Guilty (5 page)

“Mr. McCain has already vowed to ‘whip' Mr. Obama's ‘you-know-what' tonight. At the same time, watch to see if Mr. McCain raises the matter of Mr. Obama's past association with William Ayers, the former 1960s radical.”

“Watch for the degree to which Mr. McCain dials back his attacks, as he has on the campaign trail.”

“His behavior during the current crisis—from announcing a brief suspension of his campaign to offering a plan during the last debate for buying up bad mortgages—appeared to have the effect of undermining voter confidence and driving away independents.”

One would hope that professional journalists wouldn't typically reprint Democratic talking points as news. More often, what professional journalists do is manufacture their own mock outrages against Republicans and then hand-deliver the fake scandal to the Democrats, who act dutifully shocked.

According to his devoted media claque, Obambi was a victim of “guilt by association” whenever anyone mentioned his two-decade association with a racist preacher or his ties to an unrepentant domestic terrorist. Being offended by “guilt by association” was another new posture for liberals, who heretofore had specialized in making guilt-by-association charges.

Republican politicians who had given speeches to a conservative group, the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), were branded sympathizers of white supremacists because some of the directors of the CCC had, decades earlier, been leaders of a segregationist group, the Citizen Councils of America, which were founded in 1954. There is no evidence on its Web page that the modern incarnation of the CCC supports segregation, though its “Statement of Principles” offers that the organization opposes “forced integration” and “efforts to mix the races of mankind.” But mostly the principles refer to subjects such as a strong national defense, the right to keep and bear arms, the traditional family, and an “America First” trade policy.
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Apart from some aggressive reporting on black-on-white crimes— the very crimes that are aggressively hidden by the establishment media—there is little on the CCC website suggesting that the group is a “thinly veiled white supremacist” organization, as the
New York Times
calls it in one of its more charitable descriptions. At least the crimes reported on the CCC's Web page actually happened, as opposed
to the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's claim that the U.S. government invented AIDS to kill blacks.

Republicans Senator Trent Lott and Representative Bob Barr did nothing more than give speeches to the CCC, yet they were forever damned by their association with it. Neither man even belonged to the CCC, nor did they attend CCC meetings once a week for twenty years. They certainly didn't have their daughters baptized by CCC activists.

But according to the establishment media, Lott and Barr were fully responsible for the decades-old affiliations of some of the directors of a group … because they spoke at the CCC. As the media's hysteria about the CCC reached a fever pitch, a
Times
editorial howled about “fresh evidence of the persistence of racism” on the part of Lott based on his “links to the white separatist group called the Council of Conservative Citizens.” The
New York Times
was shocked by the group's “thinly veiled white supremacist agenda,” but was somewhat more accepting of the completely unveiled racism of Obama's preacher.
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One surmises that the CCC's thin veil of white supremacy would have become a bit thicker had Democratic congressman Dick Gephardt ever been a serious candidate for president. In the 1970s, he had spoken to a branch of the related, but more outré, Citizen Councils of America.
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That, and the fact that he's a preposterous boob, are probably the only two things that kept Dick Gephardt out of the White House.

After the initial flurry of articles, editorials, and news stories in the
Times
excitedly reporting that Barr had spoken to the CCC, Democratic representative Bob Wexler introduced a resolution in Congress for the sole purpose of denouncing the Council of Conservative Citizens.
⁴⁷
Other than the 9/11 terrorists, the CCC may be the only group ever singled out for denunciation in a congressional resolution. How about a resolution from Obama pom-pom girl Wexler on Obama's Trinity United Church of Christ?

When Barr later gave a speech on the House floor favorably citing President John F. Kennedy, Senator Ted Kennedy's son, Representative Patrick Kennedy, got in Barr's face, shouting, “How dare you! Anybody who has been to a racist group has no right invoking my
uncle's memory!”
⁴⁸
Liberals are now reserving the right to tell us which former presidents we can mention by name.

Barr had given a speech to a group that, even assuming everything that the Southern Poverty Law Center says about it is true, does not hold a candle to the racism of Obama's Trinity United Church of Christ. Obama was married by the Reverend Wright, his daughters were baptized by the Reverend Wright, Obama gave his second autobiography the title of one of the Reverend Wright's sermons. And yet after decades of majoring in Guilt by Association, liberals were indignant when an ad on cable television linked Obama and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr. The
Times
produced a blistering editorial decrying the “hate mongering” and calling the ads “the product of a radical fringe that has little regard for rational debate.”
⁴⁹

Liberals, who will attack with whatever is available because they have no principles, were also appalled by any attempt to link Obama to Bill Ayers. In an op-ed so clever she couldn't stand herself,
New York Times
columnist Gail Collins wrote that if Obama was responsible for Ayers's actions then she was responsible for the banking scandals of the eighties by virtue of the fact that savings-and-loan king Charles Keating had spoken at her high school thirty years earlier. Collins's satirical chain of causation did not, however, apply to Republicans speaking to a group containing members who had belonged to a segregationist group thirty years earlier, which, come to think of it, pretty much describes Collins's connection to the banking scandals.
⁵⁰

Can Trent Lott and Bob Barr get an apology now?

