All,
Auto Rail might be someplace you want to avoid if you are shipping a car from Canada to Florida. Please read the following letter I sent to them recently.
Dear Mr. Giovanetti;
I am writing to bring something to your attention. I hope that you can change a bad impression I have acquired after contracting with Auto Rail.
In late July and early August, after visiting your office and meeting you and others regarding shipping my car to Florida from Bedford, I chose to use Auto Rail to ship my 2001 Ford Taurus to Tampa Florida. The information I was given was that it would take approximately 8 to 12 days to complete the move.
I turned my car over to your office on August 25th. At that time I was told the car would probably be picked up by a driver later in the week.
On August 29th, I called to see how the transfer was going. I was told my car would be moving across the border on September 2nd.
I was scheduled to leave Canada on September 2nd and had hoped to still be in Canada and able to contact the U.S. Customs office at the border, in case there were difficulties.
I left Canada by plane, somewhat confident that my car would be moving across the border at about the same time I was.
I called about September 4th to see if the move across the border had gone well, and to find out where the car was along the route to Florida. The person I spoke to said “I have no idea” when I asked where my car was. I asked if there was someone who might “have an idea” that I could speak to. I was placed on hold for a time. When they returned to the phone, it was explained to me that “the dispatcher was not answering the phone” and they had left a message for him. They further said that when the dispatcher called back and they found out anything they would call me back. I was not called back.
The next day I called again to inquire as to the location of my car. I spoke to a different lady who was willing to help. She said she would check on my car and call me back. Four hours later, after no call back, I called again to see if anything had been discovered. The same lady who answered previously told me the phones had been shut down and she was unable to call anyone. She was behind on all of her work but would try to find out something. If she found out anything she would call me back. Again, I was not called back.
On September 8th, I believe, I called again to check on the whereabouts of my car. I was starting to wonder if perhaps it had been stolen. I was told the car was still somewhere in New Brunswick waiting for a few more cars to make a bigger load. They weren’t sure what day it would be crossing the border.
During the week of the September 8th, I was moving my belongings into my new address in Florida and so let the week go by without calling your office.
Around September 12th, a message was left for me from a lady in your office saying that your office had no valid delivery address in Florida. I had left a map and address as well as names and phone numbers when I left the car at your office two weeks prior. I immediately called your office to inform the person of the correct delivery address. I reminded them of the map I had provided. They remembered there was a map in the file and apologized.
On September 15th, I believe, I called to check once more to on the car. GOOD NEWS! The car had crossed the border without any Customs difficulties and was now in Massachusetts. The lady I spoke to told me my car would be in Tampa by the end of the week! This was certainly good news.
I contacted the Ford dealership in Brandon, Florida to advise them to be on the lookout for my car, which should be arriving before the end of the week. They were happy to help me and said they would call me when it arrived
On Friday, September 19th, after not hearing from Auto Rail or Brandon Ford, I called your office to check once again. I was told my car was now in New Jersey. I was momentarily speechless. New Jersey? I asked. “I know” was the reply.
On Tuesday, September 23rd I called Auto Rail and was told my car would definitely be in Tampa on Wednesday or Thursday of the same week.
On Friday September 26th, I was called by Brandon Ford and told my car had arrived the night before. I went and claimed my car. I was not called by your office.
I found the car to be in good condition except for some personal trash left inside by whoever had driven it during the transfer.
It was apparent, by the empty manila envelope I found in the car, that the release by U.S. Customs was gained by utilizing the duplicate documentation I had placed in the car. I had done this in case the originals documents I had given your office were lost or not available.
I had been assured by your agents that the originals documents for release, which I had provided your office, would be attached to the waybill and would definitely be given to U.S. Customs when the car crossed the border.
Fortunately for me, these were the documents that were used for entry and release purposes.
In all, the car took 31 days to travel 3,258 kms. That translates to an average speed of about four and a half kilometers and hour. That is about the same speed of a person walking.
I believe you would agree that what I experienced, during the time my car was in transit, was extraordinary. I would hope it was also unprecedented.
I had given a great deal of money to Auto Rail to move my car, in a timely manner, to Florida. The move was certainly not done in a timely manner. I spent a great deal more money because I was without the use of my car.
In consideration of all the aforementioned, I believe it reasonable to ask you for a partial refund of the contract price; twenty five per cent is the amount I am asking to be refunded.
I look forward to your response.
Sincerely,
Thomas W. Scott
His Reply to me;
Subject: Re: Problems with my car transfer to Florida
HiDebbie in our claims dept will review.TksGerryCc. Chrissy
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device.
I waited a month and got no answer. I sent another message...
Gerry,
It has been another month.
Can you please tell me what the status of the review is?
TW Scott
His answer and then mine....
Subject: Re: Problems with my car transfer to Florida
No statusThere is no opportunity for a claim..Sorry
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device
I was hoping it would not come to that, but I imagined it would. Why would you want to do the right thing if it costs you money, right?
I'll be sure to recommend your company to all my associates who have time and money to burn.
Thomas Scott
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
New Big Bopper?
Just a short note;
Is it just me or does anyone else get the urge to say "SHAMA-LAMMA-DING-DONG" every time the name OBAMA is spoken?
Is it just me or does anyone else get the urge to say "SHAMA-LAMMA-DING-DONG" every time the name OBAMA is spoken?
Thursday, June 05, 2008
God Bless our World War Veterans
I used to live in Charlotte, North Carolina. I worked at the Charlotte airport with a man named Paul Joseph Manley Sr. He was a United States Marine who served in World War Two and was on Iwo Jima. He stayed in the Marines after that war and later saw service in the Korean War as well as Viet Nam.
Every time I saw him I shook his hand.
Every time.
Every time YOU see him, you should do the same. How do you express your gratitude for a lifetime of service to our country? Somebody tried to say thanks and made a song of it "Before You Go" on YouTube; here is a link.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A393E3wF-o
Go and watch, then find a World War Veteran and thank them for their service, they won't be around much longer. They need to hear it now.
Every time I saw him I shook his hand.
Every time.
Every time YOU see him, you should do the same. How do you express your gratitude for a lifetime of service to our country? Somebody tried to say thanks and made a song of it "Before You Go" on YouTube; here is a link.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A393E3wF-o
Go and watch, then find a World War Veteran and thank them for their service, they won't be around much longer. They need to hear it now.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Obama Wins in South Carolina. Another Victory for Racial Harmony or Not?
I just read a Washington Post story that said nearly 80% of African-American voters voted for Obama and over 70% of Caucasian voters voted for Clinton. The article also went on to say that because exit polls showed that whites would be happy with Obama as a presidential nominee and African-Americans would be happy with Clinton, that some racial unity had been achieved. And oh, oh, I can't believe they said it but yes they said it; The Dallas Morning News on-line headline is;
Back to the title subject of this editorial.
I must be missing something here. Caucasoids mainly voted for Caucasoids and the hyphenated Americans mainly voted for the half Caucasoid guy who looks more African than European. That's supposed to mean we have progressed from the racist dark ages?
Some have mentioned the fact that Obama lacks experience and well Clinton, uh, lacks experience. At least if Hillary becomes president, Bill will be there to show her where to sign.
Wouldn't you like to be a fly on the wall if Hillary' is in the Oval office and Bill comes in for some reminiscing? The crockery would be flying.
Barack Obama's South Carolina win rejiggers race
click on the headline to see it for yourself. Hey guys, you can't use words like "rejigger" when someone who might be called a rejigger is running for President. They phone must be ringing off the hook in the newsroom about now. Dummies.Back to the title subject of this editorial.
I must be missing something here. Caucasoids mainly voted for Caucasoids and the hyphenated Americans mainly voted for the half Caucasoid guy who looks more African than European. That's supposed to mean we have progressed from the racist dark ages?
Some have mentioned the fact that Obama lacks experience and well Clinton, uh, lacks experience. At least if Hillary becomes president, Bill will be there to show her where to sign.
Wouldn't you like to be a fly on the wall if Hillary' is in the Oval office and Bill comes in for some reminiscing? The crockery would be flying.
Monday, January 21, 2008
What Do Miami's Lights in 1942 and Passports in 2008 Have in Common? M-O-N-E-Y !
I am reading a book called “The Two-Ocean War”. It tells the history of the U.S. Navy during World War 2. I have discovered some interesting parallels from events then and now.
In 1942 there was much disagreement among the Allies about how to prosecute the war, such as which front and what tactics to use. Much the same discussions as concerns Iraq and Afghanistan now. How long do we stay, how much money do we spend, how many men do we use. How much should each country contribute?
In 1942 there was much disagreement among the Allies about how to prosecute the war, such as which front and what tactics to use. Much the same discussions as concerns Iraq and Afghanistan now. How long do we stay, how much money do we spend, how many men do we use. How much should each country contribute?
In Afghanistan, our NATO allies, for the most part, are unwilling to pay the political price of doing what is right and helping to stabilize Afghanistan. Canada and Britain, our staunchest allies, are having problems deciding whether to follow through to the end. Europeans have almost always been "Johnny come lately's" in facing down tyrants and fascism, until forced to face reality. If you don’t shove the Europeans too hard and just use small constant pressure, you can move them right off a cliff, while they continue eating their cheese and drinking their wine until they hit bottom.
Most of Europe wants to sit in the shade while America, Canada and Britain do the heavy lifting. European governments are simply lukewarm to the idea of using troops to stabilize Afghanistan. They send some troops, but not to the areas they could be used best. They don't want to see coffins draped with THEIR countries flag on the front page of their home newspapers. (And by the way, American newspapers were really pissed at not being able to take pictures of every coffin of every U.S. service member killed in Iraq. Those pictures, of course, would be front page news every day if the media had their way.) Those pictures would turn the public against the politicians who support the war against terror and make it harder to be re-elected.
Here, I am reminded of a cartoon I saw once; A politician is standing in front of a mob carrying torches and signs and looking very angry. The politician has his hands up as if stopping the crowd and he is saying "Tell Me Where You're Going and I'll Lead You!"
The media cooperates with the defeatist politicians, or is it the other way around. In America "defeatist" is spelled D-E-M-O-C-R-A-T. (Even decorated Viet Nam veteran former Marine Congressmen. They make me sick just thinking about them.)
Each and every death is faithfully reported, on the front page if possible. The death is tallied, chronicled, examined, investigated, discussed, and cried over. If the dead soldier had a pregnant wife or a newborn he had not yet seen, then all the better to crank up the weeping machine. Let’s all cry on each other’s shoulder over the terrible loss and wring our hands as if the death of one soldier is the greatest tragedy mankind has ever suffered. By the way, how many people were killed in World War 2? Anybody want to guess? Anybody know? Anybody care?
