"Democrats, with help from media, have waged an all-out war on Bush

By David Horowitz

In 200 years of this nation's political history, there has never been a hate campaign as massive, as nasty, and as personally vicious as the one directed against President Bush.

Part of this hate is a product of the generic politics of destruction practiced by Democratic Party leaders in every election cycle as a matter of course (for example, Sen Kerry's disgraceful claim that Bush stole a million black votes to win the 2000 election).

But it is the specifically personal attacks on Bush that reveal the ferocious insanity of liberal hate in this frenzied political season. For two years, George Bush has been derided as a "moron," a "dummy," and a Cheney "puppet" by liberal elites, even though his college test scores rank his intelligence in the top 10 percent of the nation, and even though newspapers give him full credit for orchestrating his own alleged vendettas. He has been accused of being a military "deserter" despite the failure of the media to prove this charge in four election campaigns, despite his logging 574 air hours in a plane dangerous enough to be referred to as "the widow-maker," and despite his honorable discharge from the service.

As President, he has been denounced as a traitor who has "betrayed" Americans, a liar, a corrupt manipulator who misled America and sent its young and innocent to battle in full knowledge that their mission was fraudulent and their deaths needless. It has been charged that the sole reason he sent the young to die was to line the pockets of his corporate Texas cronies. He has been accused in advance of being responsible for any dirty nuclear bomb that terrorists detonate in the United States. And these are merely the attacks originating with Al Gore and Ted Kennedy before spreading through the Democratic ranks. Not a single Democrat, by the way, has stood up to deplore the recklessness of these smears, or to speculate on how such attacks might affect the fortunes of the troops under the President's command. Instead of fulfilling their role as neutral arbiters of the facts, the media have regularly given these destructive and despicable accusations a free pass.

The personal attacks on Bush began even before the war in Iraq started - a war authorized and justified by Bill Clinton and Al Gore and ratified by the majority of congressional Democrats in the Iraqi Liberation Act of 1998; then ratified again in the congressional Authorization of Force Act of October 2002. John Kerry signed on to both resolutions before he turned his back on them because Howard Dean was passing him in the polls. These attacks on a President carrying out a bipartisan policy began with an unconscionable personal strike by Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle on the eve of the war. Even as our troops moved into harm's way to enforce United Nations Resolution 1441, which called on Saddam to disarm or else, Daschle claimed that Bush's "failed diplomacy" - not Saddam's intransigence - was responsible for the war.

I have been invited to respond to today's Inquirer editorial, which takes aim not at the Democrat hate mongers, but at their target, George Bush, describing him as a vindictive politician with an "enemies list." How's that for a fair-minded press! Inquirer editorial writers have every right to be partisan, but what kind of judgment would make a man more sinned against than sinning, and responsible for the security of us all, the butt of an editorial like this?

The Inquirer rehashes a discredited canard about Joseph Wilson and his wife, who, it claims, were punished by Bush for casting doubt on evidence of Saddam's attempt to get nuclear materials from Niger. Yet a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee investigated Wilson's charges and cand rejected them, concluding that the President's statement was "well-founded." Wilson's story was evidently a political dirty trick to undermine the rationale for the war, but the media are so consumed by their own anti-Bush passions that they can't even play fair a year and a half later, when the accusation they endorsed is thus rejected.

If George Bush loses this election to a man who has been on all sides of the issue of war and peace, and has shifted his positions according to which way the political winds blow, Americans will surely suffer consequences in the coming months of the war on terror. But then they will have only themselves to blame, along with media that did not meet their most fundamental obligation to stay above the political fray and tell the American people the truth.

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David Horowitz is editor of frontpagemag.com. Contact him at dhorowitz@earthlink.net.