By Chad Groening and Jody Brown
A media watchdog group says the mainstream press is clearly trying to help the Democratic Party discredit the Bush Administration in its coverage of a controversy surrounding the president’s State of the Union address.
It is a controversy that the liberal media will not allow to go away. The White House has been in damage control ever since it was determined that a State of the Union statement about Iraqi efforts to buy African uranium was based on faulty information.
The president’s statement? “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” The government of Tony Blair still insists it has viable evidence for the claim, but the controversy over the 16-word statement continues to grow.
Tim Graham with the Media Research Center says the media is helping the Democrats play politics by focusing on this one line in the president’s speech.
According to Graham, the liberal media realizes the presidential campaign is just around the corner and that the Democrats do not want Bush to “just roll over” their party’s nominee by riding on the successes of Operation Iraqi Freedom. So the media, he says, is willing to do whatever the Democrats want them to do — which is anything that will make Bush politically unpopular.
Graham points out that even though the Clinton Administration lied numerous times concerning foreign policy, the media consistently left it alone, clearly demonstrating a double standard.
“Clinton people clearly did that over and over again,” Graham says. [In one case] they asked the Iranians to arm the Bosnian Muslims, against the United Nations’ arms embargo. They did that on the sly [and] lied about it, [but] nobody [in the media] cared because it was the Clinton years.”
Graham says if the press is now going to say that the president should never lie about a matter of foreign policy, they are going to have trouble “sticking up” for Bill Clinton.
Pro-family activist Gary Bauer calls the uproar a “tempest in a teapot” that is badly in need of a reality check.
“Members of Congress who claim they were deceived by the president’s speech to support the war should look at their calendars,” he says. “The congressional vote authorizing the use of force took place months before the speech.”
He also says the U.S. and its allies did the right thing by ousting Saddam Hussein from power. “If anyone doubts that, they should visit the mass graves we have discovered in Iraq,” he says.
Bauer says that during his 35 years in Washington, he has seen many so-called “scandals” start out small and then grow because the political risks were under-estimated. He recommends the White House go on the offensive as soon as possible to avoid that happening.
(This article courtesy of Agape Press).
