Pete The Elder

I am kind of surprised that you pulled the liberal bias card Peter. Who are the liberal news outlets? Maybe some local news channels and several major newspapers, but for every liberal newspaper there is a conservative one as well. Major cable news? Fox and MS/CNBC are clearly conservative and it looks like CNN is going that way. I guess PBS may lean a little left, but they really try to offer fairness to both sides.

And I think that is a completely unfair generalization about Democrats (I'm not a Democrat). Conservative media rarely offers opposing viewpoints and plays directly to emotion instead of accurate description. The few really liberal media do the same. AirAmerica is guilty of that, but pointing the finger at Democrats is the pot calling the kettle black.

Sorry Jeff, but the media is overwhelmingly liberal. From the fake Dan Rather National Guard memos on 60 minutes to the vast disparity in critical stories of George W. Bush to positive stories on John Kerry during the last election the Mainstream Media shows a consistent liberal bias. The vast majority of reporters for major news organizations self identify as liberals, with polls of the Washington press core going about 90% Democrat voters.

CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The LA Times, Newsweek, Time, and US News & World Report (to name just the biggest ones) all consistently favor liberal agendas in both the stories they chose to cover and how they cover them.

Conservatives have Fox News, The Washington Times, The Editorial Pages (but not the news pages) of the Wall Street Journal, and the alternative media institutions like talk radio and conservative web sites and magazines like National Review. If you haven't read Bias by Bernard Goldberg I suggest you do. Goldberg accurately describes the culture at CBS News where he was demonized after pointing out flaws in a report they did on the flat tax where the tax was repeatedly made fun of and no effort was made to defend it, even though several Nobel prize winning economist are in favor of it. No liberal ideas received similar treatment. It was this same culture at CBS that led to the assumption that documents from a person with a history of confinement to mental institutions and no way to access the originals somehow had proof that Bush had avoided service.

I think the treatment of Bush and Kerry's service records is a prime example of media bias. Bush never made a big deal of his service records and no actual proof has ever been found that he used any influence to get in or that he ever failed to live up to his duty. Yet the media has been relentless in its coverage of his service, even going so far as CBS to cite crudely forged documents from a single, extremely questionable source, and then lie about what their own experts said. If you know of a mainstream media crusade against a similar liberal figure I would like to hear about it.

Meanwhile, Kerry has always made his service the central theme to his political career from his winter soldier testimony before congress to his salute at the democratic convention. Kerry's own description of his service was full of impossibilities, like the contractions in his various Cambodia stories, yet these were never investigated by shows like 60 Minutes or institution like the New York Times to the degree Bush's past was.

"Conservative media rarely offers opposing viewpoints' Have you ever actually watched Fox news? It has far more liberals on its shows than any of other networks have conservatives. Have you ever listened to conservative talk radio? Pretty much every talk show I have listened to from Limbaugh to Medved to Hewitt rush liberals to the front of the caller line when they call in. I know Medved reserves at least an hour of his show each week for liberals to come on and argue with him, while Hewitt has made inviting prominent liberals onto his show so he can debate them a consistent part of his show. We do not get Air America here so I cannot compair them, but I used to listen to NPR regularly and they consistently had far more liberals on than conservatives and tended to focus on more liberal cultural issues as well. Conservatives in the US thrive in debate because they have been forced to do so to get their voices heard in instutions like the media and academia, which take liberal views for granted. I actually think this has helped conservatives because they have been forced to defend their views far more often than liberals. Todays conservatives also are more willing to argue with each other than liberals do with each other, which is why today's conservatives tend to come up with more ideas and have a more concrete vision.

By the way, I have no problem with bias in the media either way as long as the media is honest about where they are coming from. This is one of the rare areas where the European media is better off than ours is because they do not pretend to be objective. I include Fox News in this as well and wish they (along with all of their liberal competition) would come out and say they were biased, although Fox is probably more balanced than most of their competition. The media should not lie and when they claim to be objective, when they are so clearly not, they are lying.

Also, it is Democrats who are trying to reintroduce the fairness doctrine, not Republicans, Louise Slaughter is a Democrat in congress and her exact words were "Fairness isn't going to hurt anyone" and she said conservative radio and cable shows are "a waste of good broadcast time, and a waste of our airwaves." Congressman Slaughter thinks I am too stupid to make up my own mind about what to watch or else I do not have the right to make up my own mind and she is actively trying to prevent conservatives voices being heard through government edict. And she has many Democrats actively campaigning for her bill. Here is her website if you do not believe me. This is an entirely fair generalization about Democrats. I did not say all Democrats or even most Democrats. If you know any Republican politicians who are trying to reinstate the fairness doctrine let me know and I will righteously bash them as well for trampling on the media's right to say what it wants. Except for the terrible McCain-Feingold Bill, Bush and most other major Republicans of recent years have been pretty good about letting people say what they want to say.

