balanced budgets, limits on lawsuits, tax cuts and tough interrogations of terror suspects.

But their applause this week at the Conservative Political Action Conference was for an illusion. Romney’s assertions lacked context at best and at worst were flat-out wrong.

All right, Mr. Fournier, let’s hear your case as to how Romney, of whom I am not a big fan, lied to the CPAC audience.  Wait for it… wait for it…

And so it’s worth noting when Romney, the former Massachusetts governor positioning himself for the 2012 presidential race, tells the CPAC crowd that Democrats are opposed to tax cuts.

He conveniently left out the fact that the stimulus bill backed by President Barack Obama and approved by the Democratic-led Congress included $288 billion in tax benefits, including refundable credits of $400 for individuals and $800 for families in 2009 and 2010 covering about 95 percent of taxpayers.

Notice the distortion perpetuated by Fournier of the State-run AP: “tax cuts” are not the same thing as “tax benefits” or “tax credits.”  In fact, his explanation sounds eerily similar to an Obama campaign speech.  Coincidence?  I think not.  Mr. Fournier, allow me to explain the difference.  Tax “cuts” are cuts in taxes.  Percentage cuts.  Removal of certain taxes.  For example, when Ronald Reagan cut taxes, he dropped the threshholds of those paying taxes, allowing more citizens to keep their own money.  Money that they would have paid.  To the government.  Understand?  Tax “credits” are liberal code speak for “money to our constituents.”  Those who haven’t paid in.  At all.  Got it?  This is why a tax “cut” can help Americans in a much more substantive way than a tax “credit,” which predominantly goes to one segment of society.  A tax “cut” won’t provide a “refund” for a person who paid nothing in taxes in the first place.  A “credit” usually does just that.

In addition, a tax cut keeps me from paying so much to the government in the first place.  With a tax “credit” or tax “benefit” or other euphemism, if I’ve paid into the system, the government is allowing me–in its graciousness–to have a little of that money back that they’ve gotten from me.  They’ve used it for a year, and then let me have a pittance back.  Not exactly the same as the elimination of, say, the estate tax.  Ok, school’s out for the moment.  Back to the insanity.

Democrats are against balanced budgets? You might chalk that up to harmless hyperbole except for important facts that Romney overlooked: A Democratic president, Bill Clinton, oversaw surpluses and the nation’s debt skyrocketed under President Bush, a conservative Republican.

Really?  You’re going to use Clinton?  Ok, let’s go.  Who sent the balanced budget to him to sign, creating the illusionary surpluses?  The Democrats?  I believe that the Republicans… yes, that’s right, the Republicans who won the majority in Congress in 1994 were the ones who pushed for a balanced budget.  Clinton used their work to his own advantage because he was a bright politician.  It’s yet to be seen, Mr. Fournier, if your Messiah is as apt, or if the Republicans can repeat their feat in 2010.  But to chalk up the fiscal responsibility, if you can call it that, of the mid-1990s to Clinton is laughable.  Remember Hillary-care?  Guess not.

Bush did see an increase in the debt and deficit.  I wasn’t thrilled with that either.  But why would Mr. Fournier criticize Romney’s “untruths” and not focus in on Obama’s new-found desire to cut spending and work toward fiscal prudence after he pushed the largest deficits in U.S. history after one short year?  Is it a distortion that Obama and his super-majority Congress has spent more in his first year than Bush in his eight?

In these hyper-partisan times, it’s rarely good enough to respond to an unfair attack with a factual argument. Fire is fought with more high heat. And so it was this week, when liberal bloggers reacted to the CPAC distortions with false attacks of their own. On the Daily Kos Web site, one blogger noted the standing ovation given to “the self-confessed war criminal Dick Cheney.”

Whatever one might think of Cheney’s interrogation policies, the former vice president has never been charged with a war crime, much less confessed to one.

In his summary, Fournier discussed this “false attack” on former vice president Dick Cheney.  Wow, thanks for standing up to the Daily Kos, Ron.  (Incidentally, notice that Fournier doesn’t say that Cheney isn’t a war criminal.  Just that he hasn’t been charged and hasn’t admitted to it.)  Where were you when U.S. congressmen were claiming our servicemen in Iraq were raping and pillaging the land, killing as many unarmed civilians as possible?  Oh wait… wasn’t one of those guys… let me think.  That’s right, his name was Barry Something-or-other.  And wasn’t CBS guilty of outright lies about President Bush days before the 2004 election?  Written anything recently on the “jobs created or saved” notion?  Or do you just save your “untruth” radar for CPAC?  Don’t bother answering.  We know.

“Obstructionist” Republican cultists thwarting the Will of Obama?

In a scathing op-ed in The New York Times on May 1, Bob Herbert describes everything wrong with the Republican party.  Inadvertently, he touched on what’s exactly right.

by Michael Naragon

“The incredibly clueless stewards of the incredibly shrinking Republican Party” are missing the boat, claims Herbert.

