Guilty (35 page)

But the facts were irrelevant when the word “arsenic” allowed liberals to scream that Bush was poisoning us. In a typical doomsday editorial, the
San Francisco Chronicle
intoned, “Arsenic and Water Don't Mix.”
⁶⁴
Other apocalyptic editorials were titled “A Powerful Poison”
(News and Observer
[Raleigh, NC]), “Serve Up a Tasty Glass of Arsenic
(Detroit Free Press),
and “Arsenic, Ozone and Lead Are Poison, Not Politics”
(South Bend Tribune
[Indiana]).
⁶⁵
Letters to the editor reached a fever pitch. Noe Coopersmith wrote a letter to the editor of the
Chronicle
saying that Bush “seems determined to poison us all with arsenic in our water.”
⁶⁶
James F. Gerrits wrote to the
Times Herald
(Port Huron, Michigan), “The new administration in Washington seems to be bent upon poisoning the general population.”
⁶⁷
Kurt Weldon wrote to the
Los Angeles Times
that Bush was “getting ready to … poison our children with arsenic-laden water.”
⁶⁸

These letters were impressively panic-stricken. But excited liberals firing off letters to newspapers could not hold a candle to the professional hysterics at the
New York Times.
(There must be something in the water over there.) The
Times
ran three separate editorials and more than a dozen op-ed columns attacking Bush for not immediately adopting the new arsenic standard that was so urgent, it had not been implemented throughout eight years of the Clinton administration. America's most easily fooled journalist, Bob Herbert, raged that “Mr. Bush is presiding over a right-wing juggernaut that has … withdrawn new regulations requiring a substantial reduction in the permissible
levels of arsenic, a known carcinogen, in drinking water.”
⁶⁹
Paul Krug-man wrote, “And about those who thought Mr. Bush meant something kinder and gentler by ‘compassionate conservatism,' all I can say is, let them eat cake. And drink arsenic.”
⁷⁰
Guest columnists Paul Begala and James Carville wrote a column saying Bush's “environmental agenda would put more arsenic in the water and more pollutants in the air.” I guess that depends on what your definition of the word “more” is. In Carville and Begala's sentence, it meant “the same as it was for the past six decades, including during the Clinton administration.”

But the winner of the prestigious Lombardi Award for Best Beating of a Dead Horse was Maureen Dowd, something of a nag herself, with a grand total of seven op-eds denouncing the Bush administration's decision to delay implementation of a new arsenic rule dumped on them by the departing Clinton administration. These columns are believed to contain considerably more than 10 parts per billion of pure b.s., also a known carcinogen. Sample: “As W. and Uncle Dick went about strip-mining the nation, allowing arsenic in the water and turning Alaska into a gas station …”
⁷¹
(We started drilling for oil in Alaska under Carter, incidentally.)

By August of Bush's first year in office, the Democratic National Committee was running an ad with Senate minority leader Tom Daschle saying, “Under FDR, all we had to fear was fear itself. Now we have to fear arsenic in our drinking water.” The late
Washington Post
columnist Michael Kelly ruefully remarked, “The charges are manifestly false and they stick anyway.”
⁷²

In the end, the Bush administration adopted the rule, requiring vast amounts of money that could no longer be spent on other things, like heart disease research, lifesaving vaccines, or … I don't know … how about shoring up some levees in Louisiana? A stupid regulation was adopted because of a prank pulled by the Clinton administration and then elevated to an emergency lifesaving measure by a ferociously anti-Bush press. Bush didn't even get credit for finally adopting the idiotic rule hysterically demanded by liberals. The article reporting Bush had adopted the new arsenic rule ran on page A18 of the
Times
.
⁷³

Clinton himself had frozen all midnight regulations promulgated
by the first Bush administration. Guess how that was portrayed by the media. If you guessed “heroic,” you would be correct. When Clinton did the exact same thing as W., he was depicted as a brave young president protecting the country from Republican dirty tricks. An article in the
Wisconsin State Journal
explained, “President Clinton ordered his Office of Management and Budget to freeze all last-minute rulings by Bush
to make sure Bush wasn't hurting the country through a lot of last-minute favors.”
⁷⁴
An Associated Press article began, “The Clinton administration is putting the brakes on scores of regulations pushed in the waning days of President Bush's term, including an alternative-fuels proposal
backed by a big Republican contributor and ethanol maker…. ‘There were some that were pretty questionable,' White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers said Sunday.
”
⁷⁵
How prescient of Clinton to be opposing alternative fuels as far back as 1992!

