Using Lieberman Loss is a Republican Dirty Trick?

[red states rule]

You know the kook left is starting to get nervious when you see a story like this.

The liberal media is blaming Republicans for using Lieberman's loss in CT!


Why the Republicans Are Loving the Lieberman Loss
At a time when the GOP should be back on its heels, Connecticut voters' rejection of a centrist Senator gives the party a potentially powerful new weapon to use against the Democrats this fall
By MIKE ALLEN/WASHINGTON


From Washington State to Missouri to Pennsylvania, Democratic candidates found themselves on the defensive Wednesday as the Republican Party worked ferociously at every level to try to use the primary defeat of Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut to portray the opposition as the party of weakness and isolation on national security and liberal leanings on domestic policy. Doleful Democrats bemoaned the irony: At a time when Republicans should be back on their heels because of chaos abroad and President Bush's unpopularity, the Democrats' rejection of a sensible, moralistic centrist has handed the GOP a weapon that could have vast ramifications for both the midterm elections of '06 and the big dance of '08.

At breakfast time, Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman was in Cleveland, decrying "an unfortunate embrace of isolationism, defeatism, and a blame- America-first attitude by national Democratic leaders at a time when retreating from the world is particularly dangerous." In early afternoon, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow told reporters in Crawford, Tex.: "It's a defining moment for the Democratic Party, whose national leaders now have made it clear that if you disagree with the extreme left in their party they're going to come after you." And an hour or so later, Vice President Cheney told wire-service reporters in a conference call: "It's an unfortunate development, I think, from the standpoint of the Democratic Party to see a man like Lieberman pushed aside because of his willingness to support an aggressive posture in terms of our national security strategy."

Karl Rove, White House senior adviser and deputy chief of staff, telephoned Lieberman but an aide said the call was personal in nature and did not include any offer of assistance with his independent bid against Tuesday night's victor, Ned Lamont of Greenwich.

One of the nip-and-tuck Senate races this year is in Missouri, and backers of Sen. Jim Talent are preparing an attack on his opponent, State Auditor Claire McCaskill, that is emblematic of the sort that will be seen all over the country within 24 hours. "Does Claire McCaskill support the wishes of the angry left by endorsing Ned Lamont's candidacy or will she support the man who was chosen by Al Gore as the Democrat's 2000 nominee for Vice President?" the National Republican Senatorial Committee asks in a statement that will force McCaskill to talk about messy party business instead of her favored issues of government accountability and affordable health care.

The NRSC blasted similar releases into 10 states.

House candidates planned a similar tack, and the National Republican Congressional Committee issued a memo this morning playing up the potential distraction of Lieberman's independent candidacy in a state where three GOP incumbents — Reps. Rob Simmons, Chris Shays and Nancy Johnson —are perennially endangered. The memo said Connecticut Democrats "will now continue to train their attention on vanquishing Senator Lieberman when their three House candidates need all the help the can get."

Some senior Democrats hoped Lieberman would bow out to avoid underscoring party divisions. For instance, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, who is close to the Lamont family, will campaign for the Democratic nominee, an aide said.

But Dan Gerstein, a strategic communications consultant who is a senior adviser to Lieberman, tells TIME that the independent campaign — formally called "Connecticut for Lieberman" — is "full steam ahead" and that the Senator's remarks on election night were "a point-of-no-return speech." Lieberman was doing a series of interviews, mostly with Connecticut reporters, and plans some campaign stops on Thursday with Democrats who supported him and will continue to do so. Organizers shied away from calling it a kick-off tour, instead saying it is a new phase of the campaign. "He's committed," Gerstein said. "He feels liberated and he feels very strongly it's the right thing to do." Gerstein said the Senator is prepared to have some tough conversations with senior Democrats, perhaps even former President Bill Clinton, who may pressure him to withdraw. "He feels there's something much larger at stake," Gerstein said.