For those of you who may not know, soldiers are WARRIORS. They are also volunteers. They train to find, engage and kill the enemy. Soldiers know, if they have a brain, that their work is dangerous and sometimes fatal. They do it to protect the rest of us from threats that almost all of us would not have the guts to face. A picture of a Policeman comes to mind. They do it for us, you and me. I am humbled by the thought they do this for me without my asking them to.
I DO mourn their deaths. I honor their sacrifice and will fight to make sure their sacrifice is never forgotten. One should remember they are warriors and warriors are sometimes killed in battle. That is just the way it is. Innocent civilians are also killed in the battles. This is also just the way it is. Innocent’s being killed is to be avoided if possible, but not at all costs.
I am a former soldier. As soldiers, we were taught that in our line of work the levels of importance were; accomplishment of the mission, then the welfare of your men. Depending on the importance of the mission, the welfare of the men may not even be a consideration. Your men may have to be sacrificed for the accomplishment of the mission. A horrible tenet, but one that has helped us win almost all the wars America has fought. (At least the ones we weren't fighting with one hand tied behind our back.)
We should not go into a war with the goal of just defending ourselves. No war was ever won simply by being on the defense. You must attack. When you attack, people die. It is an ugly, ugly business to fight a war. We do it too quickly and too often, but we should never be afraid to fight. If we go into a fight, we should fight to win. “To the victor go the spoils”. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the spoils are freedom, democracy and all the rights of free men.
On to another subject.
Border Security.
I found another parallel from World War 2.
Recently, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, announced plans to phase in the requirement for proof of citizenship for persons attempting to enter the United States at land border ports of entry.
The reaction from the public, mainly business people, was as expected. Claims of over-reaction, un-necessary, extra cost for travelers, delays at the border, profit losses and other sorts of economic woes are waiting to land on us because these new rules are to be adopted.
The parallel from World War 2;
In early 1942, when the German submarines were sinking a merchant ship every day along our eastern seaboard, the War Department attempted to implement a blackout to turn off the lights along the coast line. These coastal lights were silhouetting our ships against the shore making them easy to spot by the German submarines. Many ships were being lost. At the mention of the required blackout, there was a cry that went out all along the coast. “You’re ruining our tourist season”, “Killing my profits”, “It’s unworkable” were all heard. People wrote and called their congressmen to try to get the blackout plan stopped. In the end, the blackout was instituted, but it took months to get it in place past all the political wrangling. During this time, hundreds of our merchant sailors died and hundreds of thousands of tons of our merchant ships were sent to the bottom of the ocean because business owners along the east coast did not want to lose profits.
The parallel from World War 2;
In early 1942, when the German submarines were sinking a merchant ship every day along our eastern seaboard, the War Department attempted to implement a blackout to turn off the lights along the coast line. These coastal lights were silhouetting our ships against the shore making them easy to spot by the German submarines. Many ships were being lost. At the mention of the required blackout, there was a cry that went out all along the coast. “You’re ruining our tourist season”, “Killing my profits”, “It’s unworkable” were all heard. People wrote and called their congressmen to try to get the blackout plan stopped. In the end, the blackout was instituted, but it took months to get it in place past all the political wrangling. During this time, hundreds of our merchant sailors died and hundreds of thousands of tons of our merchant ships were sent to the bottom of the ocean because business owners along the east coast did not want to lose profits.
“To hell with national security, what about my money”?
Oh, how we love our money.
Oh, how we love our money.
As stupid and hard-headed as we were in World War 2, we still managed to win. I hope we are not more stupid now than we were then.
Monday, December 18, 2006
Winter Carbon Monoxide Rituals Resume
Each winter, the well meaning morons of the world gather in their unelectrified homes to pay homage to the days of old. They make tribute to their ancestors; people who cooked their food on open fires inside their tents and mud huts. These ancestors were hardy people who could evidently breathe carbon monoxide from the cooking fires without killing themselves. Modern man seems unable to repeat this feat as evidenced by the news that hundreds across the northwest have been sickened after BRINGING THEIR BARBECUE GRILLS INSIDE TO HELP THEM KEEP WARM!.
Is there not some test we should be giving people to identify these idiots and prevent them from breeding? EVERY SINGLE YEAR someone brings in the barbecue grill and kills his family.
Maybe barbecue grills should come with instructions which invite people to start the fire in the grill outside, wrap a blanket around your head and the grill and then count to 1,000. If you are still alive after that, and you have not cooked your head, then it is okay for you to bring the grill inside to heat your house. Otherwise, your family will be too busy with your funeral arrangements to allow themselves to be killed by your stupidity.
Is there not some test we should be giving people to identify these idiots and prevent them from breeding? EVERY SINGLE YEAR someone brings in the barbecue grill and kills his family.
Maybe barbecue grills should come with instructions which invite people to start the fire in the grill outside, wrap a blanket around your head and the grill and then count to 1,000. If you are still alive after that, and you have not cooked your head, then it is okay for you to bring the grill inside to heat your house. Otherwise, your family will be too busy with your funeral arrangements to allow themselves to be killed by your stupidity.
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Quit School, Knock Up Your Girlfriend and Enjoy Being Poor
“Countless studies have shown that children raised in a two-parent family are less likely to be raised in poverty, less likely to do drugs, less likely to be criminals later in life, and more likely to graduate from and do well in school. Married people tend to take care of themselves better and live longer. They typically eat better, have more settled lives with less stress and fewer risky habits, monitor each other’s health, and are quicker to seek medical attention for problems that arise. Married people, particularly those with children, seem to be motivated to save and invest more for the future and to live longer to enjoy their savings and their children’s future. Out-of-wedlock births increase the national incidence of: lowered health for newborns; retarded cognitive, and especially verbal, development of young children; lowered educational achievement; lowered job attainment as young adults; increased behavioral problems; lowered impulse control (aggression and sexual behavior); and increased anti-social development. It’s been said you need only do three things in this country to avoid poverty: finish high school, marry before having a child and marry after the age of 20. Among those who follow such advice, only 8% are poor, while 79% of those who do not are poor. The consequences of this trend are crime rates higher than they should be, graduation rates lower than they should be and a treasury depleted in the name of trying to solve both problems by throwing more money at them. No culture can remain healthy with illegitimacy rates like these. And it is simply impossible to understate the socially catastrophic consequences of America’s crisis of illegitimacy. The family is still the best department of health, education and welfare ever invented.” —Investor’s Business Daily
Monday, November 06, 2006
Many soldiers Views Different From Politicians
I just read about soldiers, who were interviewed at their bases in Iraq, saying that we should stay the course and see it through in Iraq. I read it here. All I can say is "amen brother". One said it would be "an extreme betrayal" to leave now. After so many American and Iraqi lives lost, have we got the guts to see it through? I doubt it. If the democrats take control of Congress, we will see the beginning of the "Iraqi-mization" to coin a word. This will be done in the same way we cut and ran in Viet Nam. It won't look like running at first, there will be ceremonies where we will turn over control of our bases to the Iraqi Army and police. They will lower the US flag and raise the Iraqi flag. The camera's will be capturing it all. After we are out of sight they will dismantle the buildings, roll up the barbed wire and sell it for scrap. The wood will be used to build cousin Omar's new house. I saw the Vietnamese version of this when I was in Viet Nam in 1972. We had turned over control of a base called "BearCat" to the Vietnamese forces. BearCat had the largest helipad in the world at the time. It was amazing to see how fast the Vietnamese Army worked. They had 2 1/2 ton trucks going back and forth non-stop. In about a weeks time, they had completely disassembled the base. They dismantled the perimeter defensive bunkers; taking the wooden beams and emptying the sandbags. Nothing was left behind. The telephone poles were pulled out of the ground and the wire was rolled up to use again. It was really quite impressive, and a little sickening. The time. The money. The lives. The young men of our generation giving of themselves at the request or order of their government. Uncle Sam now tossing in the towel.
The Iraqi's will try to cut and run too, but of course they can't run as fast or as far as we can. Since the war has been a big mistake anyway, and was set up to fail from the beginning, it will all have been an expensive tragic mistake due to the incompetence of the current president. Does that sound about right?
How did we get to this place?
I just read a very enlightening piece. I submit it for your consideration here;
The Press at War
What ever happened to patriotic reporters?
BY JAMES Q. WILSON
Monday, November 6, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST
We are told by careful pollsters that half of the American people believe that American troops should be brought home from Iraq immediately. This news discourages supporters of our efforts there. Not me, though: I am relieved. Given press coverage of our efforts in Iraq, I am surprised that 90% of the public do not want us out right now.
Between Jan. 1 and Sept. 30, 2005, nearly 1,400 stories appeared on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening news. More than half focused on the costs and problems of the war, four times as many as those that discussed the successes. About 40% of the stories reported terrorist attacks; scarcely any reported the triumphs of American soldiers and Marines. The few positive stories about progress in Iraq were just a small fraction of all the broadcasts.
When the Center for Media and Public Affairs made a nonpartisan evaluation of network news broadcasts, it found that during the active war against Saddam Hussein, 51% of the reports about the conflict were negative. Six months after the land battle ended, 77% were negative; in the 2004 general election, 89% were negative; by the spring of 2006, 94% were negative. This decline in media support was much faster than during Korea or Vietnam.
Naturally, some of the hostile commentary reflects the nature of reporting. When every news outlet struggles to grab and hold an audience, no one should be surprised that this competition leads journalists to emphasize bloody events. To some degree, the press covers Iraq in much the same way that it covers America: it highlights conflict, shootings, bombings, hurricanes, tornadoes, and corruption.
But the war coverage does not reflect merely an interest in conflict. People who oppose the entire war on terror run much of the national press, and they go to great lengths to make waging it difficult. Thus the New York Times ran a front-page story about President Bush's allowing, without court warrants, electronic monitoring of phone calls between overseas terrorists and people inside the U.S. On the heels of this, the Times reported that the FBI had been conducting a top-secret program to monitor radiation levels around U.S. Muslim sites, including mosques. And then both the New York Times and Los Angeles Times ran stories about America's effort to monitor foreign banking transactions in order to frustrate terrorist plans. The revelation of this secret effort followed five years after the New York Times urged, in an editorial, that precisely such a program be started.
Virtually every government official consulted on these matters urged that the press not run the stories because they endangered secret and important tasks. They ran them anyway. The media suggested that the National Security Agency surveillance might be illegal, but since we do not know exactly what kind of surveillance is undertaken, we cannot be clear about its legal basis. No one should assume that the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires the president to obtain warrants from the special FISA court before he can monitor foreign intelligence contacts. Though the Supreme Court has never decided this issue, the lower federal courts, almost without exception, have held that "the Executive Branch need not always obtain a warrant for foreign intelligence surveillance."
