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While I am not
denigrating by any means the validity of the human rights issues and the moral
values it derives from, I offer this piece as another example of catering to
one segment of your voter base, while rebuffing others. - . KWC Open Door Policy Bumiller: Evangelicals Sway White House on Foreign
Human Rights “No one disputes that Mr. Bush already
cares deeply about those issues and has a personal faith that his advisers say
brings a moral dimension to a foreign policy better known for war. "To put
it simply, it's a fairly radical belief that a child in an African village
whose parents are dying of AIDS has the same importance before God as the
president of the United States," said Michael Gerson, Mr. Bush's chief
speechwriter and an important White House policy adviser who is a born-again
Christian. But it is also true, religious leaders and administration
officials note, that white evangelicals accounted for about 40 percent of the
votes that Mr. Bush received in the 2000 presidential election. In 2004,
political analysts say, he is unlikely to be re-elected without the strong
support of this constituency, which is predominately but not wholly Republican,
and which in other years has thrown significant support to southern Democrats
like Bill Clinton. Mr. Rove is now tending to the constituency with great care. "You're not going to run into too many people who are smarter than
Karl," said Dr. Richard D. Land, the president of the Ethics and Religious
Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, who is in regular
contact with Mr. Rove. "Karl understands the importance of this segment of
his coalition, and I think the president understands it. The president feels
that one of the contributory factors to his father's loss is that he didn't get
as many evangelical votes as Reagan did." Closed Door Policy Rich: Why are we back in Vietnam? “However spurious any analogy between the
two wars themselves may be, you can tell that the administration itself now
fears that Iraq is becoming a Vietnam by the way it has started to fear TV
news. When an ABC News reporter, Jeffrey Kofman, did the most stinging major
network report on unhappiness among American troops last summer, Matt Drudge
announced on his Web site that Mr. Kofman was gay and, more scandalously, a
Canadian — information he said had been provided to him by a White House
staffer. This month, as bad news from Iraq proliferated, Mr. Bush pulled the
old Nixon stunt of trying to "go over the heads of the filter and speak
directly to the people" about the light at the end of the tunnel. In this
case, "the people" meant the anchors of regional TV companies like
Tribune Broadcasting, Belo and Hearst-Argyle. ..
It's at times like
this that we must be grateful that Disney didn't succeed in jettisoning
"Nightline" for David Letterman. (The administration is only too
happy to send its top brass to Mr. Letterman when it doesn't send them to Oprah
— Colin Powell most recently.) If the Oct. 15 "Nightline" wasn't an
Edward R. Murrow turning point in the coverage of the war on terrorism, it's
the closest we've seen to one since 9/11. There will be others, because this
administration doesn't realize that trying to control the news is always a loser.
Most of the press was as slow to challenge Joe McCarthy, the Robert McNamara
Pentagon and the Nixon administration as it has been to challenge the wartime
Bush White House. But in America, at least, history always catches up with
those who try to falsify it in real time. That's what L.B.J. and Nixon both
learned the hard way.” |
