Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (27 page)

Shockingly though, Democrats are not infallible, either. Here are a few Democratic blunders that somehow made their way into the public record:

Bill Clinton:
“This is still the greatest country in the world, if we just will steel our wills and lose our minds.”
¹⁰²

Bill Clinton: “They’ve managed to keep their unemployment low although their overall unemployment is high.”
¹⁰³

U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer: “Those who survived the San Francisco earthquake said, ‘Thank God I’m still alive.’ But, of course, those who died, their lives will never be the same again.”
¹⁰⁴

Former Attorney General Janet Reno: “I always wait until a jury has spoken before I anticipate what they will do.”
¹⁰⁵

Al Gore: “A zebra cannot change its spots.”
¹⁰⁶
(In a speech on the Senate floor on September 1991, later edited in the Congressional Record.)

British Prime Minister Tony Blair: “The people going into action are in far more danger than me.”
¹⁰⁷
(On the relative safety of his family and soldiers being sent to Afghanistan, October 11, 2001.)

Hillary Clinton: “I’m having a great time being presi—”
¹⁰⁸
(On July 19, 2001, denying she intended to seek the presidency.)

Bill Clinton: “I’d like for you to have more, rather than less, sooner, rather than later.” (On January 22,1998, meaning he would never cough up any information whatsoever until threatened with a subpoena.)

Al Gore: “I always had a very vivid and clear sense that men and women were entirely and completely equal—if not more so.”
¹⁰⁹

Gore tried to pass off his “equal if not more so” stumble as a hilarious joke, and that is how the media obediently reported it. Except the joke would have been:
Women are equal, if not more so,
not
men and women are equal, if not more so.
Otherwise, it’s only a joke about bad grammar. Bush could have just as plausibly passed off his verbal slips as jokes about verbal slips.

Gore also told a union gathering that his mother used to sing lullabies to him as an infant including “Look for the Union Label.” Then it turned out that song had been written in 1975, when Gore was twenty-seven. Gore misspoke. Therefore—pursuant to the rigorous IQ standards imposed by the media—Gore is a moron.

For truly appalling grammar, nothing beats Hillary’s scandal patois. Legal troubles always seem to bring out the hillbilly in her. During the
60 Minutes
interview when the Clintons lied to the country about Gennifer Flowers, Hillary’s ersatz Arkansas twang was virtually unlistenable: “I’m not sittin’ here, some little woman, standin’ by my man like Tammy Wynette. I’m sittin’ here because I love him, and I honor what he’s been through and what we’ve been through together, and, you know, if that’s not enough for people, then, heck, don’t vote for him.”

Particularly grating is Hillary’s Valley Girl penchant for saying “real” when she means “really.” When asked at a press conference on Whitewater about her failing health care plan, she began: “I think that’s a real important question.”
¹¹⁰
During the lying
60 Minutes
interview, she said: “I think it’s real dangerous in this country if we don’t have some zone of privacy for everybody.”
¹¹¹
The only solace is knowing that listening to that must have been like nails on a blackboard for every single
New York Times
reporter.

Meanwhile,
Vanity Fair
actually psychoanalyzed Bush’s misstatements, purporting to have proved him dyslexic. This was absolutely
not
liberals avoiding real issues. To the contrary, Bush’s occasional misstatements were a matter of grave national importance. As author Gail Sheehy explained, dyslexics “develop rigidity, needing the comfort of following a known path.”

By total happenstance, this is exactly what liberals say about all conservatives, with or without any phony “dyslexia” diagnoses. The left’s dogmatic refusal to acknowledge any facts that contradict their ideology—such as the now dispositive data on concealed carry laws—is known as thinking “outside the box.” In a charming populist touch, Sheehy claimed Bush’s Christianity was a symptom of his mental defect. It seems Christianity filled a psychological need for “structure and a spiritual discipline” common to many dyslexics. Citing “experts,” Sheehy proclaimed that Bush’s apocryphal “dyslexia” could affect his performance as president.

