Brutally Honest

Local AM radio station fires CBS News

My favorite local radio station (Newsradio 790AM WNIS) has dropped CBS News over the Memogate flap:

NORFOLK, Va. - A news-talk radio station in southeastern Virginia has dumped CBS News because of listener outrage over Dan Rather’s “60 Minutes” report questioning President Bush’s National Guard service.

WNIS switched Thursday to ABC News.

“We had so much outcry from our listeners. They were calling and complaining and saying they wouldn’t listen to a CBS newscast anymore,” said Lisa Sinclair, general manager of Sinclair Communications, which owns WNIS and four other stations in the Norfolk area, home to the world’s largest naval base.

“This is a conservative market, and people felt that CBS was exhibiting a great deal of liberal bias and lost credibility with this situation,” Sinclair said, referring to the Sept. 8 story.

Rather apologized on behalf of CBS News on Monday because it could not authenticate documents used in the story that suggested Bush got preferential treatment to get into the Texas Guard during the Vietnam War.

Sinclair did not know how many upset listeners had called the station. WNIS received some calls Thursday from people pleased with the station’s decision, she said.

CBS spokesman Dana McClintock said the network has more than 1,000 radio affiliates nationwide and WNIS is the only one to drop CBS. None of the network’s more than 200 television affiliates has done so.

May more affiliates follow suit. Hats off to Tony Macrini, Lisa Sinclair and all the decision-makers at WNIS.

Coming to a theatre near you...

... at least I certainly hope so...

The Celsius 41.11 Interactive Media Center - A Citizens United Production

John Kerry: Aiding and Abetting

Ralph Peters brutally and honestly:

IMAGINE if, in the presiden tial election of 1944, the can didate opposing FDR had in sisted that we were losing the Second World War and that, if elected, he would begin to withdraw American troops from Europe and the Pacific. We would have called it treason. And we would have been right.

In WWII, broadcasts from Tokyo Rose in Japan and from Axis Sally in Germany warned our troops that their lives were being squandered in vain, that they were dying for big business and "the Jew" Roosevelt.

Today, we have a presidential candidate, the conscienceless Sen. John Kerry, doing the work of the enemy propagandists of yesteryear.

Is there nothing Kerry won't say to win the election? Is there no position he won't change? Doesn't he care anything for the sacrifices of our troops in Iraq?

And if he does care about our soldiers and Marines, why is he broadcasting remarks that insist — against all hard evidence — that the terrorists are winning?

Has he seen the situation with his own eyes? I'll gladly tell him how to get there. I'll even be his guide. And he can smell what remains of Saddam's mass graves — with new ones still being discovered. He can taste the joy of freedom among the Kurds. He can see the bustling commerce throughout the country — despite the violence that alone makes headlines.

Above all, he could see the magnificent performance of our troops, their dedication and professionalism. And their humanity, their goodness.

But Kerry doesn't want to see those things. He's reverting to form. Just as he lied about our troops three decades ago, encouraging our enemies of the day and worsening the suffering of our POWs in North Vietnam, today he's pandering to a new enemy.

Imagine the encouragement the terrorists, insurgents and global extremists draw from Kerry's declarations of defeat, from his insistence that our efforts in Iraq and in the War on Terror have failed.

As he always does, Kerry slips in qualifiers. Of course, Iraq's important. And he'll fight terror, too. It's just that the Bush administration doesn't know how to do anything. A Kerry presidency would let us withdraw our troops, collect more allies, succeed where others have "failed" and win the hearts and minds of the whole, wide world.

Earlier this week, Kerry made a much-ballyhooed speech offering four generalizations about how he would fix Iraq. But there was no detail, not a single nut or a lonely bolt. And the current administration is already doing most of what Kerry suggested.

As for involving the French and Germans, the truth is that they'd do more harm than good. These are the corrupt cynics who made billions from the U.N. Oil-for-Food program while the Iraqi people suffered. The French kiss up to every dictator willing to wink in their direction. The German military barely exists — it's just an employment agency for uniformed bureaucrats — and the French military's sole competence lies in slaughtering unarmed black Africans.

As for the United Nations, any day now we'll see a huge banner hanging from its Manhattan headquarters: Dictators For Kerry.

Even if I detested everything about President Bush, I'd vote for him just to rub it in the faces of the Germans, the French and all of the tyrants rooting for the Iraqi people to slip back into despotism. We Americans choose our own presidents, and we don't take orders from Europeans or from any of Kerry's other Swiss boarding-school pals.

I think it's great that Kerry speaks fluent French. I wish he'd go to France where he could speak it all the time.

