Say Anything Blog

This is positioning for 2006 and the problem is that they do not know which position is going to help them win.  Different districts have different demographics and someone like Pelosi can get away with calling for an immediate withdrawl while someone like Dorgan or the others from red states cannot.

The real question is can Bush keep the Republicans unified and in his camp despite the growing criticism.  The new strategy to turn the agenda back towards Illegal Immigration and towards the economy should help play to the Right’s stengths and shift the focus from Iraq.

Remember that no news from Iraq is good news as long as it gets the media focusing on the domestic agenda.  The economy is humming along.  Falling gas prices and strong GDP and Jobs numbers mean all the Dems have left to do is bash Iraq.  And at the end of the day, they cannot offer any suggestions on what they will do better.

Rob said, I think it shows that, for the Democrats, Iraq is nothing more than a political issue. They don’t really care what happens there (if they did there would be no calls for troop withdrawal at all), they just want to win elections.

Just don’t question their patriotism, because hey - that is off limits. If the Democrats want to stab our troops and America in the back while working to lose a war, then so be it. Just don’t question their patriotism.

In other words don’t question the patriotism of the treason party.

I think the more “finger-in-the-wind” sort of politicians are trying to be on the record as having been both for and against the war, counting on a generally friendly news media and a short attention span of news consumers. That way, regardless of the prevailing attitude a year from now, they can count on a soundbite supporting the popular position.

Yeah, I know--it didn’t work so well for Kerry. I think the American electorate on the right and center has developed a longer memory and more patience for researching the issues, while the left is still playing catch-up with the new media and political realities.

[...] The MoveOn.org/Michael Moore/Cindy Sheehan base of the Democrat party isn’t too happy with all the fence-sitting on Iraq Democrat politicians have been engaging in. Unfortunately (or fortunately, I guess, depending on your perspective) Hillary isn’t coming down off the fence any time soon: After delivering her prepared remarks, Mrs. Clinton returned to the subject of Iraq. [...]

The only position Democrats seem to share is that Bush’s current strategy is flawed.

So, the Democrats in fact don’t agree on anything related to the Iraq war.

I just want to clarify that I don’t think Joe Lieberman is a traitor even though he is a Democrat.

The only position Democrats seem to share is that Bush’s current strategy is flawed.

See dave, here is a perfect example.(What Liberal Media?)

Dave:

What liberal media?

The fact that there isn’t anything coherent in the DNC Iraq strategy and the fact that this was left out of the original story points to a liberal bias.  Same with Sheehan and “hiding” 90% of the really flakey BS spewed from her mouth.

Sometimes the media reports on topics that make them personally uncomfortable.  The bias isn’t necessarily in which stories get reported but how it gets reported.  The evidence that US reporters have a net political bias is pretty much overwhelming. Thus it is completely expected that individual reporters biases will show up in their writing, in how they slant stories.  Which stories get covered is more often a function of the editor’s judgment of what is news worthy, so this doesn’t speak to individual journalists’ bias as much.  Their personal bias, on the other hand, prevents them from reporting in such as way as to appear to be “piling it on” the Democratic Party.  That is where the bias shows its ugly head.

In the case of this story, it is obvious to anybody other than a heavy dope smoker that the Democrats have been completely incoherent their positions on the Iraq war.  That makes it a newsworthy article, a “necessary” topic for coverage.  Not covering the story would make them poor journalists, and not just biased journalists.

It is a strange fairyland universe that MSM journalists live in that they think they can insulate themselves from their personal prejudices and biases.

The evidence that US reporters have a net political bias is pretty much overwhelming.

Dave:

That study merely showed that there are more liberal journalists than conservative journalists.

Actually, I counted at least 15 studies referenced in this research article, so it’s not just one study.

It’s irresponsible to conclude that all journalists are biased in favor of their own individual ideology.

Actually, it’s completely naive---and at odds with what is known on a scientific basis about human behavior---to assume otherwise.

In science, we fully recognize that individuals are biased in favor of their own viewpoint, and put mechanisms in place to protect ourselves from it.  That is why the “scientific method” is so important. If I went in front of a group of scientists and boasted that I could act without my personal biases influencing my research, I would be laughed out of the room.

It is a crack-pipe dream of journalists and their apologists that journalists are capable of reporting without their individual biases or prejudices influencing their reporting.

The vast majority of journalists are white Christian males–can I then conclude that the media is biased against minorities, non-Christians and females?

First I’d like evidence to establish that “the vast majority of journalists are white Christian males”.  I think this probably is not the case, unless you have a different definition of “vast majority” that I do.

However, assuming your assertion to be true, you can then quite reasonably assume that their perceptions will be filtered by this factor.  The underlying assumption that ones experiencial basis influences ones perceptions is a generally accepted scientific fact.

The only people I know who claim to be able to act otherwise are journalists and their apologists.  Then again, journalists as a group are about the most reactive and non-scientifically thinking as any that I have met, so it would follow that they think they are capable of violating generally established laws governing human behaivor.

Yea! What Carrick said.

Carrick,

Now you’re gone and burst the poor boy’s bubble.  Shame on you.

But wait, there’s hope still.  Watch...he’ll now counter with something as insipidly stupid as his last response.

Regards…

Or maybe he won’t.

Guess Dave ran out of snarky, topic-changing comebacks on this one.

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.

-- Thomas Jefferson

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