Gleeful Republicans across the country mocked their opponents as isolationist "Defeat-ocrats," as Mehlman put it, and even some Democratic officials said they can already imagine the ads in November races saying that Lieberman, once within a few hundred votes of being Vice President of the United States, is now "not liberal enough" for the Democratic Party. Republican officials, who have had little but bad news for months as Iraq festered and U.S. voters showed increasing signs of pessimism and discontent, said the Lamont victory gave them a chance to paint Democrats as a party that had become captive to the liberal wing symbolized by the MoveOn.org civic action group. Mary Matalin, an outside adviser to the White House, signaled the message when she said on Fox News Channel shortly after the polls closed: "MoveOn is not fringe. They're the heart of the party."

On television and in speeches in coming days, party officials and strategists plan to talk about their respect for Lieberman as a distinguished public servant and argue that Lamont's victory represents the end of the long tradition of strong-on-national-defense Democratic leaders in the mold of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy. The GOP plans to try to broaden the argument beyond Connecticut, a liberal stronghold, and work to convince viewers and voters that Democratic nominees across the country have more in common with Michael Moore and liberal bloggers than Main Street America.

Mehlman, speaking to the City Club of Cleveland this morning, said the rejection of a well-liked Senator who was strong on national defense showed that Democratic candidates must embrace "defeatism and isolation" or "risk being purged" for their party. "For those of us who follow politics closely, who work in politics, and who know that there can be good and honest people on the other side of the political divide, it is a shame," he said. "It is also a sign of what the Democratic Party has become in the 21st century. ... The Democratic Party has chosen to nominate for Senate a leading proponent of the isolationist, defeatist, blame-America-first philosophy."

Trying to look on the bright side, Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean issued a statement this morning pointing to strong turnout in the primaries and declaring that Democratic voters "are energized." The challenge for Dean, and his party, is to channel that energy in a direction that makes victory more likely, not less.

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1224692,00.html?cnn=yes

 

[Annie]

Interesting article, there seems to be a presumption by both TIME and the DNC that the Republicans should just slate candidates, shut up and lose. They seem shocked that instead they are going to define the issues, but their vision. Who would have thought that was part of the electoral process? :shocked:

 

[red states rule]

Interesting article, there seems to be a presumption by both TIME and the DNC that the Republicans should just slate candidates, shut up and lose. They seem shocked that instead they are going to define the issues, but their vision. Who would have thought that was part of the electoral process? :shocked:

That is what Dems mean by "bipartisanship"

They get to say what ever they want, about who they want; and Republicans sit back and say nothing

 

[Annie]

That is what Dems mean by "bipartisanship"

They get to say what ever they want, about who they want; and Republicans sit back and say nothing

Well that's their 'vision' but it never happens.

 

[red states rule]

I also remember how the liberal media said how Republicans needed to work with Pres Clinton.

Now they say how Pres Bush needs to work with Democrats

They lectured Republicans needed to get along with the Democrat majority in Congress

Now they say how the Democrat minority needs to stand up to the Republican majority

 

[Annie]

I also remember how the liberal media said how Republicans needed to work with Pres Clinton.

Now they say how Pres Bush needs to work with Democrats

They lectured Republicans needed to get along with the Democrat majority in Congress

Now they say how the Democrat minority needs to stand up to the Republican majority

That's what the media does, they are MSM/DNC. If you are in GOP you can complain and suck it up or just suck it up. For me, I like to keep pointing out their hypocrisy and bias.

 

[red states rule]

You mean liberal bias like this...............


The Early Show Continues To Mis-label Terrorist Surveillance Program
Posted by Lyford Beverage on August 19, 2006 - 09:07.


When the New York Times originally broke the story of the NSA Terrorist Surveillance Program, the rest of the media leapt to the bandwagon, and immediately began referring to President Bush's "Domestic Surveillance Program." One of the forums where this has been particularly egregious is CBS' The Early Show. Well, the last 7 months and all of the discussion has done nothing to change the view of the program held by CBS. There were two separate comments in a 30-second news snippet from Tracy Smith that were either inaccurate or incomplete, and, of course, they were inaccurate or incomplete in a manner that made the program sound worse than it is.

