Yet another selection of media quotes

[eruthros]

Again, without commentary. They stand on their own.

Bill O'Reilly had some things to explain about the Iraqi people:

I think that they're a prehistoric group ...[...]

And this teaches us a big lesson, that we cannot intervene in the Muslim world ever again. What we can do is bomb the living daylights out of them, just like we did in the Balkans. Just as we did in the Balkans. Bomb the living daylights out of them. But no more ground troops, no more hearts and minds, ain't going to work. [...]

They're just people who are primitive. -- Bill O'Reilly, Fox News host, all from his June 17th radio broadcast

Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution on Why Europe Doesn't Matter:

The ethicists of Europe don't want to see success in Iraq, since it might be interpreted as a moral refutation of their own opposition to Saddam's removal. So let us in turn stop begging old Europe, NATO, and the EU to participate in the rebuilding or policing of the country. To join or help, in the collective European mind, would be to suggest that an emerging democracy far away was worth our own sacrifice to rid the world of Saddam Hussein. Liberating Iraq, shutting down Baathist terror, and establishing consensual rule, after all, was a dangerous -- and mostly Anglo-American -- idea, antithetical to all the Europeans have become. [...]

Meanwhile, those born after World War II in these two countries either know nothing about the American sacrifice or chalk the invasion up to the insanity of war in general. I won't even speak of a sense of gratitude, because that is an emotion almost as archaic to the contemporary European mind as patriotism. [...]

As Europe addresses its demographic time bomb -- with ever-increasing entitlements, less and less defense spending, and ever greater schizophrenia as it vacillates between paranoid repression and dangerous laxity -- its angst about the freewheeling and upbeat United States will only grow. [...]

I fear that we should expect over the next 50 years some pretty scary things coming out of Europe as its impossible postmodern utopian dreams turn undemocratic and then ugly -- once its statism and entitlement economy falter; Jews leave as Arabs stream in; its shaky German-French axis unravels; its next vision of an EU mare nostrum encompassing North Africa and Turkey begins to terrify Old Europe; and its pacifism brings it real humiliation from the likes of an Iran or China. Indeed, despite Europe's noble efforts to incorporate the former Warsaw Pact, we are already seeing such tensions in the most recent EU elections.

We all like the Europeans and wish them well in their efforts to create heaven on earth. But in the end I still think we Americans are on the right side of history in Iraq -- while they are on no side at all. -- Victor Davis Hanson in the NRO

Tom Gross, former Middle East correspondent for the New York Daily News, on the BBC:

But then the Cold War plays a very small part in the worldview of the BBC. They seldom showed signs of caring much about hundreds of millions of people living under Communist dictatorship then, and they are still very reluctant to acknowledge that it happened, let alone their own failings in reporting it.

I mention this because it helps explain the bubble they live in today with regard to the Middle East and Arab world. A bubble which has led them to seek to undermine, even delegitimize Israel, the region's sole democracy, while at the same time bending over backwards to excuse extremist Islamic clerics, and the worst of the Arab dictators.

The BBC doesn't seem to care that -- as Jonathan Kay of Canada's National Post once put it -- if Robert Mugabe walked into an Arab League summit he would be the most democratically legitimate leader in the room. The BBC's attitude appears to be that: Arabs don't deserve to have their human-rights situation mentioned. As far as their reporting is concerned, women, gays, and others don't deserve rights in Muslim countries. [...]

My friend Kamran al-Karadaghi, an urbane, moderate, and thoughtful Iraqi, who was for a decade the political editor of the Arabic-language newspaper al-Hayat in London, and who until last week served as head of Radio Free Iraq, tells me that the BBC Arabic-language service is not just far worse than the English-language BBC. It is "even worse," he says, than al Jazeera, in the vitriol it pours out against America and Israel. -- Tom Gross in the NRO

Oliver North:

In the original statement issued by his captors, they referred to Abu Ghraib. Now, that whole scandal has been elevated to the level of self-flagellation by our media and by politicians in Washington hoping to gain some kind of political traction from it. They have blood on their hands if they keep this up, because what we're doing is giving ammunition to the likes of the captors of Paul Johnson. -- Oliver North, June 16 on Hannity & Colmes, referring to the capture of Paul M. Johnson Jr.