If liberals truly believed verbal fluency were determinative of IQ, why did they call Reagan dumb? The peculiar liberal obsession with verbal facility as a proxy for IQ seemed to recede a bit when the “Great Communicator” was president. Instead of hailing Reagan as the greatest genius ever to inhabit the White House, his very facility with words was derided as the vocational faculty of a hackneyed actor.

When he was over eighty years old, having left public life four years earlier, Reagan made an incredibly minor slip during his speech to the 1992 Republican National Convention. The refrain to his speech was a quote from John Adams: “Facts are stubborn things.” Reagan stated the refrain flawlessly a half dozen times, but in one single rendition of it he said: “Facts are stupid things—stubborn things, I should say.”

That one-syllable slip quickly became the greatest Republican error since Watergate. Reagan’s monumental idiocy in making a minor slip has been cited in at least four books
¹¹²
and flogged in seventy-seven news stories on LexisNexis. Soon liberals began embellishing on the word slip to claim Reagan had got the quote wrong—claiming it was not a verbal slip but a “misquotation.” This called for snippy remarks from all the Adams experts in the media.

A book review in the
New York Times
noted that “many famous and successful people had little regard for history,... cf. Ronald Reagan, ‘Facts are stupid things’ et passim”
¹¹³
(meaning “and throughout”). An article in the
Dallas Morning News
said Reagan had “misquoted John Adams,” saying Reagan’s “version” was “Facts are stupid things.”
¹¹⁴
A column in the
Los Angeles Times
suggested Reagan was “making up something stupid on his own. “115

Bush occasionally misspeaks and therefore he’s an idiot. Reagan spoke mellifluously, which proved he was an idiot, except the one time he finally fumbled a word—which also demonstrated he was an idiot. You can’t win with these people; all a Republican can do is die.

On the left’s theory that misspeaking is a searing gauge of intelligence, Gore was an imbecile. “Sublimmable,” for example, is a lot closer to “subliminal” than “was the inspiration for
Love Story”
is to “knew the guy who wrote
Love Story.”
Bush may stumble over his words on occasion, as does every human. At least he never claimed he fought at the Alamo.

Liberals are not only incapable of explaining a conservative position, they censor conservative views from their media. Instead of arguing substantive issues, liberals prefer to drone on and on about the larger cosmic meaning of Bush saying “subliminable.” It’s as if they believe allowing an articulate statement of the conservative position to escape into the world will put a religious hex on them. Until you can intelligently articulate the other side’s position, you are not an adult. You are a liberal.

For those easily duped by media propaganda, there would be no more staggering surprise than George W. Bush’s masterful response to a devastating terrorist attack seven months after he took office. Never was the myth of a “dumb” Republican shattered with such dispatch. Stupid old Reagan won the Cold War, but that took time. It was the gradual, if inevitable, outcome of Reagan’s massive defense buildup, military invasions, support for anti-communist insurgents around the globe, and, finally, walking away from the table at Reykjavik.

Unfortunately for liberals, a surprise attack on America on September 11,2001, would test George W. Bush like no other president in United States history. It was precisely the risk of something like a terrorist attack happening that sent the media into anxious reveries about Bush’s performance on Andy Hiller’s pop quiz. How on earth could Bush be expected to handle a national crisis if he couldn’t name the Prime Minister of Swaziland? (Dr. Barnabas Sibusiso Dlamini.)

Bush’s alleged weaknesses—subjected to side-splitting ridicule throughout the campaign—were precisely those that “would be most severely tested in the crucible of war. Contrary to urgent news bulletins throughout the campaign, Bush was a masterful leader. War was where the rubber met the road and Bush was the consummate wartime commander. The media’s campaign portrayal of Bush as “not the sharpest knife in the drawer” was not simply wrong in the sense of being untrue. It was the opposite of true. The media had lied and now everyone knew it.

Far from smirking bravado, Bush exuded calm deliberation. He didn’t overreact with a quick ostentatious display of pyrotechnics, as Democrats are wont to do. Indeed, in a direct rebuke to the Clinton administration, Bush pointedly said: “When I take action, I’m not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It’s going to be decisive.”