The first was the continued mis-labeling. The program is not, despite the mainstream press' continued insistence, a "domestic" surveillance program. The NSA is not monitoring American's domestic calls without warrants, or at least, if they are, that has not been made public. That's not what the program being talked about covers. The NSA is monitoring overseas communications of suspected terrorists and terrorism supporters. If some of those communications are into the United States, they're continuing to monitor. That doesn't make the conversations "domestic."

But according to Tracy Smith on The Early Show today, "President Bush says that he expects a Federal Appeals Court to uphold a key part of his domestic surveillance program." The drumbeat continues.

And then, to top it off, after mis-representing what the program is, she mis-states what the program does. "[The terrorist surveillance program] allows the monitoring of e-mails and phone calls from Americans suspected of having tied to terrorism."

Again, that's such an incomplete description as to be a virtual lie. The program that has been talked about and discussed is not about surveilling Americans. The surveillance is of terrorism suspects overseas. If they were surveilling Americans as a policy, there would surely be cases of entirely domestic conversations having been monitored. There have been no allegations that that has taken place. None. And it's just plain wrong to suggest, as CBS continues to do, that the program under discussion does that.

http://newsbusters.org/node/7073

 

[Annie]

Yep, like that. But I'd lable it MSM/DNC and highlight the bias. It becomes fun. Here's one I skipped from AP, cause the Israeli thing is just too easy:

http://www.topix.net/content/ap/3933511990239916943717574731050925583542?threadid=STF0E75PE6L6FFB5

Rockets Hit Lebanon Despite Cease-Fire

The Associated Press

By STEVEN R. HURST

August 14, 2006

Tens of thousands of Lebanese jammed bomb-cratered roads Monday as they returned to still-smoldering scenes of destruction after a tenuous cease-fire ended 34 days of vicious combat between Israel and Hezbollah...

The logical inference from the headline would be that Israel has sent rockets; when you get to the gist of the story, what do you find?

Highlighting the fragility of the peace, Hezbollah guerrillas fired at least 10 Katyusha rockets that landed in southern Lebanon early Tuesday, the Israeli army said, adding that nobody was injured. The army said that none of the rockets, which were fired over a two-hour period, had crossed the border and so it had not responded.

 

[red states rule]

Or this from the NY Times. Hezbollah is a Social Service agency........

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/18/world/middleeast/18hezbollah.html?pagewanted=all

A Girl’s Life Bound Close to Hezbollah
E-MailPrint Reprints Save

By SABRINA TAVERNISE
Published: August 18, 2006
AINATA, Lebanon, Aug. 17 — For Zahra Fadlallah, a serious 17-year-old, Hezbollah was always family. Two of her brothers were fighters. Her mother was an activist. A distant relative is a hard-line Hezbollah member in Parliament.

When the war hit, she stayed in this village to help her mother bake bread for the fighters. Both were killed in an Israeli airstrike in late July. Their bodies were dug out of the rubble this week.

Israel’s goal of uprooting Hezbollah from southern Lebanon has frequently been questioned by critics who say the group is deeply woven into society and cannot simply be cut out. An afternoon with the Fadlallah family in this southern Lebanese village shows that the group not only is part of society, but also helps form the shape of life itself.

It has a vast social services network that pays for health care and education, performs weddings and reduces electric bills — important considerations for Shiites in the south, who are some of the country’s poorest citizens.

Israelis, noting that their troops left Lebanon six years ago, say that the southern Lebanese should have no basis for ill will toward them. But this is a culture of long memories, and six years is not a long time for the wounds of the 18-year occupation to heal.

When Zahra was 10, her mother was arrested. She watched while Lebanese working for Israeli authorities put a bag over her mother’s head and led her out of the house. Her father was taken on the same day, and Zahra spent three days in the house by herself. Her brothers and sisters, already military age and deeply involved with Hezbollah, had moved to Beirut, north of the Israeli zone. Later, she hid while soldiers searched the house for weapons.