Michael Savage, man. Michael Savage:

The word progressive today is a code word for the new Communist movement.[...]

So this man compares the death of 3,000 Americans to radical Muslim hijackers and murders, to the humiliation of a number of Iraqi prisoners, by a very small number of American troops. This is called the big lie. And if you tell a big lie often enough it will become the truth. That's what Goebbels, Hitler's media man, said, and that's what Soros and the others at this Communist rally yesterday, call Take Back America or doing. It's unbelievable to me. And he keeps doing it, and doing it, and doing it. And this does remind me of a very dangerous time in the past. This man is a clear and present danger to America. He's declared war on America, and I don't know how George Bush doesn't understand how dangerous this man is. [...]

You know you're part of a left-wing fringe that will destroy the Democrat party even further than it's been destroyed. Keep on talking George, because it doesn't play outside MoveOn.org, an organization of rat-bastard Communists. How's that George? -- Michael Savage, all from his June 4th radio show, talking about George Soros (a Jewish man from Hungary who survived Nazi occupation)

Also, this is from April, but is relevant because the man who said it will shortly have his own show on PBS called Tucker Carlson, Unfiltered. Tucker Carlson, for those of you who don't know, is currently co-host of CNN's Crossfire.

...one liberal phenomenon that I support is female bisexuality -- this apparent increased willingness of girls to bring a friend. That's a pretty good thing. [...]

Interviewer: If you had to spend the rest of your life as a woman, who would you be?
Carlson: Elizabeth Birch [formerly] of the Human Rights Campaign, because you'd be presiding over an organization of thousands of lesbians, some of them quite good-looking.
Interviewer: What do women want?
Carlson: They want to be listened to, protected, and amused. And they want to be spanked vigorously every once in a while. -- Tucker Carlson, all from an April interview in Elle

Well, in his new movie, "Fahrenheit 911," Michael Moore alleges the following things, that President Bush is responsible for the terrorist attacks of September 11, that Bush's family is connected to Osama bin Laden in some important, sinister way, and that Bush intentionally caused the deaths of thousands of people in the war with Iraq simply to enrich his friends in the oil industry.

It's hardly worth repeating these claims or even refuting them. They are the ramblings of the lunatic fringe, or they used to be anyway. Yet "The Washington Post" reports today at least four previously mainstream Democratic operatives, including former press secretaries for Hillary Clinton and Al Gore, have been hired to promote Moore's movie. And they are, all of which raises an interesting question: What happens when the lunatic fringe and the mainstream of the Democratic Party become indistinguishable? -- Tucker Carlson on Crossfire, May 19th

Comments

[oralelk.livejournal.com]

As a European, I can't decide if I want to be angry about the Victor Davis Hanson quote, or if I just want to think he lives so completely in a different world than I. At least, I find his condescension sickening. And scary.

[eruthros]

Seriously. The whole article was pretty creepy -- very "civilization will fall because they're abandoning the nation-state and immigration laws!" Eurgh.

I sometimes think that I'd understand the right-wing better if I tried to always remember that they don't live in the same world I live in. But on the other hand, I'm not about to go "oh, well, but so-and-so's view is equally valid" if so-and-so is a Holocaust denier. So I might understand them better, but it would still be sickening. *shrugs*

[m-shell.livejournal.com]

i think you mean michael savage, not dan savage...dan's a jerk fairly often, but not on that level of badness.

[eruthros]

I fixed it. I do that ALL THE TIME. So embarrassing. I can't keep them straight. *pauses* Well, I guess I can keep Michael straight -- I mean, I don't need to be involved even, he does it on his own -- but I can't remember which name is which.

[m-shell.livejournal.com]

though if you believe this salon.com article (http://archive.salon.com/news/feature/2003/03/05/savage/index.html), he may possibly be less straight than one might otherwise think (unfortunately - all the world needs is one more repressed/closeted homophobe queer...::grimaces::)