Memo to the self-proclaimed “mainstream media”:
Point 1: You actually aren’t in the American
mainstream. The American mainstream is miles to the right of you
politically, and in a different universe from you culturally.
Point 2: Religious faith is not a strange
affliction; it’s an essential component of (and an indicator of) a
healthy outlook on life.
Point 3: The U.S. Constitution isn’t an
exposition of what ought to be law, but of what is law. It
is not prescriptive, but descriptive. If you believe the
Constitution ought to protect a “right,” that doesn’t mean that the
Constitution does protect that “right.” It just means that you have
the opportunity in a free society to work through the political
process to protect that right either by statute or, if and only if
you formally amend the Constitution, via language in the
Constitution itself.
Point 4: Ordinary Americans may not be sure
whether or not the American effort in Iraq is already “lost,” but
they strongly want to believe that it is still winnable. Unlike
you, they think that Americans really are the “good guys” over
there, whether or not we “win.” And unlike you, they do not think
that we somehow earned or deserve the terrorists’ ire.
Point 5: Most Americans think that if Western
Europe dislikes us, that is a sign not that the United States or
its current administration is wrongheaded, but that Western Europe
is wrongheaded. In fact, even those ordinary Americans who think
that the current administration is wrongheaded still believe that
Western Europe is asinine for not liking us.
Point 6: President Bush did not “lie” to get us
into war in Iraq. I challenge anybody to prove that he “lied.” A
lie is not merely a statement that turns out not to be accurate; it
is a statement that the speaker himself knows is inaccurate. There
is no evidence, none whatsoever, that President Bush believed
anything other than exactly what he told the American people in the
months leading up to the war. And if you say that Bush “lied”
without being able to show evidence that he intentionally
misled us all…well, then, you, yourself, are a liar.
Point 7: There was no unanimity or even broad
agreement between the American left and right on how to conduct the
Cold War. The left furiously opposed all the policies that ended up
winning the Cold War. And, contrary to revisionist history, the
left never believed that the Soviet Union would collapse of its own
weight anyway. Instead, the left consistently said that the Soviets
were too strong ever to be defeated or to fall apart, and that
therefore the only way to deal with them was to reach an
accommodation with them, by convincing them that we could no longer
be a threat to them, so as to make them stop being nasty to us.
Strength, not accommodation, won the Cold War. And those lessons
are applicable in the war against Islamic terrorists.
Point 8: By every traditional measurement, the
U.S. economy is not just strong, but stunningly strong. And it has
been strong since well before the 2004 election.
Point 9: Tax cuts, by definition, do not “give”
money to the rich. The government doesn’t own the money to “give”
it out. The people who earn the money own the money. Government
merely decides how much of it to take, to confiscate, for other
purposes. Any money that the government does not take in taxes is
not money the government has given; it is money the government has
not taken.
Point 10: The economy began strengthening
immediately after the 2003 tax cuts. Government revenues began
growing strongly right after those tax cuts, just as conservatives
predicted, and have continued to grow at record levels since. And
taxes paid (as opposed to tax rates) grew more
progressive, not less, after those tax cuts, just as they have done
after almost every tax cut for the past 50 years.
Point 11: Saddam Hussein did indeed have
weapons of mass murder. The question is not whether or not he had
them — they were documented numerous times in the 1990s — but
what happened to them. Did they just get degraded? Were they
destroyed? Were they lost? Were they moved to Syria? Those are the
questions to which nobody knows the answers. But it is an absolute,
incontrovertible, documented fact that he had them.
Point 12: The Supreme Court did not “award” the
2000 election to George W. Bush, and its main decision was not made
by a 5-4 split. A consortium of every major news outlet in the
country conducted its own recount of the Florida ballots and found
that under every legal approach advocated by the Gore campaign,
Bush won. Moreover, the decision itself on the overall legal issue
in Bush v. Gore was handed down by a 7-2 majority; it was
merely the remedy that was decided by a 5-4 split. Absent
that remedy, a) the counting under the standards proposed by Gore
would have given Bush the win; b) the alternative constitutional
means of letting Congress decide would have given Bush the win; c)
the other alternative constitutional means would have left it to
the Florida governor to determine which Florida slate of electors
was the official one, which would have given Bush the win.
Point 13: The majority of the charges leveled
by the Swift Boat vets against John Kerry were not disproved. In
fact, most of them were never answered. At least a couple of them
are incontrovertibly true.
Point 14: The 1988 campaign of the elder Bush
did not run a TV ad with the photo of Willie Horton. (An
independent effort did.) And it was not Republicans who first
raised the issue, nor was it used as a proxy for race. It was
reporters (non-conservative ones) for the Lawrence Eagle
Tribune who broke the story, and it was Al Gore who first used
it against Michael Dukakis.
Point 15: Most Google searches trying to find
examples of respected conservatives calling liberals or Democrats
“unpatriotic” or “un-American” would be fruitless. But examples of
leading Democrats calling Republicans or conservatives
“un-American” are multitudinous.
Point 16: President Bush and his official
spokesmen have used language far less nasty toward their Democratic
opponents than President Clinton and his official spokesmen
(especially Mike McCurry) used toward their Republican opponents.
In fact, it is virtually impossible to find President Bush himself
ever using harsh language about the left, even though Harry Reid
and company have used the most scathing language toward him. He
promised to change the tone in Washington, and he, himself, has
lived up to that pledge. (More’s the pity. The blame-America-first
crowd that runs the Washington Democratic Party deserves to be
called on the carpet.)
Okay, that’s plenty for now. The mainstream media lives in too
much of a leftist echo chamber to ever hear any of this,
anyhow.
Quin Hillyer is a senior editor of The American
Spectator. He can be reached at qhillyer@gmail.com.