In an election year, our engagement in Iraq is a legitimate topic for sober debate. But Kerry isn't serious. All he does is to declare defeat. He certainly doesn't want to be al Qaeda's candidate, but he's made himself into their man through his irresponsibility.

If Kerry were insisting, without caveats, that we're going to stay the course and win, while backing up his criticisms with convincing details of how he would improve our efforts, that would be fine. But his mad claims of disaster and his inability to maintain a firm position unquestionably give aid and comfort to the enemy.

The terrorists and their allies already intended to increase the level of violence in Iraq before November. But Kerry's pandering has encouraged them to pull out all the stops. I wish it were otherwise, that our election process had more integrity, but the truth is that every roadside blast and car bomb in Iraq is meant to support John Kerry.

...

In 1944, the Democrats had FDR. In 2004, they've got the stretch-limo version of Mike Dukakis.

There was a wartime election in 1864, too. The Democratic Party's candidate, former Gen. George McClellan, ran on a platform that declared President Abraham Lincoln's policy a failure. The price of McClellan's rhetoric was a prolonged war and tens of thousands of dead Americans.

In 1864, the citizens of the North were steadfast. They rejected the Democratic Party's warnings of defeat and saved the Union. In 2004, the American people, North and South, East and West, need to reject the cynical lies of John F. Kerry and vote to support our troops and save Iraq.

Ralph Peters is a retired Army officer and the author of "Beyond Baghdad: Postmodern War and Peace."

A beautiful piece...

Not Perfection: Pulling no punches

Dave has a must read up titled the biggest hypocrite in a parliament of whores: Kofi Annan.

Kofi Annan helped Saddam Hussein steal food from babies.

When U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan opined last week to the BBC that the U.S.-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein had been "illegal," two words came instantly to my mind: baby food. It would be interesting to hear Annan expand his opinion on legality and illegality when it comes to Oil-for-Baby Food.

If Mr. Annan wants to discuss right and wrong in Iraq, which seems to be the real issue, then it is time to talk about baby formula. Why? Because Mr. Annan's preferred means of dealing with Saddam was a mix of U.N. sanctions and the U.N. relief program called Oil-for-Food. And the heart and soul of Oil-for-Food was supposed to be the feeding of sick and hungry Iraqi babies--including the purchase by Saddam, under U.N. auspices, of large amounts of baby formula. When Oil-for-Food was launched in 1996, it was advertised by the U.N. as a response to such horrors as pictures of starving Iraqi children and alarming statistics about infant mortality in Iraq, released by one of the U.N.'s own agencies, Unicef.

It was in service of that U.N. mix of sanctions and humanitarian relief that Mr. Annan after visiting with Saddam in Iraq in 1998 returned to New York to report: "I think I can do business with him."

And oh what a lot of business the U.N. did. Mr. Annan's Secretariat collected more than $1.4 billion in commissions on Saddam's oil sales, all to supervise the integrity of Saddam's $65 billion in oil sales and $46 billion in relief purchases. The official aim of this behemoth U.N. aid operation was solely to help the people of Iraq, while the U.N. waited for sanctions to weaken Saddam enough so he would be either overthrown from within or forced to comply with U.N. resolutions on disarmament. Instead, Saddam threw out the U.N. weapons inspectors for four years, and, by estimates of the U.S. General Accounting Office, fortified his own regime with at least $10.1 billion grafted and smuggled out of Oil-for-Food.

Go read it all.

Jimmy Swaggart. Just. Shut. Up.

Via Joe Carter, at the evangelical outpost, I find this:

(Toronto, Ontario) A Canadian television station has apologized publicly to viewers for a telecast of American evangelist Jimmy Swggart's television program in which he threatened to kill gays.

The program, aired last week on Omni 1, a Toronto multicultural station, and throughout the US, has also prompted an investigation by the Canadian Radio Television Commission, the government agency which regulates television.

During the program, a rambling sermon by Swaggart who is trying to rehabilitate himself after an arrest for soliciting a prostitute, the televangelist turned to the subject of gay marriage.

According to a transcript of the program, Swaggart said: "I'm trying to find the correct name for it ... this utter absolute, asinine, idiotic stupidity of men marrying men. ... I've never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry. And I'm gonna be blunt and plain; if one ever looks at me like that, I'm gonna kill him and tell God he died."

Mr. Swaggart, what I find to be "utter absolute, asinine, idiotic stupidity" is the notion that anyone would listen to what you have to say and find it worthy.

You are, at least as represented by this latest statement of yours, the epitome of all that is wrong with fundamentalist Christianity. Why don't you simply start carrying signs stating "God hates fags" like that other blithering excuse for a Christian whose name I've conveniently and mercifully forgotten...