Nor is it obvious that FISA defines all of the president's authority. Two assistant attorneys general have argued that when the president believes that a statute unconstitutionally limits his powers, he has the right not to obey it unless the Supreme Court directs him otherwise. This action would be proper even if the president had signed into law the bill limiting his authority. I know, you are thinking, That is just what the current Justice Department would say. In fact, these opinions were written in the Clinton administration by assistant attorneys general Walter Dellinger and Randolph Moss.
The president may have such power either because it inheres in his position as commander in chief or because Congress passed a law authorizing him to use "all necessary and appropriate force" against nations or people that directed or aided the attack of 9/11. Surveillance without warrants may be just such an "appropriate force." In any event, presidents before George W. Bush have issued executive orders authorizing searches without warrants, and Jamie Gorelick, once Bill Clinton's deputy attorney general and later a member of the 9/11 Commission, said that physical searches may be done without a court order in foreign intelligence cases. Such searches might well have prevented new terrorist attacks; if they are blocked in the future, no doubt we will see a demand for a new commission charged with criticizing the president for failing to prevent an attack.
In August 2006, when the British arrested the conspirators in the plot to blow up commercial aircraft in flight, evidence suggested that two leads to them were money transactions that began in Pakistan and American intercepts of their electronic chatter. Unfortunately, the New York Times and the ACLU were not able to prevent the British from learning these things. But they would have tried to prevent them if they had been based in London.
Suppose the current media posture about American military and security activities had been in effect during World War II. It is easy to imagine that happening. In the 1930s, after all, the well-connected America First Committee had been arguing for years about the need for America to stay out of "Europe's wars." Aware of these popular views, the House extended the draft by only a one-vote margin in 1941. Women dressed in black crowded the entrance to the Senate, arguing against extending the draft. Several hundred students at Harvard and Yale, including future Yale leader Kingman Brewster and future American president Gerald Ford, signed statements saying that they would never go to war. Everything was in place for a media attack on the Second World War. Here is how it might have sounded if today's customs were in effect:
December 1941. Though the press supports America's going to war against Japan after Pearl Harbor, several editorials want to know why we didn't prevent the attack by selling Japan more oil. Others criticize us for going to war with two nations that had never attacked us, Germany and Italy.
October 1942. The New York Times runs an exclusive story about the British effort to decipher German messages at a hidden site at Bletchley Park in England. One op-ed writer criticizes this move, quoting Henry Stimson's statement that gentlemen do not read one another's mail. Because the Bletchley Park code-cracking helped us find German submarines before they attacked, successful U-boat attacks increased once the Germans, knowing of the program, changed their code.
January 1943. After President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill call for the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers, several newspapers criticize them for having closed the door to a negotiated settlement. The press quotes several senators complaining that the unconditional surrender policy would harm the peace process.
May 1943. A big-city newspaper reveals the existence of the Manhattan Project and its effort to build atomic weapons. In these stories, several distinguished scientists lament the creation of such a terrible weapon. After Gen. Leslie Groves testifies before a congressional committee, the press lambastes him for wasting money, ignoring scientific opinion, and imperiling the environment by building plants at Hanford and Oak Ridge.
December 1944. The German counterattack against the Allies in the Ardennes yields heavy American losses in the Battle of the Bulge. The press gives splashy coverage to the Democratic National Committee chairman's assertion that the war cannot be won. A member of the House, a former Marine, urges that our troops be sent to Okinawa.
August 1945. After President Truman authorizes dropping the atomic bomb on Japan, many newspapers urge his impeachment.
Thankfully, though, the press did not cover World War II the way it covered Vietnam and has covered Iraq. What caused this profound change? Like many liberals and conservatives, I believe that our Vietnam experience created new media attitudes that have continued down to the present. During that war, some reporters began their coverage supportive of the struggle, but that view did not last long. Many people will recall the CBS television program, narrated by Morley Safer, about U.S. Marines using cigarette lighters to torch huts in Cam Ne in 1965. Many will remember the picture of a South Vietnamese officer shooting a captured Viet Cong through the head. Hardly anyone can forget the My Lai story that ran for about a year after a journalist reported that American troops had killed many residents of that village.
Undoubtedly, similar events occurred in World War II, but the press didn't cover them. In Vietnam, however, key reporters thought that the Cam Ne story was splendid. David Halberstam said that it "legitimized pessimistic reporting" and would show that "there was something terribly wrong going on out there." The film, he wrote, shattered American "innocence" and raised questions about "who we were."
The changes came to a head in January 1968, when Communist forces during the Tet holiday launched a major attack on South Vietnamese cities. According to virtually every competent observer, these forces met a sharp defeat, but American press accounts described Tet instead as a major communist victory. Washington Post reporter Peter Braestrup later published a book in which he explained the failure of the press to report the Tet offensive accurately. His summary: "Rarely has contemporary crisis-journalism turned out, in retrospect, to have veered so widely from reality."
Even as the facts became clearer, the press did not correct its false report that the North Vietnamese had won. When NBC News producer Robert Northshield was asked at the end of 1968 whether the network should put on a news show indicating that American and South Vietnamese troops had won, he rejected the idea, because Tet was already "established in the public's mind as a defeat, and therefore it was an American defeat."
In the opinion of Mr. Braestrup, the news failure resulted not from ideology but from economic and managerial constraints on the press--and in his view it had no material effect on American public opinion.
Others do not share his view. When Douglas Kinnard questioned more than 100 American generals who served in Vietnam, 92% said that newspaper coverage was often irresponsible or disruptive, and 96% said that television coverage on balance lacked context and was sensational or counterproductive.
An analysis of CBS's Vietnam coverage in 1972 and 1973 supports their views. The Institute for American Strategy found that, of about 800 references to American policy and behavior, 81% were critical. Of 164 references to North Vietnamese policy and behavior, 57% were supportive. Another study, by a scholar skeptical about the extent of media influence, showed that televised editorial comments before Tet were favorable to our presence by a ratio of 4 to 1; after Tet, they were 2 to 1 against the American government's policy.
Opinion polls taken in 1968 suggest that before the press reports on the Tet offensive, 28% of the public identified themselves as doves; by March, after the offensive was over, 42% said they were doves.
Sociologist James D. Wright directly measured the impact of press coverage by comparing the support for the war among white people of various social classes who read newspapers and news magazines with the support found among those who did not look at these periodicals very much. By 1968, when most newsmagazines and newspapers had changed from supporting the war to opposing it, backing for the war collapsed among upper-middle-class readers of news stories, from about two-thirds who supported it in 1964 to about one-third who supported it in 1968. Strikingly, opinion did not shift much among working-class voters, no matter whether they read these press accounts or not. Affluent people who read the press apparently have more changeable opinions than ordinary folks. Public opinion may not have changed much, but elite opinion changed greatly.
There are countless explanations for why the media produced so many stories skeptical of or hostile to the American military involvement in Vietnam. But many of these explanations are largely myths.
First myth. Media technology had changed. Vietnam was the first war in which television was available to a mass audience, and, as both critics and admirers of TV unite in saying, television brings the war home in often unsettling graphic images. But the Second World War also brought the struggle home through Pathé and Movietone newsreels shown in thousands of theaters nationwide at a time when Americans went to the movies remarkably often. Moreover, television accounts between 1962 and 1968 were not critical of the American effort in Vietnam, and public support for the war then actually increased.
Second myth. The war in Vietnam was conducted without censorship. As a result, the press, with trivial exceptions, could report anything it wanted. Moreover, the absence of a formal declaration of war made it possible for several Americans, including important journalists, to travel to Hanoi, where they made statements about conditions there that often parroted the North Vietnamese party line. But the censorship rules in the Second World War and in Korea, jointly devised by the press and the government, aimed at precluding premature disclosure of military secrets, such as the location of specific combat units and plans for military attacks. The media problem in Vietnam was not the disclosure of secrets but the conveying of an attitude.
Third myth. The press did not report military matters with adequate intelligence and context because few, if any, journalists had any military training. But that has always been the case. One veteran reporter, S.L.A. Marshall, put the real difference this way: once upon a time, "the American correspondent . . . was an American first, a correspondent second." But in Vietnam, that attitude shifted. An older journalist in Vietnam, who had covered the Second World War, lamented the bitter divisions among the reporters in Saigon, where there were "two camps": "those who wanted to win the war and those who wanted to lose it." The new reporters filed exciting, irreverent copy, which made it to the front pages; the veteran reporters' copy ended up buried way in back.
In place of these three myths, we should consider three much more plausible explanations: the first is the weak and ambivalent political leadership that American presidents brought to Vietnam; the second is the existence in the country of a vocal radical movement; and the third is the change that has occurred in the control of media organizations.
First, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson both wanted to avoid losing Vietnam without waging a major war in Asia. Kennedy tried to deny that Americans were fighting. A cable that his administration sent in 1962 instructed diplomats and soldiers never to imply to reporters any "all-out U.S. involvement." Other messages stressed that "this is not a U.S. war." When David Halberstam of the New York Times wrote stories criticizing the South Vietnamese government, Kennedy tried to have him fired because he was calling attention to a war that we did not want to admit we were fighting.
Johnson was willing to say that we were fighting, but without any cost and with rosy prospects for an early victory. He sought to avoid losing by contradictory efforts to appease doves (by bombing halts and peace feelers), satisfy hawks (with more troops and more bombing), and control the tactical details of the war from the Oval Office. After the Cam Ne report from Morley Safer, Johnson called the head of CBS and berated him in language I will not repeat here.
When Richard Nixon became president, he wanted to end the war by pulling out American troops, and he did so. None of the three presidents wanted to win, but all wanted to report "progress." All three administrations instructed military commanders always to report gains and rely on suspect body counts as a way of measuring progress. The press quickly understood that they could not trust politicians and high-level military officers.
Second, unlike either World War II or the Korean conflict, there was a radical peace movement in America, much of it growing out of the New Left. There has been domestic opposition to most of our wars (Karlyn Bowman and I have estimated the size of the "peace party" to be about one-fifth of the electorate), but to this latent public resistance was added a broad critique of American society that opposed the war as not only wrong as policy but immoral and genocidal--and, to college students, a threat to their exemption from the draft. Famous opponents of the war traveled to Hanoi to report on North Vietnam. Attorney General Ramsey Clark said that there was neither crime nor internal conflict there. Father Daniel Berrigan described the North Vietnamese people as having a "naive faith in human goodness." Author Mary McCarthy said these folks had "grace" because they lacked any sense of "alienation."