In response to the growing economic crisis that is affecting the entire world economy, the Republican strategy, according to the Times columnist, is “to build a wall of obstruction in front of efforts to get the economy moving again, and then to stand in front of that wall chanting gibberish about smaller government, lower taxes, spending cuts and Ronald Reagan.”

Gibberish about spending cuts?  While we run a $1.84 trillion deficit?  If I may interpret his words even more clearly:  “Step away from the Constitution, conservatives, and allow Obama to work his magical illusions.”

“Even in the face of a national economic nightmare,” Herbert preaches,  “the [Republican] party is offering nothing in the way of policies or new ideas that might give a bit of hope or comfort to families wrestling with joblessness, housing foreclosures and bankruptcies.”  The new ideas he approves are, presumably, the record deficit spending of the Obama administration and the subsequent stagflation and economic weakening that will result.  But at least the idea is new.

Well, at least it hasn’t been tried since 1976.

As he lambastes Republicans about every shortcoming imaginable (conveniently omitting the fact that Democrats controlled Congress for the closing years of the Bush administration), he touches on some truth.  Any political weakness the Republican party has at the moment is of their own making.  The Republican-controlled Congress of the early Bush years showed themselves to be as apt to spend money America doesn’t have as the liberals who have made a career out of it.

However, while Herbert uses the Specter defection and the infighting among Republicans, including the much-publicized “feud” between Dick Cheney and Colin Powell, as evidence that the party is fading into obscurity, I see it as exactly the opposite.

The reason the Republican party has been marginalized by the voting public is because it is no longer a party of truth.  “It’s a party that doesn’t seem to care about anything other than devotion to a set of so-called principles that never amounted to more than cult-like rhetoric,” claims Herbert.

What the columnist describes as so-called cultish principles, I call the Constitution of the United States.  Herbert’s flippant attitude toward the rules upon which our country is based is indicative of the attitude most liberals share concerning that hallowed document: it’s a decent guide for governing, but it’s outworn its usefulness.  Why would he have any interest in belonging to a cult of the Constitution when he can belong to the cult of a radical leftist president who, Pied Piper-like, leads us to economic destruction?

This is why the Republican transformation going on at the moment is such a vital step in the G.O.P. becoming viable again.  I am not a Republican.  I am a conservative, clinging to my “so-called principles” of life, liberty, and the freedom from government interference in pursuing my path in life.  These are not platitudes.

Perhaps liberals, whose loyalties and ideals are based on emotions that are ever-changing, don’t understand what true reasoned principles are.  Perhaps Herbert fears what he does not understand.  Perhaps Republicans should have no concern for what the enemy is telling them to do to right the ship.

Liberals like Herbert and Clinton attack dog James Carville have plenty of advice for the Republicans these days.  I am a high school basketball coach.  If I was involved in a close game with our rival with the clock running down in the fourth quarter, I would not call time out and ask the opposing coach to come over to advise my players.  I know what works, and I would give them the gameplan.

Republicans should have absolutely no interest in the words of Carville, et al.  If they truly believed the conservative movement was dead, they would waste little time attacking it ceaselessly and advising Republicans on how to rebuild their party.  Instead, they would limit themselves to singing the choral praises of their Savior as He breaks bread with our enemies and surrenders our sovereignty.

But they are attacking the Republican party and the conservative principles it is returning to on a daily basis.  Conservatism is not about obstruction, and it is not indecision to attempt to keep the United States from plunging down a path toward certain economic ruin.

Herbert concludes the piece by saying that the Republican party “will have to stop fooling itself and re-engage with the real world.”  He’s almost right.

I believe Republicans have ceased being fooled by so-called Reagan conservatives like Specter, Snow, and McCain.  And the goal of conservatives should be engagement–not by pitching a tent bereft of principle in order to catch “moderates” within its shadow, and not by listening to the people in order to find answers, as Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, and others did last week.

Engagement with the American people requires teaching.  Teaching those indoctrinated by government schools that capitalism works, despite the excesses of a fractional percentage of the business world.  Teaching that government rarely works, despite the cheerleading of a willing media that now more closely resembles Pravda and Tass than the organizations to which Ernie Pyle and Walter Cronkite belonged.  Teaching that spending money we won’t have for generations in order to gain a few jobs and a few votes does the country nothing but ill.

If this sort of teaching is obstructionist, then I hope more than a few conservatives will help me to form a massive impediment to the Marxism that pervades our government.  Together, we can show the American people how the basic principles of the conservative movement–Constitutional government, true fiscal responsibility, and strong defense against our enemies–are not empty words, but ways to reestablish the United States as the greatest country on earth.

Bob Herbert’s full column can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/02/opinion/02herbert.html

Is America now the “evil empire”? Hardly.

The Obama administration takes another stab at George W. Bush, and our national security bleeds for it.

by Michael Naragon

On April 10, 1942, a large contingent of American and Filipino soldiers surrended to the Japanese, ending the battle for the Philippines.  Their general had vowed to return, but his men were unable to make such dramatic promises.  The Japanese ordered the nearly 75,000 prisoners to march from Mariveles to Camp O’Donnell sixty miles away.