I regularly watch FoxNews and even listen to Rush Limbaugh. Who are the liberals on FoxNews? Alan Colmes? Barely. He makes a tiny little jab of a defense every once in a while by claiming that he is liberal, but rarely shows any backbone in the 30 seconds they give him. Brit Hume? Gibson? Coulter? O'Reilly? Where are the liberals? Conservatives bring liberals onto their talks show so they can turn their mike off, misquote them, and then call them a kook. That is neither fair nor balanced. Rush does this every day. It makes me sick because they give Democrats a hard time about the same crap they were doing during Clinton's presidency.

If CBS, NBC and ABC are so liberal, why do studies regularly show that there is a 3:1 Conservative:Progressive guest ratio. Shows like Meet the Press always have significant guests from both sides of the aisle. Is that biased? Maybe their news is more biased, but that is really only the 30 minute national news shows since most of their coverage is local news broadcasts, which we all know is more infotainment than anything. And as far as NPR goes, I would consider them closer to unbiased than FoxNews any day.

There wasn't enough attacks against Kerry's records? What about the Swiftboat people that were making shit up during the campaign? I would argue that half of that was Kerry's fault for being a dumbass and not standing up for himself, but I think both of their lackluster records were pretty well hit in the last couple of years.

Here's another thought. Maybe there are more negative stories about Bush because he does more negative things. Clearly his popularity is dropping. He started his presidency after a questionable election, brought us into a quagmire of a war using false reports (which is worse - lying about the President's questionable military record or lying to get into a war that has killed thousands of our troops and tens of thousands of Iraqis?), has staff member who gets indicted for leaking the identity of a CIA agent because her husband revealed the lies about getting into the war, is facing hearings about secretly wiretapping U.S. citizens, and whose administration is being lambasted for basically screwing thousands of people after Hurrican Katrina. What has he done that was good? Every news channel ran the pictures of Sadaam's statue falling a million times, they carried his little "Mission Accomplished" event on the boat, but what else does he have to speak about? The No Child Left Behind that he doesn't fund? His new Medicare program that is failing? This incredible democracy in Iraq? News services can't ignore his many mistakes. They certainly didn't ignore Monica Lewinsky.

Finally, if you noticed I never commented about the Fairness Doctrine because I think it is a load of crap. If Slaughter really said that, and I believe you that she did, then she is a complete retard because that sounds like Stalin's media policy. However, if what you say is true about liberal bias, wouldn't the Fairness Doctrine actually help conservatives?

In the end, though, I agree that media outlets that do not hide their bias are much better. Trust me, AirAmerica is way left and they don't hide it. I'll stick to my past comparison of conservatives and liberals. Conservatives generally base their arguments on misquoted or made-up facts while liberals base their arguments on information that they "think they heard some guy say this one time."

This is fun. We need to do this in person after some drinks at my reception while we both look important in our tuxedos.

I also think its funny, although a bit condescending, that you always start your big counter-arguments by using my name. I'm not as immature and under-read as I was during high school. OK, maybe I'm still a little immature.

"If CBS, NBC and ABC are so liberal, why do studies regularly show that there is a 3:1 Conservative:Progressive guest ratio" Which studies?

"There wasn't enough attacks against Kerry's records? What about the Swiftboat people that were making shit up during the campaign?" I think you just proved my point there. The swift boat people are not a newspaper or tv network, yet the only way we found out problems in kerry's record in that area is because they stepped forward. Again why didn't 60 Minutes investigate Kerry's stories about running guns to the Khmer Rogue or spending Chirstmas in Cambodia under Nixon's orders with the same zeal they used against Bush who, unlike Kerry, never made his military service his main qualification for office. (When Kerry was in Vietnam LBJ was president, on Christmas Kerry's own diary says he was 50 miles away, and the Khmer Rogue barely existed and were fighting on the side with the communists.) If Bush's record in these area was relavent news, then why wasn't Kerry's which was full of obvious falsehoods and more importantly was central to his campaign?

"which is worse - lying about the President's questionable military record or lying to get into a war that has killed thousands of our troops and tens of thousands of Iraqis?" Lying about war would be wrose, but there is no evidence Bush ever lied while their is plenty of evidence that Kerry lied. It diminishes your argument greatly to claim Bush lied. Lying means saying something that you know to be false. The "Bush Lied" argument has caused me lose a lot of respect for the wars critics. The most reasonable posibilities are first that Bush made an honest mistake based on the overwhelming intelligence available to him and the rest of the world's leaders at the time and Saddams repeated use of (and claims to still have) WMD. The second posibility is that Saddam moved the WMD to Syria shortly before the invasion, which is what some of Saddam's former officials like General Sada claim. If the second is true, does that make you a liar for falsely claiming that the WMD were never there? I think it would mean that you were mistaken and were using what you thought was the best available information at the time, but it would not make you a liar.