I repeated for the Iraq War the analysis that Professor Wright had done of the impact of the media on public opinion during the Vietnam War. Using 2004 poll data, I found a similar effect: Americans who rarely watched television news about the 2004 political campaign were much more supportive of the war in Iraq than were those who watched a great deal of TV news. And the falloff in support was greatest for those with a college education.
Third, control of the press had shifted away from owners and publishers to editors and reporters. During the Spanish-American War, the sensationalist press, led by Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and St. Louis Post-Dispatch, William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, and Joseph Medill's Chicago Tribune all actively supported the war. Hearst felt, perhaps accurately, that he had helped cause it. His New York paper printed this headline: "How Do You Like the Journal's War?" Even the New York Times supported the Spanish-American War, editorializing that the Anti-Imperialist League was treasonable and later that the Filipinos "have chosen a bloody way to demonstrate their incapacity for self-government."
Today, strong owners are almost all gone. When Henry Luce died, Time magazine's support for an assertive American foreign policy died with him. William Paley had worked hard to make CBS a supporter of the Vietnam War, but he could not prevent Walter Cronkite from making his famous statement, on the evening news show of Feb. 19, 1968, that the war had become a "stalemate" that had to be ended, and so we must "negotiate." On hearing these remarks, President Johnson decided that the country would no longer support the war and that he should not run for reelection. Over three decades later, Mr. Cronkite made the same mistake: We must, he said, get out of Iraq now.
There are still some family owners, such as the Sulzbergers, who exercise control over their newspapers, but they have moved politically left. Ken Auletta has described Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times, as a man who has "leaned to the left," but "leaned" understates the matter. Mr. Sulzberger was a passionate opponent of the war in Vietnam and was arrested more than once at protest rallies. When he became publisher in 1997, he chose the liberal Howell Raines to control the editorial page and make it, Mr. Sulzberger said, a "more assertive, populist page."
Other media companies, once run by their founders and principal owners, are now run by professional managers who report to directors interested in profits, not policy. Policy is the province of the editors and reporters, who are governed by their personal views, many of them acquired not by having once covered the police beat but from a college education. By 1978, 93% of the top reporters and editors had college degrees.
These three factors worked in concert and have carried down to the present. The ambivalent political leadership of three presidents during Vietnam made the press distrust American leaders, even when, as during the Iraq War, political leadership has been strong. The New Left movement in the 1960s and 1970s slowly abandoned many of its slogans but left its legacy in much of the press and Democratic Party elites. The emergence of journalism as a craft independent of corporate owners reinforced these trends. As one journalist wrote, reporters "had come to reject the idea that they were in any sense part of the American 'team.' " This development happened slowly in Vietnam. Journalists reported most events favorably for the American side from August 1965 to January 1968, but that attitude began shifting with press coverage of Sen. J. William Fulbright's hostile Senate hearings and climaxed with the Tet offensive in January 1968. Thereafter, reporters and editors increasingly shared a distrust of government officials, an inclination to look for coverups, and a willingness to believe that the government acted out of bad motives.
A watershed of the new attitude is the New York Times's coverage of the Pentagon papers in 1971. These documents, prepared by high officials under the direction of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, were leaked to the Times by a former State Department staffer, Daniel Ellsberg. The Times wrote major stories, supposedly based on the leaked documents, summarizing the history of our Vietnam involvement.
Journalist Edward Jay Epstein has shown that in crucial respects, the Times coverage was at odds with what the documents actually said. The lead of the Times story was that in 1964 the Johnson administration reached a consensus to bomb North Vietnam at a time when the president was publicly saying that he would not bomb the north. In fact, the Pentagon papers actually said that, in 1964, the White House had rejected the idea of bombing the north. The Times went on to assert that American forces had deliberately provoked the alleged attacks on its ships in the Gulf of Tonkin to justify a congressional resolution supporting our war efforts. In fact, the Pentagon papers said the opposite: there was no evidence that we had provoked whatever attacks may have occurred.
In short, a key newspaper said that politicians had manipulated us into a war by means of deception. This claim, wrong as it was, was part of a chain of reporting and editorializing that helped convince upper-middle-class Americans that the government could not be trusted.
Reporters and editors today are overwhelmingly liberal politically, as studies of the attitudes of key members of the press have repeatedly shown. Should you doubt these findings, recall the statement of Daniel Okrent, then the public editor at the New York Times. Under the headline, "Is the New York times a Liberal Newspaper?," Mr. Okrent's first sentence was, "Of course it is."
What has been at issue is whether media politics affects media writing. Certainly, that began to happen noticeably in the Vietnam years. And thereafter, the press could still support an American war waged by a Democratic president. In 1992, for example, newspapers denounced President George H.W. Bush for having ignored the creation of concentration camps in Bosnia, and they later supported President Clinton when he ordered bombing raids there and in Kosovo. When one strike killed some innocent refugees, the New York Times said that it would be a "tragedy" to "slacken the bombardment." These air attacks violated what passes for international law (under the U.N. Charter, people can only go to war for immediate self-defense or under U.N. authorization). But these supposedly "illegal" air raids did not prevent Times support. Today, by contrast, the Times criticizes our Guantanamo Bay detention camp for being in violation of "international law."
But in the Vietnam era, an important restraint on sectarian partisanship still operated: the mass media catered to a mass audience and hence had an economic interest in appealing to as broad a public as possible. Today, however, we are in the midst of a fierce competition among media outlets, with newspapers trying, not very successfully, to survive against 24/7 TV and radio news coverage and the Internet. As a consequence of this struggle, radio, magazines, and newspapers are engaged in niche marketing, seeking to mobilize not a broad market but a specialized one, either liberal or conservative.
Economics reinforces this partisan orientation. Prof. James Hamilton has shown that television networks take older viewers for granted but struggle hard to attract high-spending younger ones. Regular viewers tend to be older, male, and conservative, while marginal ones are likely to be younger, female, and liberal. Thus the financial interest that radio and television stations have in attracting these marginal younger listeners and viewers reinforces their ideological interest in catering to a more liberal audience.
Focusing ever more sharply on the mostly bicoastal, mostly liberal elites, and with their more conservative audience lost to Fox News or Rush Limbaugh, mainstream outlets like the New York Times have become more nakedly partisan. And in the Iraq War, they have kept up a drumbeat of negativity that has had a big effect on elite and public opinion alike. Thanks to the power of these media organs, reduced but still enormous, many Americans are coming to see the Iraq War as Vietnam redux.
Most of what I have said here is common knowledge. But it is common knowledge about a new period in American journalistic history. Once, powerful press owners dictated what their papers would print, sometimes irresponsibly. But that era of partisan and circulation-building distortions was not replaced by a commitment to objective journalism; it was replaced by a deep suspicion of the American government. That suspicion, fueled in part by the Vietnam and Watergate controversies, means that the government, especially if it is a conservative one, is surrounded by journalists who doubt almost all it says. One obvious result is that since World War II there have been few reports of military heroes; indeed, there have been scarcely any reports of military victories.
This change in the media is not a transitory one that will give way to a return to the support of our military when it fights. Journalism, like so much scholarship, now dwells in a postmodern age in which truth is hard to find and statements merely serve someone's interests.
The mainstream media's adversarial stance, both here and abroad, means that whenever a foreign enemy challenges us, he will know that his objective will be to win the battle not on some faraway bit of land but among the people who determine what we read and watch. We won the Second World War in Europe and Japan, but we lost in Vietnam and are in danger of losing in Iraq and Lebanon in the newspapers, magazines and television programs we enjoy.
Mr. Wilson, formerly a professor at Harvard and at UCLA, now lectures at Pepperdine University. Among his recent books are The Moral Sense and The Marriage Problem. This article, adapted from a Manhattan Institute lecture, appears in the Autumn issue of City Journal.
The Iraqi's will try to cut and run too, but of course they can't run as fast or as far as we can. Since the war has been a big mistake anyway, and was set up to fail from the beginning, it will all have been an expensive tragic mistake due to the incompetence of the current president. Does that sound about right?
How did we get to this place?
I just read a very enlightening piece. I submit it for your consideration here;
The Press at War
What ever happened to patriotic reporters?
BY JAMES Q. WILSON
Monday, November 6, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST
We are told by careful pollsters that half of the American people believe that American troops should be brought home from Iraq immediately. This news discourages supporters of our efforts there. Not me, though: I am relieved. Given press coverage of our efforts in Iraq, I am surprised that 90% of the public do not want us out right now.
Between Jan. 1 and Sept. 30, 2005, nearly 1,400 stories appeared on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening news. More than half focused on the costs and problems of the war, four times as many as those that discussed the successes. About 40% of the stories reported terrorist attacks; scarcely any reported the triumphs of American soldiers and Marines. The few positive stories about progress in Iraq were just a small fraction of all the broadcasts.
When the Center for Media and Public Affairs made a nonpartisan evaluation of network news broadcasts, it found that during the active war against Saddam Hussein, 51% of the reports about the conflict were negative. Six months after the land battle ended, 77% were negative; in the 2004 general election, 89% were negative; by the spring of 2006, 94% were negative. This decline in media support was much faster than during Korea or Vietnam.
Naturally, some of the hostile commentary reflects the nature of reporting. When every news outlet struggles to grab and hold an audience, no one should be surprised that this competition leads journalists to emphasize bloody events. To some degree, the press covers Iraq in much the same way that it covers America: it highlights conflict, shootings, bombings, hurricanes, tornadoes, and corruption.
But the war coverage does not reflect merely an interest in conflict. People who oppose the entire war on terror run much of the national press, and they go to great lengths to make waging it difficult. Thus the New York Times ran a front-page story about President Bush's allowing, without court warrants, electronic monitoring of phone calls between overseas terrorists and people inside the U.S. On the heels of this, the Times reported that the FBI had been conducting a top-secret program to monitor radiation levels around U.S. Muslim sites, including mosques. And then both the New York Times and Los Angeles Times ran stories about America's effort to monitor foreign banking transactions in order to frustrate terrorist plans. The revelation of this secret effort followed five years after the New York Times urged, in an editorial, that precisely such a program be started.
Virtually every government official consulted on these matters urged that the press not run the stories because they endangered secret and important tasks. They ran them anyway. The media suggested that the National Security Agency surveillance might be illegal, but since we do not know exactly what kind of surveillance is undertaken, we cannot be clear about its legal basis. No one should assume that the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires the president to obtain warrants from the special FISA court before he can monitor foreign intelligence contacts. Though the Supreme Court has never decided this issue, the lower federal courts, almost without exception, have held that "the Executive Branch need not always obtain a warrant for foreign intelligence surveillance."