“It made a wound in her,” said Ali Fadlallah, one of Zahra’s brothers, who spoke in the living room of their family house as mourners came and went through a central hallway.

She had to help care for her father, who returned several days later badly beaten; he was refused admission to the local hospital because he was suspected as a Hezbollah collaborator, Ali said.

Every year in Ainata, villagers hold a poetry reading to commemorate the date that the Israelis withdrew. Zahra was one of the organizers.

In 1982, when the Israeli military first came to this area, it was to uproot local Palestinian guerrilla bases. That was a military success in the short term. But the Palestinians were outsiders, and Hezbollah is homegrown. With the end of the war, Hezbollah has emerged militarily diminished but far stronger politically. That new power will make voices like the Fadlallahs’ even more important as the weak Lebanese state stumbles ahead.

“Hezbollah is from here,” said Zahra’s fiancé, a Hezbollah activist who would give only his first name, Fadhi. “It’s the families of Ainata. It’s not a stranger.”

Not every family has a fighter. Hezbollah will not disclose the number of its fighters, but it is believed to be relatively small. Even so, tens of thousands of Shiites across south Lebanon are involved with Hezbollah in other ways. They hang banners and teach religious studies. They help in hospitals. They keep watch in neighborhoods.

The story of Zahra is typical. She was born in 1989, the same year one of her brothers, a fighter named Ahmed, and her older sister, Raja, moved to southern Beirut. Ahmed had joined Hezbollah and had been secretly working against Israeli forces in the south, and the Israeli administration, with a Lebanese staff, had discovered his work.

At that time, Hezbollah members communicated by secret missives, Ali said, and Zahra was the most inventive member of the family when it came to hiding them so they would make it through Israeli checkpoints.

“She had a lot of suggestions,” said Ali, sitting in the living room. Photographs of family members standing with Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, hung on the walls. An empty, knee-high artillery shell stood in the corner, holding a spray of artificial flowers.

The occupation squeezed life into uncomfortable shapes, broadly increasing Hezbollah’s popular appeal throughout southern Lebanon. The Fadlallah family remained separated until 2000, when the Israelis withdrew. Zahra was 11.

“I didn’t see my family for six years,” said a high school teacher and Hezbollah member who had come to pay his respects. “That would motivate anybody to want to change things.”

Hezbollah views Israel as an enemy, saying that its very existence means that Muslim lands were taken, changing the region forever.

But while Hezbollah’s political rhetoric sometimes refers to coming to Jerusalem and routinely refuses to acknowledge Israel as a state — maps in bookstores here label northern Israel as Palestine — voices in towns and villages across the south talk not of destroying Israel but of defending themselves from what they see as its aggressiveness.

“All the wars with Israel we were fighting to keep our land only,” said Raja, Zahra’s older sister, sitting in a black smock and black hijab on the living room couch.

Another brother, Muhamed, said that Israel had taken Muslim lands and that he could never accept it until they were given back. But even he did not see the Palestinians as a cause for Lebanon to invade Israel with the goal of destroying the state.

The high school teacher chimed in: “People of this village don’t want anyone to come and take their land. Not Israel, not America, not even Iran.”

Iran started Hezbollah in the 1980’s, as part of its Islamic revolution. The group is believed to be responsible for the kidnapping of an American reporter, Terry Anderson, and for the bombing of a Marine barracks in 1983. The group later evolved, adopting a more moderate public face under the leadership of Mr. Nasrallah, who took over in 1992 and began deepening the party’s social network. Programs started small: at the height of the Lebanese civil war, the group distributed water in hard-hit areas.

It was in Hezbollah charity work that Zahra found herself, Raja said. She wanted to become a doctor to help villagers and fighters. She seemed old beyond her years. In her teens, she kept the family finances. She was organized and never lost things.

“If you told her a secret, she would keep it,” the teacher said, wearing a Dolce & Gabbana T-shirt and a pair of jeans.