Along the way, the prisoners were forced to endure various forms of physical and psychological torture.  Survivors recall that those who stopped for any reason were immediately bayoneted.  At several points along the way, the soldiers were forced to endure the hot conditions as the Japanese forced them to sit in the sun without helmets.  Those who dared ask for water were executed.

Of the 75,000 who left for Camp O’Donnell, only 54,000 reached their destination.  More died in the brutal conditions in the camp.

Nearly 30 years later, the North Vietnamese made their attempt to rival the Japanese in terms of brutality.  On August 26, 1967, Major George Day’s F-100 was shot down over the North, and he was captured.  For two days, he was hung upside down with ropes and beaten severely.

Day managed a miraculous escape and came within two miles of freedom when he was recaptured by the Viet Cong and returned to a prison camp.  Although he had been shot twice during his second capture, Day was refused medical treatment, and his wounds became infected.  Maj. Day spent over five years in North Vietnamese prisons and was continually beaten and tortured.

Many of the prisoners in Vietnamese camps were not asked for information.  Their captors simply wanted them to make disparaging remarks about the United States that could later be used for propaganda.

Fast-forward to 2009.  The Obama administration, likely under pressure from leftist groups such as MoveOn.org, has released memos from the previous administration describing our “torture” of captured enemy combatants.  The media, as expected, has gleefully pounced on the possibility that George W. Bush and his staff could be prosecuted for their actions.

Two questions are left, as yet, unanswered by Obama and his staff, however.  First, were the CIA’s actions torture?  Also, what are the long-term implications of this play for short-term political gains?

Torture?

According to published reports, members of al-Qaida captured by the United States were subjected to waterboarding on numerous occasions from 2002 to 2005.  In a story by the AP released late Wednesday, then-National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice authorized the waterboarding of al-Qaida operative Abu Zubaydah, who underwent the process over 80 times.

The media has commonly referred to the process as torture.  The information obtained from the waterboarding of Khalid Sheik Mohammed was called by The Los Angeles Times “Exhibit A in the case for torture.”

In the memos distributed by the Obama administration, al-Qaida operatives reportedly underwent other interrogation techniques such as sleep deprivation and psychological abuse.

Is it torture?  The word is rife with connotation, but in terms of world history, the “torture” undergone by the terrorists was minimal.  There were no fingernails removed, no roping, no broken bones.  Each of the CIA and military operatives who performed the interrogations had undergone SERE training, a military program which taught students to Survive, Evade, Resist, and Escape.

As part of their training, each of the men underwent waterboarding, isolation in a “hot box,” and other interrogation techniques to prepare them for potential capture situations.  A comparison can be made to police officers being made to sustain a taser before using one in the line of duty.

Did the military then “torture” its own men?  The agents who performed these interrogations knew the limits of the men they questioned, and the prisoners sustained no permanent injury.

And, unlike the torture endured by prisoners of war in Japanese and Vietnamese prison camps or the terrors brought upon prisoners of al-Qaida, the interrogations of the CIA had purpose.  A Justice Department report classified in 2005 described that Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, gave up several key items of information during the interrogation process.

One of these pieces of information involved a plot by terrorists in the United States to carry out a Sept. 11-style attack on buildings in Los Angeles.  Are the thousands who may have been saved by the “torture” willing to step forward and condemn it?  Would their families be willing to do so?

Implications?

The Obama administration obviously released the “torture” memos for political gain.  As of Wednesday, administration officials had not qualitatively denied this.  But what will Obama’s attack on the previous administration cost the United States?

Nations and groups who hate the United States now have ammunition for various attacks against America.  Obama’s tour of the world, in which he gave a fist-bump to Communist dictator Hugo Chavez and listened to Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega berate the United States, has continued a pattern of weakness shown by the administration.

Our enemies, and potential enemies, are beginning to see that our leadership is less interested in protection and defense than they are in apology and embarassment over previous administration policies.  In a world climate unlike any seen in history, where small unstable dictatorships such as Iran and North Korea can possess nuclear weapons and potentially blackmail the world, the president seems to be bent on a mission to make the United States seem as harmless as possible.

This weakness, whether perceived or real, combines poorly with the fact the the U.S. military is being weakened from within.  Budget cuts of major programs such as the F-22 and outsourcing of materials for programs like the F-35 could have dire consequences for the future.  In fact, in a report released Tuesday by The Wall Street Journal, information on the F-35 was hacked by foreign intruders, compromising the security of the entire weapons system.

Could our enemies use the “torture” memos to prosecute the United States for war crimes?  With the current state of the global society, it seems possible.  Other nations, jealous of U.S. prosperity, would like nothing better than to embarass or, better yet, force our nation to pay reparations to affected countries.

As our president continues to search for those needing heartfelt apologies for a nation he apparently does not endorse, who will fill the role of superpower that we seem determined to reject?  More importantly, can our national ship be turned aright before irreparable damage is done?