Nor is it obvious that FISA defines all of the president's authority. Two assistant attorneys general have argued that when the president believes that a statute unconstitutionally limits his powers, he has the right not to obey it unless the Supreme Court directs him otherwise. This action would be proper even if the president had signed into law the bill limiting his authority. I know, you are thinking, That is just what the current Justice Department would say. In fact, these opinions were written in the Clinton administration by assistant attorneys general Walter Dellinger and Randolph Moss.
The president may have such power either because it inheres in his position as commander in chief or because Congress passed a law authorizing him to use "all necessary and appropriate force" against nations or people that directed or aided the attack of 9/11. Surveillance without warrants may be just such an "appropriate force." In any event, presidents before George W. Bush have issued executive orders authorizing searches without warrants, and Jamie Gorelick, once Bill Clinton's deputy attorney general and later a member of the 9/11 Commission, said that physical searches may be done without a court order in foreign intelligence cases. Such searches might well have prevented new terrorist attacks; if they are blocked in the future, no doubt we will see a demand for a new commission charged with criticizing the president for failing to prevent an attack.
In August 2006, when the British arrested the conspirators in the plot to blow up commercial aircraft in flight, evidence suggested that two leads to them were money transactions that began in Pakistan and American intercepts of their electronic chatter. Unfortunately, the New York Times and the ACLU were not able to prevent the British from learning these things. But they would have tried to prevent them if they had been based in London.
Suppose the current media posture about American military and security activities had been in effect during World War II. It is easy to imagine that happening. In the 1930s, after all, the well-connected America First Committee had been arguing for years about the need for America to stay out of "Europe's wars." Aware of these popular views, the House extended the draft by only a one-vote margin in 1941. Women dressed in black crowded the entrance to the Senate, arguing against extending the draft. Several hundred students at Harvard and Yale, including future Yale leader Kingman Brewster and future American president Gerald Ford, signed statements saying that they would never go to war. Everything was in place for a media attack on the Second World War. Here is how it might have sounded if today's customs were in effect:
December 1941. Though the press supports America's going to war against Japan after Pearl Harbor, several editorials want to know why we didn't prevent the attack by selling Japan more oil. Others criticize us for going to war with two nations that had never attacked us, Germany and Italy.
October 1942. The New York Times runs an exclusive story about the British effort to decipher German messages at a hidden site at Bletchley Park in England. One op-ed writer criticizes this move, quoting Henry Stimson's statement that gentlemen do not read one another's mail. Because the Bletchley Park code-cracking helped us find German submarines before they attacked, successful U-boat attacks increased once the Germans, knowing of the program, changed their code.
January 1943. After President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill call for the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers, several newspapers criticize them for having closed the door to a negotiated settlement. The press quotes several senators complaining that the unconditional surrender policy would harm the peace process.
May 1943. A big-city newspaper reveals the existence of the Manhattan Project and its effort to build atomic weapons. In these stories, several distinguished scientists lament the creation of such a terrible weapon. After Gen. Leslie Groves testifies before a congressional committee, the press lambastes him for wasting money, ignoring scientific opinion, and imperiling the environment by building plants at Hanford and Oak Ridge.
December 1944. The German counterattack against the Allies in the Ardennes yields heavy American losses in the Battle of the Bulge. The press gives splashy coverage to the Democratic National Committee chairman's assertion that the war cannot be won. A member of the House, a former Marine, urges that our troops be sent to Okinawa.
August 1945. After President Truman authorizes dropping the atomic bomb on Japan, many newspapers urge his impeachment.
Thankfully, though, the press did not cover World War II the way it covered Vietnam and has covered Iraq. What caused this profound change? Like many liberals and conservatives, I believe that our Vietnam experience created new media attitudes that have continued down to the present. During that war, some reporters began their coverage supportive of the struggle, but that view did not last long. Many people will recall the CBS television program, narrated by Morley Safer, about U.S. Marines using cigarette lighters to torch huts in Cam Ne in 1965. Many will remember the picture of a South Vietnamese officer shooting a captured Viet Cong through the head. Hardly anyone can forget the My Lai story that ran for about a year after a journalist reported that American troops had killed many residents of that village.
Undoubtedly, similar events occurred in World War II, but the press didn't cover them. In Vietnam, however, key reporters thought that the Cam Ne story was splendid. David Halberstam said that it "legitimized pessimistic reporting" and would show that "there was something terribly wrong going on out there." The film, he wrote, shattered American "innocence" and raised questions about "who we were."
The changes came to a head in January 1968, when Communist forces during the Tet holiday launched a major attack on South Vietnamese cities. According to virtually every competent observer, these forces met a sharp defeat, but American press accounts described Tet instead as a major communist victory. Washington Post reporter Peter Braestrup later published a book in which he explained the failure of the press to report the Tet offensive accurately. His summary: "Rarely has contemporary crisis-journalism turned out, in retrospect, to have veered so widely from reality."
Even as the facts became clearer, the press did not correct its false report that the North Vietnamese had won. When NBC News producer Robert Northshield was asked at the end of 1968 whether the network should put on a news show indicating that American and South Vietnamese troops had won, he rejected the idea, because Tet was already "established in the public's mind as a defeat, and therefore it was an American defeat."
In the opinion of Mr. Braestrup, the news failure resulted not from ideology but from economic and managerial constraints on the press--and in his view it had no material effect on American public opinion.
Others do not share his view. When Douglas Kinnard questioned more than 100 American generals who served in Vietnam, 92% said that newspaper coverage was often irresponsible or disruptive, and 96% said that television coverage on balance lacked context and was sensational or counterproductive.
An analysis of CBS's Vietnam coverage in 1972 and 1973 supports their views. The Institute for American Strategy found that, of about 800 references to American policy and behavior, 81% were critical. Of 164 references to North Vietnamese policy and behavior, 57% were supportive. Another study, by a scholar skeptical about the extent of media influence, showed that televised editorial comments before Tet were favorable to our presence by a ratio of 4 to 1; after Tet, they were 2 to 1 against the American government's policy.
Opinion polls taken in 1968 suggest that before the press reports on the Tet offensive, 28% of the public identified themselves as doves; by March, after the offensive was over, 42% said they were doves.
Sociologist James D. Wright directly measured the impact of press coverage by comparing the support for the war among white people of various social classes who read newspapers and news magazines with the support found among those who did not look at these periodicals very much. By 1968, when most newsmagazines and newspapers had changed from supporting the war to opposing it, backing for the war collapsed among upper-middle-class readers of news stories, from about two-thirds who supported it in 1964 to about one-third who supported it in 1968. Strikingly, opinion did not shift much among working-class voters, no matter whether they read these press accounts or not. Affluent people who read the press apparently have more changeable opinions than ordinary folks. Public opinion may not have changed much, but elite opinion changed greatly.
There are countless explanations for why the media produced so many stories skeptical of or hostile to the American military involvement in Vietnam. But many of these explanations are largely myths.
First myth. Media technology had changed. Vietnam was the first war in which television was available to a mass audience, and, as both critics and admirers of TV unite in saying, television brings the war home in often unsettling graphic images. But the Second World War also brought the struggle home through Pathé and Movietone newsreels shown in thousands of theaters nationwide at a time when Americans went to the movies remarkably often. Moreover, television accounts between 1962 and 1968 were not critical of the American effort in Vietnam, and public support for the war then actually increased.
Second myth. The war in Vietnam was conducted without censorship. As a result, the press, with trivial exceptions, could report anything it wanted. Moreover, the absence of a formal declaration of war made it possible for several Americans, including important journalists, to travel to Hanoi, where they made statements about conditions there that often parroted the North Vietnamese party line. But the censorship rules in the Second World War and in Korea, jointly devised by the press and the government, aimed at precluding premature disclosure of military secrets, such as the location of specific combat units and plans for military attacks. The media problem in Vietnam was not the disclosure of secrets but the conveying of an attitude.
Third myth. The press did not report military matters with adequate intelligence and context because few, if any, journalists had any military training. But that has always been the case. One veteran reporter, S.L.A. Marshall, put the real difference this way: once upon a time, "the American correspondent . . . was an American first, a correspondent second." But in Vietnam, that attitude shifted. An older journalist in Vietnam, who had covered the Second World War, lamented the bitter divisions among the reporters in Saigon, where there were "two camps": "those who wanted to win the war and those who wanted to lose it." The new reporters filed exciting, irreverent copy, which made it to the front pages; the veteran reporters' copy ended up buried way in back.
In place of these three myths, we should consider three much more plausible explanations: the first is the weak and ambivalent political leadership that American presidents brought to Vietnam; the second is the existence in the country of a vocal radical movement; and the third is the change that has occurred in the control of media organizations.
First, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson both wanted to avoid losing Vietnam without waging a major war in Asia. Kennedy tried to deny that Americans were fighting. A cable that his administration sent in 1962 instructed diplomats and soldiers never to imply to reporters any "all-out U.S. involvement." Other messages stressed that "this is not a U.S. war." When David Halberstam of the New York Times wrote stories criticizing the South Vietnamese government, Kennedy tried to have him fired because he was calling attention to a war that we did not want to admit we were fighting.
Johnson was willing to say that we were fighting, but without any cost and with rosy prospects for an early victory. He sought to avoid losing by contradictory efforts to appease doves (by bombing halts and peace feelers), satisfy hawks (with more troops and more bombing), and control the tactical details of the war from the Oval Office. After the Cam Ne report from Morley Safer, Johnson called the head of CBS and berated him in language I will not repeat here.
When Richard Nixon became president, he wanted to end the war by pulling out American troops, and he did so. None of the three presidents wanted to win, but all wanted to report "progress." All three administrations instructed military commanders always to report gains and rely on suspect body counts as a way of measuring progress. The press quickly understood that they could not trust politicians and high-level military officers.
Second, unlike either World War II or the Korean conflict, there was a radical peace movement in America, much of it growing out of the New Left. There has been domestic opposition to most of our wars (Karlyn Bowman and I have estimated the size of the "peace party" to be about one-fifth of the electorate), but to this latent public resistance was added a broad critique of American society that opposed the war as not only wrong as policy but immoral and genocidal--and, to college students, a threat to their exemption from the draft. Famous opponents of the war traveled to Hanoi to report on North Vietnam. Attorney General Ramsey Clark said that there was neither crime nor internal conflict there. Father Daniel Berrigan described the North Vietnamese people as having a "naive faith in human goodness." Author Mary McCarthy said these folks had "grace" because they lacked any sense of "alienation."