The family kept resisting. Ahmed was killed in 1999 in the village of Haddata fighting Israeli soldiers. The living room where the relatives spoke had several machine guns propped in the corner behind a door. The fields and farmlands leading to the town are singed with black marks from Katyusha rocket launchings, perfectly round like giant cigarette burns.

When the war started, Zahra was planning her wedding. She approached it with her characteristic seriousness. Her purse, found in the crushed basement where she had been hiding when the bomb fell, contained a note she had written to herself, truths she felt she should live by once she became Fadhi’s wife.

“Men talk more than women,” she wrote in clear Arabic script. “Set priorities. Be frank. Talk everything through.”

Even in that part of her life, Hezbollah was present. A photograph of Zahra and Fadhi smiling with her parents, standing next to Mr. Nasrallah in front of green satin-looking curtains, is framed in the living room. It was taken when they were engaged.

Once the airstrikes began and several artillery shells punched through Zahra’s bedroom wall, she moved with her mother out of the house into a basement just down the hill. They continued to bake and cook, giving the food to men who then took it to the fighters.

Ali called many times, desperately trying to persuade her to leave the village. She would not. Soon after, telephone contact was lost.

By the end of the war, the house was still standing, relatively undamaged. The basement shelter, however, was smashed beyond recognition. Zahra, her mother and at least three others, including a 5-year-old boy, were killed in the room, according to the Red Cross.

Villagers, who used a 48-hour cease-fire part of the way through the war to get to Beirut, told Zahra’s family she had been killed. Another brother, Amir, was killed in Bint Jbail, a neighboring village that is Hezbollah’s traditional stronghold. He was working in the hospital there, Raja and Ali said.

On Wednesday, the house breathed a heavy sadness. Early in the afternoon, a new group of relatives arrived from out of town. Embraces were exchanged. Women wailed.

The family waited as the villagers and emergency workers continued to dig. A group of young men had dug a temporary grave on a small, leafy hill for Zahra the day before, but Fadhi had a different idea. He wanted to bury her next to her brother in the fighters’ cemetery.

“This is where she should be,” he said, looking down at the small plot, a yellow Hezbollah flag stuck through the metal of its gate.

 

[Annie]

Which 'good works' noted above, may well be funded with conterfeit US $100 bills, taking a page right out of fellow evil Empire, NK. Does the MSM even consider such? If they brought forth 1/10th the skeptism they give to anything the US government does, to their reporting on terrorism and tyrants, they wouldn't be able to be so easily criticized and recently proven incorrect with too much frequency:

http://www.snappedshot.com/index.php?/archives/70-A-sudden-lack-of-context.html

Now that Hezbullah has suddenly morphed into a philanthropic organization, we learn from this photograph that they are distributing approximately US$12,000 to the needy in areas destroyed by Israel. Of course, what is our intrepid photographer obviously not curious enough to know? Well, that Hezbullah has already been dinged for counterfeiting U.S. currency:

One of the most prominent and influential members of the Hizballah terrorist organization, along with two of his companies, was designated by the Treasury Department today under Executive Order 13224. Assad Ahmad Barakat has close ties with Hizballah leadership and has worked closely with numerous Islamic extremists and suspected Hizballah associates in South America's tri-border area (TBA), made up of Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina. . . .

Barakat has also been involved in a counterfeiting ring that distributes fake U.S. dollars and generates cash to fund Hizballah operations. As of early 2001, Barakat was one of two individuals reportedly in charge of distribution and sale of the counterfeit currency in the TBA.

Once again, it's left to the Blogosphere to ask the questions the media isn't interested in asking.

 

[red states rule]

or the LA Times.....


LA Times - Hezbullah Propaganda In Form of Story On Lebanese Funeral
Posted by Warner Todd Huston on August 17, 2006 - 19:10.
After reading something like a recent story in the L.A. Times, one is struck with how little "news" or analysis is often included in the "news" paper, and how much evocative, emotive, fluff has replaced any attempt at informing the reader of what is really going on.