... May others just as quickly forget the name of Jimmy Swaggart.

CBSNews: We Were Misled

CBS News Concludes It Was Misled on National Guard Memos, Network Officials Say:

After days of expressing confidence about the documents used in a "60 Minutes'' report that raised new questions about President Bush's National Guard service, CBS News officials have grave doubts about the authenticity of the material, network officials said last night.

The officials, who asked not to be identified, said CBS News would most likely make an announcement as early as today that it had been deceived about the documents' origins. CBS News has already begun intensive reporting on where they came from, and people at the network said it was now possible that officials would open an internal inquiry into how it moved forward with the report. Officials say they are now beginning to believe the report was too flawed to have gone on the air.

But they cautioned that CBS News could still pull back from an announcement. Officials met last night with Dan Rather, the anchor who presented the report, to go over the information it had collected about the documents one last time before making a final decision. Mr. Rather was not available for comment late last night.

The report relied in large part on four memorandums purported to be from the personal file of Mr. Bush's squadron commander, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, who died 20 years ago. The memos, dated from the early 1970's, said that Colonel Killian was under pressure to "sugar coat'' the record of the young Lieutenant Bush and that the officer had disobeyed a direct order to take a physical.

Mr. Rather and others at the network are said to still believe that the sentiment in the memos accurately reflected Mr. Killian's feelings but that the documents' authenticity was now in grave doubt.

I gravely doubt that we'll hear Dan Rather apologize but I hold out hope that there's some shred of decency in the man...

UPDATE: Matt Drudge has the contents of Dan's statement today:

STATEMENT FROM DAN RATHER:

Last week, amid increasing questions about the authenticity of documents used in support of a 60 MINUTES WEDNESDAY story about President Bush's time in the Texas Air National Guard, CBS News vowed to re-examine the documents in question—and their source—vigorously. And we promised that we would let the American public know what this examination turned up, whatever the outcome.

Now, after extensive additional interviews, I no longer have the confidence in these documents that would allow us to continue vouching for them journalistically. I find we have been misled on the key question of how our source for the documents came into possession of these papers. That, combined with some of the questions that have been raised in public and in the press, leads me to a point where—if I knew then what I know now—I would not have gone ahead with the story as it was aired, and I certainly would not have used the documents in question.

But we did use the documents. We made a mistake in judgment, and for that I am sorry. It was an error that was made, however, in good faith and in the spirit of trying to carry on a CBS News tradition of investigative reporting without fear or favoritism.

Please know that nothing is more important to us than people's trust in our ability and our commitment to report fairly and truthfully.

I gagged on the last statement but hey, this is a start... now we need to know what investigations might take place, what laws (if any) were broken, who the players were, and to what extent were they involved...

Unfit for Command - I'm convinced

I've finished it this weekend.

It was something of a page turner for me, something I don't usually find to be the case when reading non-novels.

I learned things that have not been reported widely (imagine that) and at no time did I find myself thinking that O'Neill and Corsi had unfairly misrepresented the subject matter or John Kerry for that matter.

What I do want to do is compel others to read the book for themselves. I especially believe that the book is a must read for those who think the Swift Vets are motivated merely by politics. This goes far deeper than that and I believe O'Neil and his band of brothers have laid their case down well (it's chock full of footnotes and concludes with a most interesting time-line).

Bottom line... get a copy. Buy it, check it out at the library or cajole someone who has a copy to lend you theirs.

Just do it.

It's important.

The plot thickens

Ex-Guardsman: I Contacted Kerry Campaign:

A retired Texas National Guard official mentioned as a possible source for disputed documents about President Bush's service in the Guard said he passed along information to a former senator working with John Kerry's campaign.

Also Saturday, a White House official said Bush has reviewed disputed documents that purport to show he refused orders to take a physical examination in 1972 and did not recall having seen them previously.

The long-running story on Bush's Texas Air National Guard service took an unusual twist when CBS broadcast a report on what it said were the newly discovered records. The authenticity of the documents has come into doubt.

In his first public comment on the CBS documents controversy, the president told The Union Leader of Manchester, N.H., "There are a lot of questions about the documents, and they need to be answered."

The retired Guard official, Bill Burkett, said in an Aug. 21 e-mail to a list of Texas Democrats that after getting through "seven layers of bureaucratic kids" in the Democrat's campaign, he talked with former Georgia Sen. Max Cleland about information that would counter criticism of Kerry's Vietnam War service. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the e-mail Saturday.

"I asked if they wanted to counterattack or ride this to ground and outlast it, not spending any money. (Cleland) said counterattack. So I gave them the information to do it with," Burkett wrote.