The very opposite of an incurious frat boy, Bush inspired the nation and showed the world America’s resolve. In one of the most eloquent speeches in American history, he proclaimed, “As long as the United States of America is determined and strong, this will not be an age of terror. This will be an age of liberty here and across the world.”

Describing a new and confusing enemy, Bush said we have “seen their kind before”: “They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the twentieth century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions, by abandoning every value except the will to power, they follow in the path of fascism, Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way to where it ends: in history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies.”

The dyslexic retard delivered the speech flawlessly.
New York Times
columnist Bob Herbert called it “a near-perfect speech.”
¹¹⁶
(For someone who hangs out with a bad crowd, Herbert’s first impulses are almost always good.)

Most impressively, in word and deed, the president emboldened a jittery nation: “The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war. And we know that God is not neutral between them.... Fellow citizens, we will meet violence with patient justice, assured of the Tightness of our cause and confident of the victories to come. In all that lies before us, may God grant us wisdom and may He watch over the United States of America.”

America had a leader who said what he meant and meant what he said— and just in the nick of time. Having cleared out the pizza boxes, women’s panties, and other detritus of the Caligula administration, the country was finally being run by grown-ups again. The entire administration was a smooth, purring machine. Bush had assembled an astonishingly talented team of advisors, and placed each in the perfect position. The nation could sleep well at night.

The incurious frat boy would go on to demonstrate the value of real intelligence, courting world leaders with his charm and resolute determination. Importantly, Bush instantly forged a crucial alliance with the leader of a Muslim nation that had its own share of Islamic terrorists, but which bordered on Afghanistan. That leader was General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan. One wonders how President “Jenny” would have done sealing that delicate deal: Musharraf, of course, was one of the leaders Bush had been unable to name in the celebrated TV reporter’s pop quiz.

The media’s relentless campaign of portraying Bush as a frivolous ne’er-do-well had culminated just days before the election when Senator Joseph Lieberman, Gore’s running mate, solemnly raised the prospect of war. This was supposed to be an argument in favor of Al Gore. “When I think of a solitary figure standing in the Oval Office, weighing life and death decisions that can affect the security of our country and the stability of our world, I see Al Gore.”
¹¹⁷

But when war came, liberals were forced to confront their own demons, realizing with unmitigated relief that Al Gore was not the man “standing in the Oval Office.” Not long after the attack, the
New York Times
talked to a series of “prominent Democrats”
¹¹⁸
—mostly off the record for obvious reasons. Uniformly, the Democrats sang Bush’s praises, and conceded that Gore would have been a disaster. Though Bush had been ceaselessly derided for his inability to talk, Democrats were now giving rave reviews to Bush’s wartime pronouncements and questioning “whether the former vice president would have been as nimble at communicating to the public.”
¹¹⁹

These prominent Democrats also heaped praise on Bush’s advisors and “questioned whether Mr. Gore would have surrounded himself with as experienced a foreign policy team as Mr. Bush.” Shuddering at the thought of Gore’s foreign policy advisors “running a war against Afghanistan,” one former “top” Clinton appointee “criticiz[ed] the qualifications of those he expected to be Mr. Gore’s foreign policy team.

A “staunch” Gore supporter and former Democratic senator griped that Gore “would have tried to micromanage everything.”
¹²¹

If you got your news from the news, all this would have come as a bolt out of the blue. Bush’s most impressive qualities included every single point for which he had been demeaned during the campaign. When Bush was running for president, the typical news report on his leadership abilities went something like this: “He flunked a foreign leaders pop quiz, doesn’t know a Greek from a ‘Grecian,’ was a C-average college student, can’t remember what, if anything, he liked to read as a boy, and admits that, even today, he doesn’t care to read weighty books on public policy, a subject that would seem a natural for the governor of the second-most-populous state.”
¹²²
(Incidentally, “public policy” isn’t a “subject.” And he was a C-average
Yale
student—back in the days when it was still possible to get a C at Yale.)