Media and Anti-war crowd MIA on ‘Terror Tuesdays’

Weekly Example of Media Bias   —   Posted on June 13, 2012

(Adapted from DouglasErnstBlog.com post on June 6):
Remember all those anti-war rallies against President George W. Bush? He was accused of all sorts of things, from purposefully killing civilians to shredding the Constitution. There were full page ads taken out in major metropolitan newspapers bashing him, anti-war poetry readings on college campuses, Code Pink hysterics, and a whole slew of other events that usually involved bongo-drums.

Oh, how the times have changed. [The Daily mail reports]:

Drones strikes were first used by the Americans in 2004, but President George W. Bush was sparing with them. In five years, he authorized only 44 attacks. By the time Obama was into his third year in office, though, he had signed off on more than five times that number (emphasis added).

Suddenly Obama is being depicted as a steely-eyed purveyor of death. This image was reinforced by an exhaustive 6,000-word article in the New York Times, quoting senior White House officials.

The piece was clearly authorized by the White House in the hope of increasing his re-election chances.

Not only has Obama made Bush’s profligate spending look like child’s play, but now ‘W’ comes off like a novice at killing with drones, too!

Imagine what your nightly news coverage would look like if you replaced “Barack Obama” with “George W. Bush” in the following paragraph:

The New York Times has revealed that President Barack Obama hosts a “Terror Tuesday” secure PowerPoint-style teleconference attended weekly by his top 100 intelligence and security officials. After the meeting he goes through a “nominating process” by viewing the “baseball cards” showing suspected terrorists, before personally deciding who is to be assassinated by drones; he also, in some cases, explicitly approves killing the suspect’s family if it should be in the vicinity of the strike.

I can see it now – jokes on late night television where President Bush views baseball cards of terrorists and is mostly concerned about why there isn’t a stick of stale, pink bubble gum that comes with each set. Political cartoons would show the president laughing at “baseball cards” of the dead, bloated bodies of innocent civilians. Code Pink would hold rallies on Tuesday to bring attention to the “Terror” of it all.

But with Barack Obama in the White House … silence.

President Obama’s solution to Guantanamo Bay wasn’t to close down the prison, but to make sure no one else checked in … by killing a whole lot of people. And then he gets around having too many people complain about the drone strikes by … killing the extended family. But don’t ask Jimmy Fallon to ever mention that because he’s too busy yucking it up with the president during a late night “slow jammin’” of the news.

The anti-war movement has zero moral authority. Zero. They played politics with national security, just like Van Jones admits environmentalists played politics with the environment during the Gulf Oil spill.  [He said:]

“You’ve never seen the environmental movement more quiet during an oil spill. I guarantee you if John McCain had been president with oil spill or George Bush had been president with that oil spill, I would have been protesting. I didn’t because of who the president was.” (Van Jones).

Personally, I blame any innocent life lost in Pakistan on Pakistan. They claim to be a sovereign nation, but can’t control Islamic radicals within their own border. They claim to be an ally, but turned a blind eye to bin Laden for years (while taking billions of dollars in U.S. aid). They don’t want U.S. boots on the ground, but they’re unwilling to enter into their tribal areas in any meaningful way.

Regardless, the silence of the anti-war movement speaks volumes. They are a joke, and in many ways the president is a joke; he fed the flames as a candidate, and then when he walked into the White House and got the intelligence briefings he shut up with the anti-war platitudes – fast. National Security briefings tend to do that to a man.

The next time the anti-war movement comes out to play, which should be the moment a guy with an ‘R’ next to his name is elected, just laugh and tell them to go home. …

Now if you excuse me, I think I’ll read up on Bashar Assad. I won’t be asking Barbara Walters or her liberal reporter-friends what’s going on in Syria because I know she’s been too busy churning the Rolodex of nepotism for murderous regimes to tell anyone the truth.