Burkett, who lives just outside of Abilene, wrote that no one at the Kerry campaign called him back.

The e-mail was distributed to a Yahoo list of Texas Democrats. The site, which had about 570 members Saturday, is not affiliated with the state party.

Republican National Committee spokesman Jim Dyke suggested collaboration between Burkett and the Kerry campaign. "The trail of connections is becoming increasingly clear," he said.

Which, of course, leads us to the inevitable question, one filled with irony in my view given the players and circumstances...

... What did John Kerry know and when did he know it?

And now that I think about it... Where are Woodward and Bernstein when you need them?

Hewitt is now linking to Brutally Honest...

... and TypePad will likely be sending me a bill for exceeding their bandwidth allotments.

On Tuesday, I playfully wrote about how Hugh, one of what I might call the mega bloggers, had linked to a small time blogger named Rick and how I had, as most bloggers are wont to do, longed to be the Rick that Hugh had linked to.

Today, I am that Rick, thanks to that other Rick.

So very cool. I'm surpassing my all time high for unique visitors and am tasting, for the very first time, what it means to be linked to by one of the blogging gods (with a little 'g').

In any case, I welcome all who are visiting.

Glance around and check out my humble abode.

If you're one of those rich Republicans we hear so much about, then be sure and hit the Tip Jar (on the right) to help offset the soon to arrive TypePad exceeding-the-bandwidth surcharges (he posts shamelessly).

If you're one of them moonbat Democrats, I don't expect your stay to exceed my average-visit-length (as computed by the good folks at SiteMeter) but I encourage you to look around if only to raise your blood pressure a tad or two.

And if you're a God seeker like I am, and want to read about my own personal travails (it's likely to be a boring story but someone might learn something of value... perhaps... maybe...), then be sure and hit the Plainly Personal or Plainly Spiritual category links on the right.

And thanks Hugh... much appreciate the boost.

And a special thanks to that other Rick... I do like what you have to say over there, I only wish we didn't have to go through that silly registration process at Blogger to leave comments on your site.

What does it all mean?

Drudge posts CBS's long awaited statement on Memogate by the President of CBS News, Andrew Heyward:

"We established to our satisfaction that the memos were accurate or we would not have put them on television. There was a great deal of coroborating [sic] evidence from people in a position to know. Having said that, given all the questions about them, we believe we should redouble our efforts to answer those questions, so that's what we are doing."

And The American Thinker breaks it down for us (via La Shawn):

What the heck is going on?

I have no inside sources, but I do have a pretty good nose for corporate intrigue. Here are the inferences I draw:

1. There was a fierce internal battle over what to say, and therefore over what CBS should do. The statement which was finally issued after 6 PM was obviously so hastily composed that nobody even bothered with spelling questions. One can imagine an intense, draining meeting coming to the conclusion something has to be said, and dickering over the wording of a statement which would make no specific promises. It was probably dictated and typed up at the last minute. Possibly on an IBM Selectric Composer typewriter being fruitlessly employed over the last several days attempting to duplicate the formatting of questionable memoranda.

2. The fact that one faction is hanging tough, refusing to formally admit there is the possibility of fraud, thereby requiring an outside investigation, strongly suggests that the identity of the source is explosive. The longer the implausible rationalizations of CBS are offered, the sillier and guiltier the network looks. Crisis management theory tells executives to fess up when caught in an error, because prolonging the agony only makes the PR consequences worse. Therefore, there must be something at stake even worse than looking bad.

3. The worse consequences could be either criminal liability, regulatory trouble, or political liability. Forgery of a federal document and of a federal official’s signature are both potential criminal matters. People could end up in jail. CBS’s parent Viacom is the license holder for numerous large market television and radio stations, licenses collectively worth billions of dollars. When Aerojet General Corporation was convicted of unrelated criminal offenses, the FCC stripped it of a Boston television station license worth hundreds of millions of dollars. CBS’s licenses in most of the nation’s top television markets are worth far, far more, and could potentially be taken away. Even worse, if CBS turns out to have received the forgeries from a party related to the Kerry campaign or the Democratic Party, it faces political liability for conspiracy to alter a presidential election by fraud. The firestorm which would follow would be unprecedented. Watergate would be small potatoes, comparatively.

4. The logical inference is that at least one faction within CBS is adamantly opposed to admitting the possibility of fraud, because once it did so, it could be ethically and legally compelled to reveal who gave it the forged documents. Rather than face the almost unlimited downside outlined in point 3, CBS prefers to become a laughingstock. At least for the moment.

The bottom line?

Only moonbats and mouth-breathers will be watching CBS for their news from now till who knows when...