It was entirely up to the media which new rules would become permanent and which would be scuttled.

Having dealt with last-minute rule-making himself, George W. Bush directed his agencies to refrain from proposing any new rules after June 1 of his last year in office, to avoid creating similar headaches for his successor.
⁷⁶
Again, liberals smelled the whiff of fascism. The
New York Times
ran a front-page article quoting “legal specialists” who denounced Bush for his ban on eleventh-hour rules, saying “the policy would ensure that rules the administration wanted to be part of Mr. Bush's legacy would be less subject to being overturned by his successor.”
⁷⁷
First of all: Huh? Second of all: So by not sneaking through eleventh-hour rule changes, the Bush administration was nefariously denying its successor administration the opportunity to revoke those rules?

The
Times
even got an environmentalist, John D. Walke, to attack Bush for trying to “shut down regulation for the remainder of the Bush administration.” It is unlikely that Walke would have liked any new rules being issued by the Bush administration, anyway. Not six months earlier, Walke had called the EPA's new rule on coal-fired emission plants “the Bush administration's parting gift to the utility industry.”
⁷⁸
You can't win with these liberals.

If Bush wanted to have fun, just before leaving office he would
have signed executive orders reinstating the “wall” between the FBI and the CIA, banning waterboarding, ending terrorist surveillance, prohibiting extraordinary rendition, and shutting down Guantánamo. After he defied all predictions by keeping America terrorist-free for eight years, let's see Obama do it without having to explain to the
New York Times
why he's “tearing up the Constitution.”

TO PROVE THAT THEIR OWN MASSIVELY LEFT-WING MEDIA BIAS is actually right-wing media bias, the media cite phony polls showing how overwhelming popular liberal ideas are with the public. It is not insignificant how the media report polls, because liberals consider polls—opinion surveys of the uninformed—more accurate than actual elections.

The biggest story of the 2004 election was the fraudulent Edison/ Mitofsky Research exit poll on election day. Early exit polls showed John Kerry the clear winner by mind-boggling margins. The Mitofsky poll had overstated Democratic percentages by about 6 to 8 percent since the 1992 election,
⁷⁹
but in 2004, the pro-Democratic tilt was absurd. For example, the exit polls had Bush tied with Kerry in Mississippi. Yes, Mississippi, the state where 9 out of 10 white men voted for Ronald Reagan in 1984. The 2004 exit poll results were so implausible that renowned political analyst Michael Barone initially speculated that the sites of exit polling had been leaked to the Democrats, enabling them to flood those precincts with Democratic voters eager to answer the pollsters' questions.

These stunningly inaccurate exit polls began to be released around noon on election day and convinced news anchors, talking heads, and even the campaigns that Kerry would win walking away. Recall that when Jimmy Carter conceded the election to Reagan in 1980 before the polls had closed on the West Coast, Carter was blamed for costing a slew of down-ticket Democrats their elections. In 2004, the entire punditocracy had essentially conceded the election to Kerry. Only at 9 P.M., when the real results began to come in, did the election flip to Bush. It was the first Kerry flip-flop that actually served the national interest.

Had the wildly inaccurate 2004 exit polls turned the election, this would have been the most spectacular October Surprise in history— better than a simple, little “October Surprise,” this was an “Election Day surprise.” How many voters were discouraged by the leaked exit polls showing Kerry to be the clear winner? In the end, Bush won, so Republicans walked away from this jaw-dropping near-theft of an election without complaint.