I repeated for the Iraq War the analysis that Professor Wright had done of the impact of the media on public opinion during the Vietnam War. Using 2004 poll data, I found a similar effect: Americans who rarely watched television news about the 2004 political campaign were much more supportive of the war in Iraq than were those who watched a great deal of TV news. And the falloff in support was greatest for those with a college education.
Third, control of the press had shifted away from owners and publishers to editors and reporters. During the Spanish-American War, the sensationalist press, led by Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and St. Louis Post-Dispatch, William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, and Joseph Medill's Chicago Tribune all actively supported the war. Hearst felt, perhaps accurately, that he had helped cause it. His New York paper printed this headline: "How Do You Like the Journal's War?" Even the New York Times supported the Spanish-American War, editorializing that the Anti-Imperialist League was treasonable and later that the Filipinos "have chosen a bloody way to demonstrate their incapacity for self-government."
Today, strong owners are almost all gone. When Henry Luce died, Time magazine's support for an assertive American foreign policy died with him. William Paley had worked hard to make CBS a supporter of the Vietnam War, but he could not prevent Walter Cronkite from making his famous statement, on the evening news show of Feb. 19, 1968, that the war had become a "stalemate" that had to be ended, and so we must "negotiate." On hearing these remarks, President Johnson decided that the country would no longer support the war and that he should not run for reelection. Over three decades later, Mr. Cronkite made the same mistake: We must, he said, get out of Iraq now.
There are still some family owners, such as the Sulzbergers, who exercise control over their newspapers, but they have moved politically left. Ken Auletta has described Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times, as a man who has "leaned to the left," but "leaned" understates the matter. Mr. Sulzberger was a passionate opponent of the war in Vietnam and was arrested more than once at protest rallies. When he became publisher in 1997, he chose the liberal Howell Raines to control the editorial page and make it, Mr. Sulzberger said, a "more assertive, populist page."
Other media companies, once run by their founders and principal owners, are now run by professional managers who report to directors interested in profits, not policy. Policy is the province of the editors and reporters, who are governed by their personal views, many of them acquired not by having once covered the police beat but from a college education. By 1978, 93% of the top reporters and editors had college degrees.
These three factors worked in concert and have carried down to the present. The ambivalent political leadership of three presidents during Vietnam made the press distrust American leaders, even when, as during the Iraq War, political leadership has been strong. The New Left movement in the 1960s and 1970s slowly abandoned many of its slogans but left its legacy in much of the press and Democratic Party elites. The emergence of journalism as a craft independent of corporate owners reinforced these trends. As one journalist wrote, reporters "had come to reject the idea that they were in any sense part of the American 'team.' " This development happened slowly in Vietnam. Journalists reported most events favorably for the American side from August 1965 to January 1968, but that attitude began shifting with press coverage of Sen. J. William Fulbright's hostile Senate hearings and climaxed with the Tet offensive in January 1968. Thereafter, reporters and editors increasingly shared a distrust of government officials, an inclination to look for coverups, and a willingness to believe that the government acted out of bad motives.
A watershed of the new attitude is the New York Times's coverage of the Pentagon papers in 1971. These documents, prepared by high officials under the direction of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, were leaked to the Times by a former State Department staffer, Daniel Ellsberg. The Times wrote major stories, supposedly based on the leaked documents, summarizing the history of our Vietnam involvement.
Journalist Edward Jay Epstein has shown that in crucial respects, the Times coverage was at odds with what the documents actually said. The lead of the Times story was that in 1964 the Johnson administration reached a consensus to bomb North Vietnam at a time when the president was publicly saying that he would not bomb the north. In fact, the Pentagon papers actually said that, in 1964, the White House had rejected the idea of bombing the north. The Times went on to assert that American forces had deliberately provoked the alleged attacks on its ships in the Gulf of Tonkin to justify a congressional resolution supporting our war efforts. In fact, the Pentagon papers said the opposite: there was no evidence that we had provoked whatever attacks may have occurred.
In short, a key newspaper said that politicians had manipulated us into a war by means of deception. This claim, wrong as it was, was part of a chain of reporting and editorializing that helped convince upper-middle-class Americans that the government could not be trusted.
Reporters and editors today are overwhelmingly liberal politically, as studies of the attitudes of key members of the press have repeatedly shown. Should you doubt these findings, recall the statement of Daniel Okrent, then the public editor at the New York Times. Under the headline, "Is the New York times a Liberal Newspaper?," Mr. Okrent's first sentence was, "Of course it is."
What has been at issue is whether media politics affects media writing. Certainly, that began to happen noticeably in the Vietnam years. And thereafter, the press could still support an American war waged by a Democratic president. In 1992, for example, newspapers denounced President George H.W. Bush for having ignored the creation of concentration camps in Bosnia, and they later supported President Clinton when he ordered bombing raids there and in Kosovo. When one strike killed some innocent refugees, the New York Times said that it would be a "tragedy" to "slacken the bombardment." These air attacks violated what passes for international law (under the U.N. Charter, people can only go to war for immediate self-defense or under U.N. authorization). But these supposedly "illegal" air raids did not prevent Times support. Today, by contrast, the Times criticizes our Guantanamo Bay detention camp for being in violation of "international law."
But in the Vietnam era, an important restraint on sectarian partisanship still operated: the mass media catered to a mass audience and hence had an economic interest in appealing to as broad a public as possible. Today, however, we are in the midst of a fierce competition among media outlets, with newspapers trying, not very successfully, to survive against 24/7 TV and radio news coverage and the Internet. As a consequence of this struggle, radio, magazines, and newspapers are engaged in niche marketing, seeking to mobilize not a broad market but a specialized one, either liberal or conservative.
Economics reinforces this partisan orientation. Prof. James Hamilton has shown that television networks take older viewers for granted but struggle hard to attract high-spending younger ones. Regular viewers tend to be older, male, and conservative, while marginal ones are likely to be younger, female, and liberal. Thus the financial interest that radio and television stations have in attracting these marginal younger listeners and viewers reinforces their ideological interest in catering to a more liberal audience.
Focusing ever more sharply on the mostly bicoastal, mostly liberal elites, and with their more conservative audience lost to Fox News or Rush Limbaugh, mainstream outlets like the New York Times have become more nakedly partisan. And in the Iraq War, they have kept up a drumbeat of negativity that has had a big effect on elite and public opinion alike. Thanks to the power of these media organs, reduced but still enormous, many Americans are coming to see the Iraq War as Vietnam redux.
Most of what I have said here is common knowledge. But it is common knowledge about a new period in American journalistic history. Once, powerful press owners dictated what their papers would print, sometimes irresponsibly. But that era of partisan and circulation-building distortions was not replaced by a commitment to objective journalism; it was replaced by a deep suspicion of the American government. That suspicion, fueled in part by the Vietnam and Watergate controversies, means that the government, especially if it is a conservative one, is surrounded by journalists who doubt almost all it says. One obvious result is that since World War II there have been few reports of military heroes; indeed, there have been scarcely any reports of military victories.
This change in the media is not a transitory one that will give way to a return to the support of our military when it fights. Journalism, like so much scholarship, now dwells in a postmodern age in which truth is hard to find and statements merely serve someone's interests.
The mainstream media's adversarial stance, both here and abroad, means that whenever a foreign enemy challenges us, he will know that his objective will be to win the battle not on some faraway bit of land but among the people who determine what we read and watch. We won the Second World War in Europe and Japan, but we lost in Vietnam and are in danger of losing in Iraq and Lebanon in the newspapers, magazines and television programs we enjoy.
Mr. Wilson, formerly a professor at Harvard and at UCLA, now lectures at Pepperdine University. Among his recent books are The Moral Sense and The Marriage Problem. This article, adapted from a Manhattan Institute lecture, appears in the Autumn issue of City Journal.
Monday, July 03, 2006
Oh Boy!, More Bad News From Iraq!
I watched the CBS Early Show news by accident this morning. Col. Mitch Mitchell and Harry Smith were discussing the case of the US Army soldiers accused of raping an Iraqi woman and then killing and setting fire to her and her family. They were discussing the "facts" of the case. Supposedly these facts are the kind that need to be leaked to the press from "un-named sources". There was a certain satisfaction in the tone of the story. The kind of satisfaction that comes from reporting stories of church officials molesting boys or babies being drowned by their mothers. There is extra special treatment for stories like that. Here is a link to it if you want to read it yourself.
You know, a long time ago a very wise person told me that life is like a river; we are on the bank of the river. We watch the water and see all kinds of unkindness going by; murder, rape, war, famine. But what is truly important and lasting is what is going on in the houses of the people living next to the water. Inside these houses are men and women who love each other. They raise their children and care for their neighbors. They pay their taxes, serve their countries and go to work faithfully every day. THAT you rarely read about in the paper.
You know, a long time ago a very wise person told me that life is like a river; we are on the bank of the river. We watch the water and see all kinds of unkindness going by; murder, rape, war, famine. But what is truly important and lasting is what is going on in the houses of the people living next to the water. Inside these houses are men and women who love each other. They raise their children and care for their neighbors. They pay their taxes, serve their countries and go to work faithfully every day. THAT you rarely read about in the paper.
Monday, February 06, 2006
Let's NOT Bring the Troops Home From Iraq, HUH?
Did anyone see this yo-yo on the NBC evening news before the State of the Union address? 
Paraphrased, he said "Polls have shown that more than 40% Americans said they want to bring the troops home"As opposed to what? Leaving them there forever? How about bringing them home before the job is finished and cheapening the sacrifices that so many have made up to now?
What a bunch of crap. What was the question exactly that was asked of those polled?
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
The "Milestone" Death Count
Yea! We finally have the number the media have all been waiting to give us.......drum roll please.......2,000 dead American soldiers!
Now we can breathe again.
That is a number to remember. It's hard to believe America sacrificed hundreds of thousands of our servicemen's lives on the altar of freedom sixty five years ago. A lot of the men who served then are still alive now. I wonder what they would have to say if asked about the sacrifice made now by these 2,000 to save so many?
Not worth it?
I doubt you'd hear that answer.
I have a friend who is a Blackhawk helicopter pilot in Iraq. He and many other Iraq war veterans tell me the same thing; the truth is not getting out.
If you watch TV and get most of your news from there, then it is a dark picture that comes out of Iraq. Do some searching and find out what goes on in Iraq besides roadside bombings.
How about some other numbers?
How many new schools are opening in Iraq? Here is a hint.
How many hospitals or other projects? Here is another hint.
I hope that those of you reading this will ask yourself this;
Is there ANYTHING, besides protecting the lives of your family members, that you would consider important enough to die for? To kill for?
If you answered no, then go sit with the sheep and wait to be slaughtered.
Now we can breathe again.
