Bolt details the erroneous claims by The Age and refutes them with the facts. The Age claimed it was "unimaginable" that Bush could ever have "kissed" any Muslim foreign leaders, as Obama recently did to the Turkish leader, appearing to imagine that such an intimate gesture would have solved all the world's problems. Bolt points to the photo of Bush kissing the current King of Saudi Arabia to prove The Age wrong.
SEE this picture? That's odd, because the Sunday Age's editor can't. Unimaginable, she calls it.
Bolt recounts that The Age said it was "unimaginable" that Bush could ever have teated a Muslim leader as grandly as Obama did noting that The Age said, "Imagine if, only a year ago, the President of the United States had visited Turkey, addressed its parliament, then kissed the Prime Minister on both cheeks.
The Age went on...
"That might have been considered far-fetched, but so, too, would have been the President's affirmation that his country was not at war with Islam and that being Muslim in the US is part of the fabric of life.
"It is indeed unimaginable that George Bush would have embraced such thoughts, words and deeds."
"Pardon?," Bolt asks before going on to remind The Age that Bush kissed Prince Abdullah, now King of Saudi Arabia back in 2002. Bolt also wonders how The Age came up with this "fantasy" it was offering as foreign policy analysis? Of this policy history, Bolt notes that The Age said:
"(Bush's) arms-length policy, bred out of a certain conservative caution and suspicion, certainly applied to being seen to be in too close a contact with Islamic nations, let alone within kissing distance of their leaders."
Bolt gently reminds The Age that there is photographic proof that refutes its claims that Bush would never do such a thing.
Bolt also wondered how The Age could have missed the many times that Bush said that the U.S. and the west is not at war with Islam itself?
And how is it also "unimaginable" that Bush could have said that his country was "not at war with Islam"?
Here he is in 2002 doing just that:
"Because this great nation of many religions understands, our war is not against Islam, or against faith practised by the Muslim people."
How is it "unimaginable" that Bush could have insisted Islam was part of American life? Here, again, is Bush:
"There are thousands of Muslims who proudly call themselves Americans, and they know what I know -- that the Muslim faith is based upon peace and love and compassion."
Bolt goes on to list several more times that The Age newspaper refused to check recent history and actually look up what Bush said when it recounted Obama's words as if no U.S. president had ever spoken in such a way.
Next Bolt reveals to his readers that an editor's editorials are rarely written by the editor himself and are often finished by a staff writer from the editor's notes. Then the finished copy is checked by a sub-editor or newsroom executive. Bolt is astonished that The Age piece went through three professional newsmen and not one of them checked the facts or were aware enough of recent history to raise a red flag on the garbled history presented in the piece.
"That's some astonishing group-think," Bolt declared.
Bolt ends with some prescient remarks:
So what do we conclude from all this? That all humans tend to see only what reinforces their prejudices. That even newspaper editors are no better. That given this, debate is essential if we are to learn all sides of any argument.
And that's why you should fear a media with no debate, like an Age or Sunday Age with not a single on-staff, conservative columnist. An ABC with wall-to-wall presenters of the Left.
See what you then get from people who find the facts "unimaginable": almost no debate on the global warming that has actually stopped, the "stolen generations" no one can actually find and the kissy new redeemer Obama who actually sounds just like old George Bush.
So, once again we can see that it isn't just the bulk of the U.S. media that have abandoned real journalistic standards only to become ideological advocates instead of reporters. Sadly, Bolt demonstrates that this woeful propensity for leftwing "group think" has infected media outlets in Australia, as well.
