Thursday, September 23, 2004

A Little Flip-Flop Never Did Anybody Any Harm

Can we say this all together now ... take a deep breath ... one, two, three ... WHAT LIBERAL MEDIA?

To wit: "Over the past four years, [President George W. Bush] abandoned positions on issues such as how to regulate air pollution or whether states should be allowed to sanction same-sex marriage. He changed his mind about the merits of creating the Homeland Security Department, and made a major exception to his stance on free trade by agreeing to tariffs on steel. After resisting, the president yielded to pressure in supporting an independent commission to study policy failures preceding the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Bush did the same with questions about whether he would allow his national security adviser to testify, or whether he would answer commissioners' questions for only an hour, or for as long they needed .... In 2000, Bush said he would include carbon dioxide on a list of air pollutants requiring federal oversight, a stand he abandoned within weeks of taking office. A month after the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush's spokesman said the president believed a homeland security department that Democrats proposed was 'just not necessary.' A year after that, Bush had switched course and was lashing some Democrats for not moving quickly enough to approve the agency. While Bush professes himself a strong free-trader, most other free-trade proponents said he bent on principle in March 2002 when he ordered tariffs on imported steel -- a move that resonated politically in electorally important industrial states such as Pennsylvania. Facing an escalating global trade dispute, he lifted the tariffs at the end of last year .... He supported tax cuts in 2000 because he said they were affordable in a time of large government surpluses, and once in power he supported them amid rising deficits because he said the economy needed stimulation. The president's principal rationale for the Iraq invasion was to end Baghdad's suspected mass-weapons program and links to international terrorism. In the absence of compelling evidence of these, the main post-invasion rationale has been to rescue Iraq from a tyrant and support democracy in the greater Middle East." (WashPost, this a.m.)

Well, at least the Democrats can rely on THE LIBERAL MEDIA to play up all that flip-flopping, right? Show the man for what he is ... if not a dangerous waffler, at least a dangerous political opportunist? The LIBERAL MEDIA will nail this guy, for sure!

Oh ... wait ... that's not at all what happened, is it?

A poll released last week by Kohut's Pew Center showed that 53 percent of voters believe Senator John Kerry, NOT El Presidente, "changes his mind too much." That polling result, folks, comes from the repetition of a Bush/Cheney caricature of the Senator repeated ad infinitum through the megaphone of CORPORATE MEDIA, led now by those paragons of journalistic virtue, Fox News.

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