That is a number to remember. It's hard to believe America sacrificed hundreds of thousands of our servicemen's lives on the altar of freedom sixty five years ago. A lot of the men who served then are still alive now. I wonder what they would have to say if asked about the sacrifice made now by these 2,000 to save so many?
Not worth it?
I doubt you'd hear that answer.
I have a friend who is a Blackhawk helicopter pilot in Iraq. He and many other Iraq war veterans tell me the same thing; the truth is not getting out.
If you watch TV and get most of your news from there, then it is a dark picture that comes out of Iraq. Do some searching and find out what goes on in Iraq besides roadside bombings.
How about some other numbers?
How many new schools are opening in Iraq? Here is a hint.
How many hospitals or other projects? Here is another hint.
I hope that those of you reading this will ask yourself this;
Is there ANYTHING, besides protecting the lives of your family members, that you would consider important enough to die for? To kill for?
If you answered no, then go sit with the sheep and wait to be slaughtered.
Friday, October 14, 2005
Bush's Scripted Iraq Show?
Kelly O'Donnell on NBC this morning suggested that "eyebrows were raised" because before the video call by Bush to Iraq yesterday, a White House aide made suggestions about their answers "according to the script". The soldiers practiced their answers before the president asked them any questions. According to O'Donnell "this distracts from the news about the vote for the new Iraqi constitution".
Imagine that; the media trying to distract us from the good news in Iraq by suggesting that the soldiers were told what to say.
The very idea.
Imagine that; the media trying to distract us from the good news in Iraq by suggesting that the soldiers were told what to say.
The very idea.
Thursday, July 21, 2005
Idiot News Nightly Views
Have you noticed how the national news has become just another half hour of "entertainment" news?
It rained heavily in Houston last week and so the national news decided to cover the event even though Michael Jackson wasn't there and it wasn't happening in New York City. Anyway, the camera gave us a close-up of a round faced black woman sitting behind the steering wheel of a car asking us the thought provoking question; "WHEY ALL DAT WAHTUH COME FROM?"
I suppose there was a shortage of skinny red-necks with missing teeth, that they usually interview, so they waved down a motorist for a quick quote for our amusement.
Sort of reminds me of the video clip I saw recently of comic talk show host Steve Allen asking people on the street if they could ever vote for a politician who was an "admitted heterosexual". Of course they said no. It's just for entertainment.
I think instead of the "Nightly News" they ought to start calling it the "Nightly Views"
It rained heavily in Houston last week and so the national news decided to cover the event even though Michael Jackson wasn't there and it wasn't happening in New York City. Anyway, the camera gave us a close-up of a round faced black woman sitting behind the steering wheel of a car asking us the thought provoking question; "WHEY ALL DAT WAHTUH COME FROM?"
I suppose there was a shortage of skinny red-necks with missing teeth, that they usually interview, so they waved down a motorist for a quick quote for our amusement.
Sort of reminds me of the video clip I saw recently of comic talk show host Steve Allen asking people on the street if they could ever vote for a politician who was an "admitted heterosexual". Of course they said no. It's just for entertainment.
I think instead of the "Nightly News" they ought to start calling it the "Nightly Views"
Friday, May 06, 2005
Marine found not guilty. NBC Knows Better.
The Marine who killed the wounded Iraqi feigning death in the mosque in Fallujah has been found not guilty of any wrongdoing.
Good.
A wounded man can kill you as easily as one who isn’t wounded. Up close, when you least expect it.
The national news sees it differently. Wednesday night NBC news showed the nation the video clip of the Marine shooting the wounded man. Of course it was too graphic to show the whole thing, they warned us. They froze the picture and played the audio instead.
But just the same, they love showing that kind of stuff. As if to say, "The Marine has been acquitted but we know better", just take a look for yourself and be as outraged as we are.
At the same time this story is playing out, you have the soldiers of Abu Gharib fame being tried by the military for their misdeeds. What a wonderful convergence of events.
It’s a media feeding frenzy.
Let’s see those pictures of the naked Iraqi’s with their heads in sand bags one more time. Maybe somebody missed it the last 200 times they showed it.
But you know, I missed the video of Nicholas Berg getting his head cut off by Zarqawi. Can I see that one again? Has anybody got a video of the Iraqi police recruits being suicide bombed? How about that Irish woman being shot in the head after spending her life helping needy Iraqi’s? What happened to those video? I guess the answer is that bad guys doing bad things is not news. We expect that from them.
Good guys doing bad things is REAL news. You don't expect it from them, unless they are congressmen. I just read a great quote from Teddy Roosevelt about roll call in the Senate; when they call their name, they don't know whether to say "present" or "guilty". That another story.
Does the media think Iraq is some type of police SWAT raid or something?
In war, people get hurt. This is a surprise to media types. They imagine only soldiers get hurt. For the first few months of the insurgency, they would report that 15 civilians were killed by U.S. troops. Never mind that the civilians were carrying rocket propelled grenadees and AK-47's. They were civilians and that implied that they had been killed by some mistake of American tropps.
Another flash for those media types; not only do people get hurt, in war, they die. In the heat of the moment, all kinds of crap happens. You shoot people who are trying to surrender. You shoot people who are just in the wrong place at the wrong time. You shoot completely innocent people, like the Italian agent at the check point. You even shoot your fellow soldiers. You can even shoot yourself sometimes. All by mistake. You don’t plan for it to happen. It just happens.
Frankly, it's like CAREFULLY having a plane crash. The rules try and make chaos and mayhem a gentlemanly sport. This son of a bitch, who 10 minutes ago was trying to blow your head off, is now wounded and the rules call for us to stop trying to kill him. Maybe he isn’t tired of trying to kill ME yet. But the rules say this calls for a time out. Okay, TIME OUT!, everybody stop shooting, this guy doesn’t want to play war anymore. I just spent 50 rounds of ammo taking down the asshole that shot my best friend in the face. Now I’ll bandage his wounds, MEDIVAC him to the nearest military aid station and spend the next month or so nursing him back to health. Then we can sit down quietly and discuss the error of his ways.
Yeah, maybe I will be merciful. But more likely, I’ll let him bleed out and then toss him in the dead pile with the others.
Sorry, but I would sacrifice the lives of a hundred wounded "insurgents" to save the life of one Marine or Soldier.
Let’s talk a little about the Geneva Convention.
There has been a lot of talk about how we are not treating our prisoners correctly under the Geneva Convention. Mainly this talk is coming from Capitol Hill. Do you know what the Geneva Convention says you can do to people in an occupied country who are resisting military control? In rebellion as it were? It says they can be executed. Not tossed in jail to be led around on a dog leash or have fake electric wires put on their fingers. Nothing unusual can happen to them. No, they can be taken out and shot.
Let’s try and adhere to ALL the rules of the Geneva Convention. Let’s treat them mercifully and if they still resist… well, then treat them mercifully.
When do we start?
Good.
A wounded man can kill you as easily as one who isn’t wounded. Up close, when you least expect it.
The national news sees it differently. Wednesday night NBC news showed the nation the video clip of the Marine shooting the wounded man. Of course it was too graphic to show the whole thing, they warned us. They froze the picture and played the audio instead.
But just the same, they love showing that kind of stuff. As if to say, "The Marine has been acquitted but we know better", just take a look for yourself and be as outraged as we are.
At the same time this story is playing out, you have the soldiers of Abu Gharib fame being tried by the military for their misdeeds. What a wonderful convergence of events.
It’s a media feeding frenzy.
Let’s see those pictures of the naked Iraqi’s with their heads in sand bags one more time. Maybe somebody missed it the last 200 times they showed it.
But you know, I missed the video of Nicholas Berg getting his head cut off by Zarqawi. Can I see that one again? Has anybody got a video of the Iraqi police recruits being suicide bombed? How about that Irish woman being shot in the head after spending her life helping needy Iraqi’s? What happened to those video? I guess the answer is that bad guys doing bad things is not news. We expect that from them.
Good guys doing bad things is REAL news. You don't expect it from them, unless they are congressmen. I just read a great quote from Teddy Roosevelt about roll call in the Senate; when they call their name, they don't know whether to say "present" or "guilty". That another story.
Does the media think Iraq is some type of police SWAT raid or something?
In war, people get hurt. This is a surprise to media types. They imagine only soldiers get hurt. For the first few months of the insurgency, they would report that 15 civilians were killed by U.S. troops. Never mind that the civilians were carrying rocket propelled grenadees and AK-47's. They were civilians and that implied that they had been killed by some mistake of American tropps.
Another flash for those media types; not only do people get hurt, in war, they die. In the heat of the moment, all kinds of crap happens. You shoot people who are trying to surrender. You shoot people who are just in the wrong place at the wrong time. You shoot completely innocent people, like the Italian agent at the check point. You even shoot your fellow soldiers. You can even shoot yourself sometimes. All by mistake. You don’t plan for it to happen. It just happens.
Frankly, it's like CAREFULLY having a plane crash. The rules try and make chaos and mayhem a gentlemanly sport. This son of a bitch, who 10 minutes ago was trying to blow your head off, is now wounded and the rules call for us to stop trying to kill him. Maybe he isn’t tired of trying to kill ME yet. But the rules say this calls for a time out. Okay, TIME OUT!, everybody stop shooting, this guy doesn’t want to play war anymore. I just spent 50 rounds of ammo taking down the asshole that shot my best friend in the face. Now I’ll bandage his wounds, MEDIVAC him to the nearest military aid station and spend the next month or so nursing him back to health. Then we can sit down quietly and discuss the error of his ways.
Yeah, maybe I will be merciful. But more likely, I’ll let him bleed out and then toss him in the dead pile with the others.
Sorry, but I would sacrifice the lives of a hundred wounded "insurgents" to save the life of one Marine or Soldier.
Let’s talk a little about the Geneva Convention.
There has been a lot of talk about how we are not treating our prisoners correctly under the Geneva Convention. Mainly this talk is coming from Capitol Hill. Do you know what the Geneva Convention says you can do to people in an occupied country who are resisting military control? In rebellion as it were? It says they can be executed. Not tossed in jail to be led around on a dog leash or have fake electric wires put on their fingers. Nothing unusual can happen to them. No, they can be taken out and shot.
Let’s try and adhere to ALL the rules of the Geneva Convention. Let’s treat them mercifully and if they still resist… well, then treat them mercifully.
When do we start?
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
The Terrorist Islamic Republic of Iraq?
I hate to ask, but is there any reason the new democratically elected government of Iraq could not democratically decide to become a state sponsor for terrorism?
From recent articles I have seen about elected Iraqi officials working to undermine the democratic process, one could see the endless possibilities to gum up the works with "elected" radicals.
