Democrats Shocked as Bush Runs for Re-Election
President Bush released the first television ads of his re-election campaign today. They are so low-key as to be almost completely inoffensive. Nevertheless, the Democrats and the nation's newspapers pretend to be shocked--shocked!--that the ads include brief views of scenes from the September 11 attacks. The New York Times can imagine nothing more improper than that the President should refer--for even a fraction of a second--to the defining event of his first term:
[T]hroughout the day [President Bush's] aides were scrambling to counter criticism that his first television commercials crassly politicized the tragedy of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks...The criticism — from a firefighters union, relatives of victims and allies of Senator John Kerry — put the Bush campaign in an uncomfortable position....Democrats said they did not believe that the president's aides had expected this much furor...Even some Republicans expressed worry.
The principal technique used by most newspapers was to dredge up two or three relatives of Sept. 11 victims to criticize the President's ads (nearly always sight unseen). Given that the 3,000 victims had at least 25,000 to 50,000 close relatives, finding two or three devoted Democrats among them is not much of a feat.
And, not surprsingly, the same names showed up repeatedly among the President's critics. UPI, in a story that was widely reproduced, relied heavily on a critical quote by Monica Gabrielle, the widow of a Sept. 11 victim. Mrs. Gabrielle, with all due respect to her tragic loss, is a crackpot who blames her husband's death not on the Arab terrorists who murdered him, but on the American construction industry. A member of the Skyscraper Safety campaign, she apparently believes that the solution to terrorism is skyscrapers that are designed to withstand the impact of fully-loaded jet airplanes:
We must first separate the events of September 11 into two categories: the terrorist attacks and the subsequent building failures, which alone encompass a variety of horrifying conditions. Unbelievably, evacuation and emergency preparedness were sorely lacking or totally non-existent on 9/11. This, along with critical flaws in the design and construction of the buildings, contributed to the ominous conditions occupants found themselves in, which ultimately claimed the lives of thousands....This responsibility must rest with all parties potentially affected: building owners, building managers, tenants, employers and employees.
Notwithstanding the transparency of the techniques used by the "mainstream" media to create a faux furor over the President's mild-mannered ads, their effort appears to have been successful. Still, this poses an interesting test of the media's neutrality. Before long, John Kerry will begin running ads or, at a minimum, giving speeches touting his Vietnam war service as a prime qualification for the Presidency. Consistent with the prominence that the media have given to a handful of anti-Bush relatives of Sept. 11 victims, can we expect that Kerry's references to Vietnam will provoke a "furor," with negative stories in all the newspapers quoting two or three of the many thousands of Vietnam veterans who are offended by Kerry's characterization of them as war criminals, and object to his politicization of the war?
ONE MORE THING: Don't you think there is a relationship between the media's hysteria at the briefest possible visual reminders of Sept. 11 in Bush's ads, and the blackout that the media have imposed on news footage of the attacks on that day? Do you think it is coincidental that no American network will show footage of the airplanes hitting the towers, of the burning buildings, of the devastation at the Pentagon, of the towers collapsing, or, most of all, of desperate Americans jumping from the windows of the World Trade Center? Why do you suppose all such images have been embargoed by every single member of the American media establishment? Why are memories of the devastation inflicted by Islamofascist terrorists relegated to the status of samizdata?
I agree with Daryl Worley: if it was up to me, I'd show them every day. But the American media, and the Democratic Party, have a great deal invested in the hope that Americans will forget what happened that day. Hence the hysterical attacks on President Bush's ads.