THE ESTABLISHMENT MEDIA's MOST COMICAL DOUBLE STANDARD appears in their treatment of gays. Liberals claim to love gays when it allows them to vent their spleen at Republicans. But disagree with liberals and their first response is to call you gay. Liberals are gays' biggest champions on issues most gays couldn't care less about, like gay marriage or taxpayer funding of photos of men with bullwhips up their derrieres. But who has done more to out, embarrass, and destroy the lives of gay men who prefer to keep their orientation private
than Democrats? Who is more intolerant of gays in the Republican Party than gays in the Democratic Party?

Speaking of very gay people, take
New York Times
columnist Frank Rich. In a blind rage at Karl Rove, Rich announced that Rove's late father was gay, citing a book by the Rove-obsessed authors of
Bush's Brain,
one a columnist for the
Huffington Post.

First, let's pause to appreciate the irony of being called gay by Frank Rich and a columnist on the
Huffington Post.
Here is a case study for the psychoanalysts. One of Rich's friends needs to take him aside and tell him to stop taking the lead on outing gays. Let someone else do it, Frank—you're not exactly the butchest guy on the planet. Meanwhile, the
Huffington Post
is made possible because such an un-calculating, simple person as Arianna Huffington acquired millions of dollars by marrying a very rich gay man.

These are the people Frank Rich cites in the Newspaper of Record to announce that Karl Rove's father was gay. Rich justifies his postmortem attack on Rove's father by accusing Rove of “dealing the gay card, dating back to the lesbian whispers that pursued Ann Richards.” This is like accusing Rove of being the guy who started the rumor that Jerry Nadler was fat.

The Richards rumor required no instigation from Rove. It grew out of Governor Richards's own peculiar habit of announcing the sexual preference of her political appointments:
And today, I announce Texas s first openly gay utility commissioner!
Gay encomiums coming out of the governor's office were so persistent that years later, at the opening of Houston's Museum of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender History, the exhibit included Governor Ann Richards's letter of commendation to a former Health Department caseworker, aka the drag queen “Lady Victoria Lust.”
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It's a weird thing with Democrats: They love telling complete strangers about their sexual proclivities—or even the sexual proclivities of people they know. At the 1996 Democratic National Convention, the Florida delegation decided to trumpet their diversity by enumerating the gay delegates, including one very much closeted gay man.
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Hey! Wait a minute!

Texans didn't care if government employees were gay, but they didn't need to know about every appointee's sexual preferences. Richards's insistence on telling them was a strange enough habit to ignite rumors without Rove's intervention. In any event, the only person ever to complain about Richards's constant gay alerts was a liberal Republican, state senator Bill Ratliff—as admitted by Rich's own source, the Rove-obsessed
Huffington Post
columnist.
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I realize that in the world of the Bush-haters, anything any Republican ever says must have come on direct orders from Karl Rove. But back in the Euclidian world, there's no evidence that Rove had anything to do with any rumors that Richards was gay. Frank Rich hates Rove, ergo he calls Rove's father gay.

There is nothing liberals love more than vicious gay-baiting, which they disguise as an attack on “hypocrisy.” They throw it out whenever a Republican is caught engaging in any sort of bad behavior, never bothering to check to see if any actual hypocrisy is involved.

When Senator Larry Craig pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct after he was accused of making a foot-tapping proposition to an undercover cop in a Minneapolis Airport bathroom, the media jeeringly gay-baited Craig for a week—and then accused Republicans of being homophobic for not insisting that Craig stay in office and run for reelection so their gay-baiting could continue unabated. Liberals accused Larry Craig of leading a double life, but they are the ones who constantly want to have it both ways. They wanted to be hysterical about Larry Craig—and hysterical about Republicans for not standing by Larry Craig. They wanted to gay-bait Republicans—and accuse Republicans of gay-baiting.

The
Washington Post
ran thirty items on Craig in the month after the story broke. The
New York Times
ran thirty-seven items—and then continued to provide
Times
readers with monthly
Larry Craig: Deviant
updates after that. In five separate columns, Frank Rich sneered about Craig—this from the newspaper that thinks we're wallowing in 9/11 anniversary coverage.