There's so much going on it's hard to know just where to start. Do we start with the asinine media assault on Bill Bennett? Or the media firestorm about the sacred Baghdad museum, which burned out the moment all those inconvenient facts leaked out. Or how about Mrs. Clinton's shunning of the families of 9/11's victims and her deceptions about the issue.
Mercy me, so much to say and so little space in which to do it.
Let's start with this obscene little witch's dance the idiot media performed around the stake where they hoped to incinerate Bill Bennett's reputation. True to his nature, the first coals were lit by Newsweek's snarling little ultra-leftist Jonathan Alter and some other socialist punk.
The two intrepid investigators, with the help of some blabbermouth casino functionaries, had discovered that Bill Bennett, America's leading advocate of the solid virtues, had bet enormous sums of money playing the slots and video card games in Las Vegas, which for the purposes of the story seems to have been cast as a den of iniquity where decent people simply don't go and gamble away the rent money.
(I've never been to Vegas, and the only thing I have against the place its the fact that it's located in a state rash enough to send the very nasty Harry Reid to even further befoul the United States Senate. One hopes Nevadans will come to their senses next year and rid the nation of this curse they've inflicted on Capitol Hill.)
This was followed by a similar hatchet job by one Joshua Green of the far-left Washington Monthly. Wrote Green, "The Washington Monthly and Newsweek have learned that over the last decade Bennett has made dozens of trips to casinos in Atlantic City and Las Vegas, where he is a 'preferred customer' at several of them, and sources and documents provided to The Washington Monthly put his total losses at more than $8 million."
He doesn't bother to tote up Bennett's winnings, which, Bennett insists, just about match his losses. In other words, Bennett says he more or less broke even over the last 10 years.
What's behind this silly tempest in a teapot – this shocking discovery that Bennett is a high roller – a fact known to most of his friends and associates and even some people in the media?
As Michael Reagan noted in his syndicated column, somebody obviously has it in for Bill Bennett. And there's little doubt who that somebody is – America's liberals still seething with anger and resentment over their electoral defeats in 2000 and 2002 and, unless everything changes in the next 18 months, a Bush landslide re-election victory and catastrophic Socialist Democrat losses in the House and Senate in 2004.
It's clearly reached the point where these panicked scoundrels will try anything to damage conservative Republicans, even to going haywire with non-stories. If they can't win, they can at least smear.
The fact of the matter is that:
Now we come to Hillary. God, will we never be rid of this dreadful woman and her disgusting spouse? Must we continue to be harangued by a failed president and his harridan of a wife? Will the media every stop fawning over these two should-be has-beens?
I once worked for a publisher who was wont to say that the public is fascinated by freaks. He catered to that obsession. Today's media, with its worshipful coverage of the Clintons, seems to be following suit. If the Clintons had even a tint of normalcy about them, they'd be ignored, but like the two-headed cow and the bearded lady, they make good copy. Besides, they don't gamble – a little adultery here and there, a rape or two, here a lie, there a lie, but they don't commit real sins like gambling.
Hillary, according to Justice Department sources, committed perjury during the Whitewater scandal investigation. Now Stephen Brill, author of a new book about 9/11, "After: How America Confronted the September 12 Era," says that Hillary tried to peddle a falsified version of her role in the wake of 9/11 and, according to NewsMax.com, made a "craven attempt to trash fellow Sen. Charles Schumer, and even had her office provide bogus records of the phantom meetings."
Brill told WABC Radio's Steve Malzberg, "They gave me documents and phone calls and things like that which just plain never happened," adding that Clinton's office attempted to construct "an elaborate story, with an elaborate subtext of memos and phone calls – a long, long story."
Neither Newsweek, which found Bennett's gambling to be so newsworthy, nor the rest of the print media, which was busy wallowing in the slime of Newsweek's biased reporting on the horrific Bennett "scandal," bothered covering Hillary's deceptions.
I'm beginning to think that this woman could commit mass murder and the media would give the story a pass or find an exculpatory excuse for her.
Finally, there was the other media firestorm that raged around the looting of the Baghdad museum, a place that suddenly achieved status as the holiest of sites in the eyes of the shocked media, which saw a golden opportunity to indulge in a little postwar sniping at the U.S. armed forces and the Bush war policy they abhorred.
The barbarians had looted this shrine of antiquity, carrying off priceless artifacts of the distant past in this cradle of civilization and leaving behind nothing but rubble and tearful museum curators and employees, America and the world were told.
The past had been looted while American troops spent their time acting like ... well, like troops engaged in cleaning up after a battle when, according to the media, they should have been guarding these priceless treasures. As many as 170,000 museum pieces were reportedly gone, probably forever.
There was just a little problem: It never happened that way.
Col. Matthew F. Bogdanos, a Marine reservist who is investigating the looting and is stationed at the museum, told the New York Times that museum officials had given him a list of 29 artifacts that were definitely missing. But since then, four items – ivory objects from the 8th century B.C. – had been traced.
''Twenty-five pieces is not the same as 170,000,'' said Bogdanos, who, the Times reports, in civilian life is an assistant Manhattan district attorney.
It turns out that before any looting took place, much of the museum's inventory of artifacts had been put away for safekeeping. A lot more has been found in Jordan and is on its way home to Baghdad.
What was really missing, it turns out, was some honest reporting, but that is hard to come by with a dishonest mainstream media devoted endlessly to promoting socialist and Democrat propaganda instead of reporting the real news.
Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist who writes for NewsMax.com. He is editor & publisher of Wednesday on the Web (http://www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s. He also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee and helped handle the Washington public relations operation for the Alaska Statehood Committee which won statehood for Alaska. He is also a trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute and a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers
He can be reached at
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