From recent articles I have seen about elected Iraqi officials working to undermine the democratic process, one could see the endless possibilities to gum up the works with "elected" radicals.
Friday, March 18, 2005
We'll Miss You David
David Grey Wilhelm is gone.
Killed for his truck. Killed for his truck.
An exceptionally good man is dead. His wife and family grieve.
Evil men live on. I don’t understand it.
It makes me sad. It makes me angry. It makes me thankful that the next person David’s murderer talked to, a single mother, talked to him about God.
She told him he had value, that God’s Son had given his life for him out of love. That meant he was worth much more than he had thought possible. The killer gave himself up without hurting anyone else.
Why didn’t somebody tell that rapist, that murderer, that man God loves as much as he loves you and me, that God loved him before he went on his killing spree?
If he had given David a chance, I know David would have told him. Maybe David did try to tell him. Maybe the killer’s heart was so hard that gentle words could not reach him.
We will never know.
Now the tributes have been made. The tears have been shed. More tears will be shed.
I’m proud to say I knew him. I wish I had known him better. Now that he is gone, it is apparent to all of us what a special person he was.
What made him so special?
Who made him so special?
His parents did certainly. His creator had an even bigger hand in who he was. I believe what made David special was his faith in God. He lived as the Bible tries to teach the rest of us to live, to become like Jesus. Gentle, loving, caring, giving, respectful, compassionate, helpful, are just a few of the things that Jesus was; and how David was.
I pray that there are more parents raising more men like David.
We need men like David.
Now, more than ever.
Killed for his truck. Killed for his truck.
An exceptionally good man is dead. His wife and family grieve.
Evil men live on. I don’t understand it.
It makes me sad. It makes me angry. It makes me thankful that the next person David’s murderer talked to, a single mother, talked to him about God.
She told him he had value, that God’s Son had given his life for him out of love. That meant he was worth much more than he had thought possible. The killer gave himself up without hurting anyone else.
Why didn’t somebody tell that rapist, that murderer, that man God loves as much as he loves you and me, that God loved him before he went on his killing spree?
If he had given David a chance, I know David would have told him. Maybe David did try to tell him. Maybe the killer’s heart was so hard that gentle words could not reach him.
We will never know.
Now the tributes have been made. The tears have been shed. More tears will be shed.
I’m proud to say I knew him. I wish I had known him better. Now that he is gone, it is apparent to all of us what a special person he was.
What made him so special?
Who made him so special?
His parents did certainly. His creator had an even bigger hand in who he was. I believe what made David special was his faith in God. He lived as the Bible tries to teach the rest of us to live, to become like Jesus. Gentle, loving, caring, giving, respectful, compassionate, helpful, are just a few of the things that Jesus was; and how David was.
I pray that there are more parents raising more men like David.
We need men like David.
Now, more than ever.
Sunday, March 13, 2005
Why Don't Arizona Farmers Grow Lettuce in Mexico?
Lettuce growers in Arizona are being annoyed by the Border Patrol. It seems the Border Patrol is arresting and deporting the undocumented Mexican workers coming to Arizona to pick lettuce.
After about a hundred years of using undocumented workers to harvest lettuce, and paying them a pittance to do it, the lettuce growers say they have no way of determining which worker has false documents. The growers say they would not hire them if they believed they were in the country illegally.
Who do they think they're kidding?
The growers make more profit using illegal workers. They illegal workers don't give the bosses any trouble either; cooperate or I'll turn you in to the Border Patrol.
Why doesn't the U.S. Government prosecute employers who knowingly hire undocumented workers? See the next paragraph for the answer.
Our government goes to a lot of trouble to make it LOOK like we want to stop illegal immigrants. In fact, they know that big business, especially agribusiness, drives our policies on immigration. Government policy is pretty much whatever Congress allows, and what Congress allows is what doesn't irritate the big campaign donors.
End of that story. But stay tuned for the coming story on how someone in the government is going to be held responsible for letting those bad, bad terrorists into the country from Mexico.
Here is a novel idea. Grow the lettuce in Mexico and the workers wouldn't have to sneak in to the country to pick it. NAFTA and all that!
After about a hundred years of using undocumented workers to harvest lettuce, and paying them a pittance to do it, the lettuce growers say they have no way of determining which worker has false documents. The growers say they would not hire them if they believed they were in the country illegally.
Who do they think they're kidding?
The growers make more profit using illegal workers. They illegal workers don't give the bosses any trouble either; cooperate or I'll turn you in to the Border Patrol.
Why doesn't the U.S. Government prosecute employers who knowingly hire undocumented workers? See the next paragraph for the answer.
Our government goes to a lot of trouble to make it LOOK like we want to stop illegal immigrants. In fact, they know that big business, especially agribusiness, drives our policies on immigration. Government policy is pretty much whatever Congress allows, and what Congress allows is what doesn't irritate the big campaign donors.
End of that story. But stay tuned for the coming story on how someone in the government is going to be held responsible for letting those bad, bad terrorists into the country from Mexico.
Here is a novel idea. Grow the lettuce in Mexico and the workers wouldn't have to sneak in to the country to pick it. NAFTA and all that!
Saturday, March 12, 2005
California Gerrymandering and New Ideas
California Gov. AHNOLD is about to take a ballot initiative to the people concerning gerrymandering.
Gerrymandering in California is nothing new. It's been happening around the country since the country began. Remember the recent debacle in Texas when the Democrats ran off to Oklahoma to keep from being defeated in voting on the new districts? What a joke.
There was a district in North Carolina that looked like someone had opened the doors of a car and driven down I-85 to create it. Following the beach for about 200 miles made the district that started all the fuss in California.
Why can't voting districts be made out of groups of two or three cities or counties without one party trying to get a leg up on the other by manipulating voting districts?
Maybe what we really need is a third political party. (Not something like Ross Perot tried to start. I can't believe I voted for him. That giant sucking sound turned out to be him pulling out of the race.)
We can call the new party the "Green America Party" (blue states plus red states make green. Clever huh?). We will simply ask a third of all the Senators and Representatives to switch to the new party for the good of the country. (Of course they could volunteer to join it they wanted.) The party would ideally be comprised of left-leaning Republicans and right-leaning Democrats (if any can be found to own up to that designation).
I have more ideas.
How about the losing presidential candidate becoming the vice president? Oh I like that idea. Talk about compromise.
Here's another; make Congress vote on each subject in a bill individually. No more attaching the pork barrel expenditure to the bill funding the Blind Orphans Minority Inner City Health Clinics. Imagine, if you will, the announcement from the Speaker of the House;
OKAY, ALL IN FAVOR OF $30 MILLION FOR CONSTRUCTION OF A MUSEUM FOR THE HISTORY OF CAT BREEDING IN ALASKA, RAISE YOUR HAND!
Yeah, this could happen.
Gerrymandering in California is nothing new. It's been happening around the country since the country began. Remember the recent debacle in Texas when the Democrats ran off to Oklahoma to keep from being defeated in voting on the new districts? What a joke.
There was a district in North Carolina that looked like someone had opened the doors of a car and driven down I-85 to create it. Following the beach for about 200 miles made the district that started all the fuss in California.
Why can't voting districts be made out of groups of two or three cities or counties without one party trying to get a leg up on the other by manipulating voting districts?
Maybe what we really need is a third political party. (Not something like Ross Perot tried to start. I can't believe I voted for him. That giant sucking sound turned out to be him pulling out of the race.)
We can call the new party the "Green America Party" (blue states plus red states make green. Clever huh?). We will simply ask a third of all the Senators and Representatives to switch to the new party for the good of the country. (Of course they could volunteer to join it they wanted.) The party would ideally be comprised of left-leaning Republicans and right-leaning Democrats (if any can be found to own up to that designation).
I have more ideas.
How about the losing presidential candidate becoming the vice president? Oh I like that idea. Talk about compromise.
Here's another; make Congress vote on each subject in a bill individually. No more attaching the pork barrel expenditure to the bill funding the Blind Orphans Minority Inner City Health Clinics. Imagine, if you will, the announcement from the Speaker of the House;
OKAY, ALL IN FAVOR OF $30 MILLION FOR CONSTRUCTION OF A MUSEUM FOR THE HISTORY OF CAT BREEDING IN ALASKA, RAISE YOUR HAND!
Yeah, this could happen.
Friday, March 11, 2005
Clinton's "Heart" Surgery
Doctors have operated on former President Clinton to remove the scar tissue around his heart. The previous heart bypass surgery was successful in routing the arteries and veins around the source of his pain; his groin.
Seriously, I am glad the operation went well and he can continue to live a full and productive life.
Seriously, I am glad the operation went well and he can continue to live a full and productive life.
Wednesday, March 09, 2005
Italian Money Helps Kill Americans and Iraqis
There is a rumor going around that the Italian government gained release of their kidnapped journalist by paying $5,000,000 in ransom money to the kidnappers. Rumor also is that this wasn't the first time a deal was made.
If these rumors turn out to be true, and I believe they probably are, then this ransom money has and will undoubtedly go to support the insurgency being waged against Coalition Forces, Iraqi Forces and the Iraqi people. Many are dead and are going to die because of weapons of war this ransom money will pays for.
Short term gain. Long term pain.
An Italian Secret Service Agent was killed by mistake. The whole of Italy is in mourning. Italy blames the war-mongering Americans for killing him while unsuccessfully trying to murder the woman he was escorting. Since American policy is not to negotiate with terrorists, the Italian logic is that if Italians negotiate with terrorists the Americans will kill you. Outrage by twisted logic.
Where is the outrage by the Italian public over the collusion by their government with the terrorists? That one agent's death is NOTHING compared to the number of people that have died and are going to die because the Italian government wanted the political mileage to be gained by her release.
Political mileage paid for, not simply with cash, but with blood.
If these rumors turn out to be true, and I believe they probably are, then this ransom money has and will undoubtedly go to support the insurgency being waged against Coalition Forces, Iraqi Forces and the Iraqi people. Many are dead and are going to die because of weapons of war this ransom money will pays for.
Short term gain. Long term pain.
An Italian Secret Service Agent was killed by mistake. The whole of Italy is in mourning. Italy blames the war-mongering Americans for killing him while unsuccessfully trying to murder the woman he was escorting. Since American policy is not to negotiate with terrorists, the Italian logic is that if Italians negotiate with terrorists the Americans will kill you. Outrage by twisted logic.
Where is the outrage by the Italian public over the collusion by their government with the terrorists? That one agent's death is NOTHING compared to the number of people that have died and are going to die because the Italian government wanted the political mileage to be gained by her release.
Political mileage paid for, not simply with cash, but with blood.
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