In the story titled, "His Heart Was Full for Lebanon and U.S.", writer ... or maybe I should say "story teller" as that seems more descriptive... Sam Quinones, gave us what amounts to a one sided, propagandistic account of the life of a man killed in Lebanon who so "loved" both the USA and Lebanon.

The subtitle pretty much tells the reader the direction of the story.


Mohamed Hammoudi lived in Los Angeles for years. He was enjoying his retirement in his homeland when an Israeli bomb struck.

There you have it. An almost American murdered by an evil Jew bomb. A kindly fellow who just loved everyone and was needlessly killed by those militaristic Jews.

Quinones goes on quite a lot about the life of Mohamed Hammoudi who we are told "admired a lot about the United States". Of course, we aren't treated to any examples of this "admiration" just the writer's say so that it was true. Though, we do find later in the story that he enjoyed reading the works of "Bob Woodward ... and Noam Chomsky", so we can guess how much "love" he might have had from his appreciation of the works of authors commonly known to savage the US, its culture and its politics.

Certainly, it is sad when people who were not necessarily "guilty" are harmed in war. It truly is sad that kindly Mr. Hammoudi lost his life. But, there are reasons things happen and this story leaves the feeling that the Jews just started casually throwing American made bombs about the countryside indiscriminately as there is no real effort to set the attacks in context in any way.
Consequently, we are treated to the nice life of Mr. Hammoudi for many paragraphs coupled with digs at the USA and Israel all along the way.

Here are all the swipes at the US and Israel in the story...


-He was enjoying his retirement in his homeland when an Israeli bomb struck.

-But two weeks ago, as Hammoudi sat down to a meal in the hilltop house in southern Lebanon that he had inherited after his father died, an Israeli bomb struck, destroying the stone structure and killing Hammoudi.

-"I've been crying from the first bomb landing, not only for my brother — for my whole family, for my whole country," said Hammoudi's sister Mariam

-When he died, "the United States lost more than what Lebanon lost," said Hassan Mansour, a lifelong friend who discovered Hammoudi's body.

-He was among a steady flow of Lebanese returning to vacation or live, repopulating a region largely deserted during Israel's occupation of Lebanon, which ended in 2000.

-Then both their houses were hit by Israeli bombs. No one saw Hammoudi after that.

-"After 30 years in the U.S., they sent you 'smart' bombs to get you killed," cried his sister Haniah.

-Most of Mansour's extended family has lost everything. Almost every house in Ainata is damaged, and many people are homeless.

-Perhaps the worst damage, Mansour said, has been to the esteem in which the Lebanese people held the United States.

-"People love Americans. Everybody wants to go to the United States," he said. "There is no need for this. You can easily have all these people on your side. I don't know why we have to go and make them our enemies."

-Hammoudi's family said Israel's attacks would only bolster Hezbollah, because the group — and not the U.S. or Israel — is most likely to care for those displaced by the bombing of villages such as Ainata.

-"Israel created Hezbollah," said Hammoudi's sister Mariam. "I am personally against Hezbollah. But when you have an enemy, you can create a devil to defeat the enemy."

-Meanwhile, bombs have silenced the voice of Mohamed Hammoudi.

Seems like the entire article reproduced there, doesn't it?

Well, it almost IS the whole article!

The lie that Israel "created Hezbullah" was especially egregious.

Now I will add here all the paragraphs that might be considered explicatory for the USA or Israel, sections that contain any hint of why the Israelis are doing the bombing in the first place and any support of that action.


-On July 12, Hezbollah fighters crossed into northern Israel and abducted two soldiers, sparking an Israeli bombing campaign in southern Lebanon.

Yep. That was it. One paragraph. 21 words in a sea of condemnation and vitriol.

Nope, what we have here is just another example of the L.A. Times supporting terrorists, making them seem softer, put-upon, and abused by those rotten Americans and Jews. Propaganda for terrorists, plain and simple.

And all that emanating from an American newspaper.

Thanks, L.A.Times, for aiding victory .... for Hezbullah.
http://newsbusters.org/node/7041