"has staff member who gets indicted for leaking the identity of a CIA agent because her husband revealed the lies about getting into the war"
Uh, Libby was indicted for perjury not for leaking anything. Also Joeseph Wilson was the liar in this case because (contrary to what his original column said) his investigation did in fact show that Saddam tried to purchase Uranium from Niger. That is why the Kerry campaign dropped him once they figured out he had lied. Also British inteliigence still stands by its claim that Saddam tried to buy Uranium from Africa (which is all Bush said in his state of the union to begin with).

"What has he done that was good?" Lets see there is the booming economy (with unemployment below a 5%, low inflation, and low interest rates), the liberation of Afganistan and creation of a free society there, the libartion of Iraq from a tyrant that was defying the international community (I would say that the Democracy in Iraq is pretty incedible), reforming our intelligence serivces, attempting to reform the UN, and appointing judges who respect the rule of law to the supreme court for starters. By the way do you honestly think Iraq would be better off under Saddam? Do you think we would be more secure? Do you see anything to celebrate in that Iraqis now have a chance to live free lives and that Saddam is no longer threatening anyone or supporting terrorism? Do you think setting up a democracy in a sea of tyrannies will have any beneficial effects on the neighboring regimes?

I would suggest that you reconsider your arguments because they are why the Republicans will keep winning. If you can not see any good that Bush has done, then you are letting partisan hatred get in the way of an honest assessment of his presidency and why about half the country thinks he is doing a good job and will not trust liberals in areas of national defense. I really did not like Clinton, but I can admit the economy was decent under him and there were major laws like NAFTA that he supported which were good and that he sometimes made the right choices in foreign policy like in Bosnia. I am also willing to admit when I do not like what Bush has done, for instance although I agree with some of the goals of No Child Left Behind, I think the federal government can not do a good job regulating education and should leave it up to the states and should not even be funding education. I disagreed with him nominating Harriet Miers because she wasn't good enough for the job. I think his immigration policy is a joke and that his medicare entitlement will only lead to more long term fiscal probelms. But on the biggest issues of how to react to a world that is full of evil men trying to destroy our way of life and spread tyranny through out the world, Bush has done an excellent and courageous job and takes these issues far, far more seriously than do the vast majority of his critics.

Here's a study: http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1187. I already know what you are going to say about FAIR, but they regularly attack NPR, the NY Times and the Washington Post. Here is a quote from that report:

"FAIR’s original 2001 study of Special Report (Extra! , 7–8/01) included a comparison to CNN ’s Wolf Blitzer Reports —which favored Republicans 57 to 43 percent. And a 2002 FAIR study of the three major networks’ nightly news broadcasts (Extra! , 5–6/02) found an even greater imbalance than on CNN : Of partisan sources, 75 percent were Republican and only 24 percent Democrats. The differences among the networks were negligible; CBS had the most Republicans (76 percent) while ABC had the fewest (73 percent)."

About the whole Kerry's record vs. Bush's record. There is, of course, going to be more criticism of Bush's record since he was the president at the time. Why didn't people examine Kerry's record more? Good question. I don't know. However, if there was such a huge issue with Kerry's record, why didn't Fox or Rush or somebody jump on it right away either.

Bush Lying. How about the Downing Street Memo? Isn't that pretty good evidence? Look, just because the lie didn't come from his mouth doesn't mean he wasn't part of the lie. He is the Chief executive and is ultimately responsible for not only his actions, but the actions of those under him who act on his behalf and under his orders. Its not like Bush never lies. He is being caught in lying about his connection to Abramoff. There are pics to prove it. That is one of my main criticisms of Conservatives - no matter how much they get caught in a lie, they find a way to spin it.

Our strong economy? Yeah, it looks good when you only consider straight employment figures, but what about the deficit? That economy is going to look like crap when we have to make cuts to make up for Bush's "strong economy" and his war. Add to that the increasing gap between rich and poor that I mentioned on my blog a few weeks ago and that strong economy only looks strong to the people at the top.

Great job overthrowing Sadaam. Now what? I have an idea...let's leave billions of dollars unaccounted for, make Iraq the main destination for

Did you really give him credit for appointing judges? Did you forget that when you mentioned Harriet Myers later? Plus, if Bozo the Clown was president when one judge retired and one died he could have appointed two judges. How is that an accomplishment?

Yes, there are bad people all over the world trying to hurt us, but why? Bush has not done much to stop people from hating us. I don't think we are any safer now than before Bush. Now it is just more public knowledge so we can spend hundreds of billions to send our people to Iraq to attract terrorists there. What is the major difference between pre and post Sadaam Iraq? Voting is about it. They still die by the hundreds and now they don't have services like electricity and water. Now instead of being killed by Sadaam they are killed by us or by insurgents.

Don't get me started on NCLB or the immigration policy. Immigration is the one issue where I go way right.