Pat Dollard | Young Americans

The thing about trying to hide something, fake something, forge something, hype something, photoshop something, cover-up something … In today’s media world, where the internet blogs are quicker than the news media outlets, and sharper … it ALL seems to float to the surface like a bloated body of evidence …

Signs Of The Times

(IBD)

The “newspaper of record” doesn’t want John McCain’s views on Iraq to go on the record, at least not while Barack Obama is on his magical media tour. The truth about Obama is unfit to print?

If you doubt the media are in the tank for Obama, doubt no more. The refusal of the New York Times to print McCain’s op-ed on Obama after an Obama piece was published has nothing to do with editorial judgment and everything to do with protecting the media’s heartthrob.

Times op-ed editor David Shipley, who served in the Clinton administration from 1995 to 1997, insists it was just a request for a rewrite, as is frequently done with other writers. But McCain isn’t a freelance writer or NYT staffer. He’s a candidate for president of the United States and ought to be able to express his views — unedited and unfiltered.

Shipley wanted McCain to define what he meant by victory and submit a timetable for achieving both victory and total withdrawal. He wanted McCain to write his editorial on Obama’s terms. We suspect the Times was trying to protect Obama, at least during his trip, from reminders that he opposed the surge and the war and was wrong on both counts.

Obama, whose foreign policy consists of talking to our enemies while bombing our allies, told the assembled veterans at the VFW Convention in Kansas City last year, “All our top military commanders recognize that there is no military solution in Iraq.”

But there was a military solution in Iraq in Gen. David Petraeus’ brilliant anti-terrorism strategy that paved the way for Iraqi political and religious reconciliation. If things are heating up in Afghanistan, it’s because al-Qaida and its jihadist brethren, having been defeated in Iraq, have fled there to make a last stand.

Obama’s views on Iraq and Afghanistan have ranged from the inconsistent to the incoherent. He’d have us believe he supported defeat in Iraq because he wanted victory in Afghanistan. Yet his subcommittee has held no hearings on Afghanistan, and when he was part of a congressional delegation that visited Iraq in 2006, he passed on the opportunity to continue on to Afghanistan.

On May 24, 2007, Obama in fact voted to cut off all funding for all our military efforts in Afghanistan (H.R. 2206, CQ Vote #181). His support for a surge there seems predicated on stopping alleged U.S. atrocities.

Three months after he voted to cut Afghan funding, Obama said on Aug. 14, 2007: “We’ve got to get the job done there, and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure there.” Shades of John Kerry and John Murtha.

Obama was asked by ABC’s Terry Moran recently: “If you had to do it over again, knowing what you know now, would you support the surge?” Obama replied: “No, because keep in mind that . . . .” An incredulous Moran asked, “You wouldn’t?”

Obama continued: “Keep in mind . . . these kinds of hypotheticals are very difficult. Hindsight is 20/20. But I think that, what I’m absolutely convinced of, is that at that time we had to change the political debate because the view of the Bush administration at that time was one that I just disagreed with.”

Huh? Knowing we would win, he’d still oppose the surge and suffer defeat in Iraq just because he just didn’t like George Bush?

The Times spiked McCain’s op-ed, which will now receive wider circulation, because it reminds voters of Obama’s dangerous and naive foreign policy that only starts with being wrong on Iraq and the surge.

The judgment of both Obama and his sycophants at the Times is open to question.