After the election, the designer of the exit poll, Warren Mitofsky, frantically examined the results to try to figure out what had gone so horribly wrong. What Mitofsky found was that “the biggest discrepancies between actual precinct votes and the exit pollsters' results occurred in precincts where the exit poll personnel were female graduate students.”
⁸⁰
Barone suggested that Republicans might have been less likely than Democrats to answer the pollsters' questions, “especially when the interviewer is a young woman whose appearance signals she is some kind of Bush hater.”
⁸¹
Perhaps it was the “Bush = Hitler” buttons that Republicans found off-putting. Next time, how about having Mormon women take the exit polls?

But ludicrous exit polls showing Kerry winning Florida by 110 percent were soon being cited by liberals as proof that Bush stole the election. Contributing to the conspiracy theories was the fact that Mitofsky's exit polls in other countries have always been accurate. But as Mitofsky told Barone, in other countries, such as Mexico and Russia, everyone answers the exit polls. It may even be mandatory in Russia. In the United States, he said, about half of those leaving polling places refused to participate in exit polls.

Those facts, adduced by the exit poll author himself, didn't slow liberals down. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote a major piece for the pretentious and stupid
Rolling Stone
magazine, titled “Was the 2004 Election Stolen?” (I responded in a spellbinding article titled “No.”) As his smoking gun, Kennedy noted that “the first indication that something was gravely amiss on November 2nd, 2004, was the inexplicable discrepancies between exit polls and actual vote counts.”
⁸²
But the discrepancies weren't “inexplicable”—they were unexplained, soon to be explained by Warren Mitofsky. Kennedy somberly noted that “the exit poll created for
the 2004 election was designed to be the most reliable voter survey in history.” And the
Titanic
was “designed” to be unsinkable.

University of Pennsylvania professor Steven Freeman also relied on the exit polls for his book, rhetorically titled
Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?
(Look for my follow-up book, tentatively entitled
No.)
Freeman argued that exit polls “should be like measuring precipitation after rain has already fallen.”
⁸³
Except, according to the man who designed and oversaw the exit poll, 50 percent of the raindrops refused to participate. As Charles Murray says, it's not an accident that for the last two decades the only really useful public policy ideas that have had an effect on public debate have come from think tanks and not American universities.
⁸⁴

There was also conspiracy theorist David Earnhardt's documentary
Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections,
which again took the exit polls as the fact-based control group that proved the actual voting results were a fraud and a hoax. You know what we need? We need a system even more reliable than an exit poll for determining how people want to vote. Maybe if we could get every voter to go into some sort of booth and cast a secret ballot …

If liberals will challenge actual election results based on these sacred polls, you can imagine how liberals can twist “public opinion” results with no election to contradict them. Actually, you don't have to imagine. I've looked it up.

After the media have flogged an issue to death, they direct pollsters to ask people whether they are “concerned” about the calamity being broadcast in headlines across the nation. Poll respondents, who seem to think they can get an answer wrong, dutifully agree to be alarmed by these media-generated “crises.” Completely phony political issues— such as campaign finance reform, earmarks, bipartisanship, health care, and global warming—suddenly roil national political campaigns as politicians become convinced that the public will lynch them if they don't pass, say, campaign finance reform laws. Proving that media coverage can turn any issue into a crisis, in the midst of the media's overblown coverage of Halliburton, Harken, and Enron—the last of which was connected to Bush by virtue of the fact that both Bush and
Enron were from Texas—the
New York Times
triumphantly produced a
Times
/CBS poll showing, as the headline said: “Poll Finds Concerns That Bush Is Overly Influenced by Business.”
⁸⁵

One of the most deceptive polls in world history was used to advocate liberals' dearest cause: killing an innocent person. After a Florida state court judge ordered that Terri Schiavo be starved to death on the basis of hazy claims from her adulterous husband that she had once expressed a wish to die after watching a TV show, ABC promptly produced a poll purporting to demonstrate that the vast majority of Americans were rooting for Schiavo's death.