Finally, An Attempt to Ask For the Truth

I have been working on a post for a couple of weeks. I read a story today that said everything I was also trying to say. So, I dumped what I was working on, and instead I am reprinting the article. This is such a great open letter! It is long so please read to the end, and everyone who starts to think that this is just more ramblings from the right, keep this in mind. It was written by a Democrat.
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WorldWatch First appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC

By Orson Scott Card
October 5, 2008

Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?

An open letter to the local daily paper -- almost every local daily paper in America:

I remember reading All the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.

This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

What is a risky loan? It's a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.
The goal of this rule change was to help the poor -- which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can't repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can't make the payments, they lose the house -- along with their credit rating.

They end up worse off than before.

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.

Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It's as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.)
Isn't there a story here? Doesn't journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren't you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefiting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. "Housing-gate," no doubt. Or "Fannie-gate."

Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting subprime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.

As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled Do Facts Matter? "Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury."

These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was ... the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was ... the Republican Party.

Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!

What? It's not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?

Now let's follow the money ... right to the presidential candidate who is the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.

And after Freddie Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate's campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing.

If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was.

But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an "adviser" to the Obama campaign -- because that campaign had sought his advice -- you actually let Obama's people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn't listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign.

You would never tolerate such weaselly nit-picking from a Republican.

If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.

If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.

There are precedents. Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension -- so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link. (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.)

If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression.

Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That's what you claim you do, when you accept people's money to buy or subscribe to your paper.

But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie -- that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad -- even bad weather -- on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.

If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth -- even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.

Because that's what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don't like the probable consequences. That's what honesty means. That's how trust is earned.

Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time -- and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.

Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter -- while you ignored the story of John Edwards's own adultery for many months.

So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?
Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?

You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women. Who listens to NOW anymore? We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles.

That's where you are right now.

It's not too late. You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there.

If you want to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against tightening its lending practices.

Then you will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation's prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at Obama's door.

You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis. You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.

This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion.

If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe --and vote as if -- President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie.

If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats -- including Barack Obama -- and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans -- then you are not journalists by any standard.

You're just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it's time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a daily newspaper in our city.


Copyright © 2008 Hatrack River Enterprises Inc. All rights reserved.

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That article says everything I wanted to say. Thank you Orson Scott Card, for having the honesty and guts to say it for me. Please forward this to as many people as you can. It is not too late to get the truth out there!

War protesters show true colors

"I support the troops, but I don't support this war."

I don't want to hear that crap anymore after what happened this weekend at a recruiting center in Milwaukee.

A group, estimated in number to be between 30 to 40 young men and women, using the pretense of the fourth anniversary of our involvement in the Iraq war to take to the streets in protest decided the best way to send their message of disapproval was to desecrate and vandalize a local army recruiting center. The group, dressed in all black and carrying signs decrying our involvement, stopped in front of the army center and began breaking windows, spray painting the front of the building, lit fires on the side walk, and for the final insult threw bags filled with human excrement into the building.

The left can't claim this was just a group of protesters whose emotions got the better of them, or that it was an unorganized "mob" that just happened to join together. Largely due to tips from witnesses, 21 of these "protesters" were able to be apprehended by local police. They ranged in age from l4 to 24, were male and female, and they came from all over South East Wisconsin.

Thinking about this logically tells us this had to be planned well ahead of time. They were all dressed in black, they had to meet in a location close enough to walk to the recruiting center, but probably the grossest fact that tells me this was planned ahead is that someone (probably more than one someone) had to defecate and then collect/assemble it into those bags thrown into the building.

I know the response from the left is that this is just an isolated group who was acting on their own and don't represent blah, blah, blah. But why is it that only the left has their activism turn violent? The tolerant, compassionate, reasonable, supportive of the little guy left is always the side that turns to violence.

Don't believe me? Tell me this, wasn't it great to see all of the supporters of the war as they gathered peacefully in Washington, DC as a counter to the anti-war protesters? The supporters actually outnumbered the protesters and...what? You didn't see the pictures of the supporters? You also say you didn't even know the supporters were there at all?

That pretty much makes my point about the media bias. They made it sound like this huge group had gathered, but failed to mention at all (or mentioned as an afterthought) the larger group of supporters.

The spokesman for the Army recruiting center made a statement about this group of absolute thugs. His words sum up the arrogance and stupidity of this so called protest group. He said that, "we are here to protect this group's right to protest..."

Let that sink in for a while.

Double Standards

Ann Coulter is being criticized for using one of the "F" words that are not allowed in today's society. No, not the big one, but the one that is a derogatory term against homosexuals. She has even drawn the ire of some Republicans who claim she should apologize, and they disavow themselves from herself and the comment. I even heard a caller from a national radio station claim that we as conservatives should always take the high ground and not use terminology like that.

Okay, would I personally ever use that word? No as I don't believe it serves any positive purpose, but I would like to look at this situation in context. The word was used in a joke that revealed the recent trend of people using a quick rehab stint to get back into the good graces of the American people.

I like Ann for many reasons, one being the fact that she is a strong conservative who speaks her mind and never backs down from a fight. I believe she knew this was going to be an inflammatory statement that would bring to light the hypocrisy of political correctness. PC speech is a huge pet peeve of mine as it is with a lot of conservatives. The only point it serves is to give liberals a tool to try to silence speech they don't agree with. The left tries to scare people into believing our rights are being taken away with things like the Patriot Act. PC speech is a much more subtle virus creeping into our lives, but instead of trying to inoculate ourselves from this virus the left embraces it.

Let's look for a minute at the double standard applied in just a couple of cases. If you are a Democrat you can say anything to smear Republicans, our military, Christians, or even our President. Howard Dean,the leader of the DNC (Democrat National Committee), said he hates Republicans and conservatives. He said we are evil, stupid, and the only way we could get a group of African Americans together in a room is if they are part of the wait staff. More than one Senator has called our military an evil organization that tortures, rapes, and kills innocent civilians. Senator John Kerry has told lies about our military twice; separated by thirty years. Rosie O'Donnell, a liberal host of a TV show, said that Christians are just as big a threat as militant Islamofacists and possibly more dangerous. How many times has the President been described as a stupid, dunce, frat boy?

None of this is ever called out or condemned by our media. It is okay to trash these people. What's worse is that too few people on our side ever stand up and fight back. Ann is one of the few who will push back. So when she uses the word to make a point, why are we surprised that she is taken out of context by the media who also completely miss the point of the original statement.

So when I hear one from our side saying that we should always take the high ground I say no. No, because the left is the one setting the high ground, but it is only applied to us. They never play fair so even if we try to follow their rules they will just; change the rules. I would love to see more people like Ann stand up and say, "Hell no! We refuse to play by your rules."