You have to love the sheer, bald hypocrisy of the liberal media.
With a nod to now-former Iowa Senator Tom Harkin you could call the recent actions by the New York Times, the New York Daily News and other media critics of those 47 GOP senators who signed that letter to Iran “media McCarthyism”
Here’s the editorial headline from the Times -- "Republican Idiocy on Iran" -- on that letter to Iran from 47 Republican senators, in which the liberal paper of record castigated the senators, in part, as “disgraceful and irresponsible.” Really. But back when the central issue in American foreign policy was the Cold War - specifically the Communist government in Nicaragua? And President Ronald Reagan’s strategy to win the Cold War by, in part, supporting the Contras? The Nicaraguan Freedom Fighters who were opposing the bid by the Soviet Union to open another shop in America’s back yard? In those days Democrats - led by Speaker of the House Jim Wright - were going out of their way to thwart Reagan. And The New York Times loved it.
In a November 17, 1987 editorial on then-Speaker of the House Wright’s repeated and deliberate interference into President Ronald Reagan’s conduct of American foreign policy in Nicaragua, the Times was blunt. Seethed the liberal paper of record of about Reagan’s furious reaction to Wright’s intervention with a foreign leader: “the Administration asked for it.”
The Times editorial backing up Wright was titled "The Speaker of State" and was furiously critical of Reagan’s policy of supporting the Nicaraguan Contras. While it finally got around to cautioning that maybe “those inclined to cheer such trespass need to ponder how they might feel if roles were reversed and a conservative lawmaker tried to undermine State Department policy…” the Times concluded that the Reagan policy was not just “worse than nonsense - it's insulting nonsense” - and therefore deserved to be interfered with. The paper also decried what it called Reagan’s “intemperate assaults” on Wright.
It took delight in what the paper called the administration’s “sputtering” about Wright’s intervention - and indeed both Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz were furious. Because the Reagan strategy - part of his larger goal of ending the Cold War - was disdained by the Times, the Times said Wright’s intervention was a case of “diplomacy abhors a vacuum.”
Said Shultz later:
Jim Wright was trying to blindside President Reagan and me, subvert our policies and become the de facto secretary of state in the process.
Wright was belligerently unconcerned, and the liberal media of the day cheered him on. NBC anchor Tom Brokaw sought out Wright and provided him with a platform to defend his actions, asking whether what Wright was doing was appropriate. Replied the Speaker:
In the first place, Tom, I don’t take orders from the Secretary of State, and I don’t take orders from anybody else except the people who have elected me.
At one point Wright went to Miguel Obando y Bravo, the Archbishop of Managua, and proposed that negotiations be conducted by Paul Warnke, an arms control negotiator for Jimmy Carter, along with two of Wright’s own staff members. The story gets even richer. When Shultz confronted Wright over the absurdity of having an ex-aide to the massively-defeated (by Reagan) Jimmy Carter the Speaker blurted that, well, it wasn’t his idea. “They” had come up with the idea. “Who is they?” demanded Shultz. Answer from the Speaker: The Communist leader of Nicaragua Daniel Ortega. In other words? In other words the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives was pushing the strategy of the Communist Ortega. And the New York Times, among others, couldn’t have been more pleased.
In April of 1984 the Times reported that Georgia Republican Congressman Newt Gingrich had learned of a “Dear Commandante” letter signed by Wright and several House Democrats (including Lee Hamilton, later to head the House Foreign Affairs Committee) to Ortega. The letter, said the Times, “took a distinctly sympathetic tone” to the Communist dictator. Gingrich was furious, saying: ''This letter clearly violates the constitutional separation of powers. It's at best unwise, and at worst illegal” and was stepping “across the boundary from opposition to a policy, to undercutting that policy….This clearly violates the executive branch's exclusive prerogative of negotiating with a foreign government.” The response? Gingrich, smugly noted the Times in quoting one of the signers, New York Congressman Stephen Solarz, was being ''frankly ludicrous’' in his objections.
The following year, Senators John Kerry and Tom Harkin traveled to Nicaragua to meet with Ortega. Secretary of State Shultz was furious at yet another intrusion into Reagan’s conduct of foreign policy by congressional Democrats. The Chicago Tribune reported the Shultz reaction this way:
Secretary of State George Shultz on Thursday scolded congressional Democrats who write”Dear Commandante" letters to Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega or who travel there as "self-appointed emissaries to the communist regime.
Shultz added that the actions of Kerry, Harkin, Wright and the rest were “reprehensible.” The response from Iowa’s Senator Harkin that was published by the Tribune? The Secretary of State was guilty of “international McCarthyism.”
And Senator Kerry? His response came at a later date to more Reagan administration criticism over his role in Nicaragua. Said Kerry, approvingly quoted by his hometown Boston Globe: “The White House is saying that, if you're not with their policy, then you're with the other guys…”
As many in the conservative media have recalled over the last several days in response to the fury over that letter to the Ayatollah of Iran from 47 Republican senators, Wright was far from alone. When the name of the president was Nixon, Reagan or Bush, liberals in both the House and Senate - not to mention as private citizens - were only too happy to interfere in a Republican president’s conduct of foreign policy. Notably, there was a pronounced tendency for Democrats to intercede when the negotiations involved the opportunity to take the side of Communist governments. And the media? They lavished attention on the liberal dissenters-turned-would-be-
The other day, as noted here at NewsBusters, NBC’s Chuck Todd, the host of Meet the Press told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell this:
[Y]ou almost wonder, did they not realize what they were signing on to? Did they not realize sort of how big of a deal this was going to be or how much it was going to be promoted? It is – look, let's just look at the political mistake of the letter. You're now these forty-seven Republicans, so now you own diplomacy failure, you get to own a piece of that. That's now on you....forget the actual policy and the historical precedent and all of this other stuff, just on a political front it was stupid.
[...]
we are sending a message to the world that he gets undermined immediately at home and the President's word can't be taken....this is why this was such a dangerous precedent set.
I know that there's this push on the right, "Well, Nancy Pelosi went to Syria and Ted Kennedy was doing quiet talks" – this, A, is on a scale we've never seen before. And B, when did...I live in a world where two wrongs make a right? If that was wrong then, this is wrong now.
This statement is remarkable. Mr. Todd calls this a “dangerous precedent.” Alas, this precedent was set long, long ago by liberals, notably beginning with their opposition to the Vietnam War. And the media of the day lapped it up. In fact, years before he arrived as a member of the US Senate a young John Kerry was busy injecting himself into the middle of the Paris Negotiations to end the Vietnam War then being conducted by the Nixon Administration, traveling to Paris, as he later recalled, to meet with the Communist negotiators. Kerry recalled his Paris trip in his 1971 Senate testimony in which he famously accused his fellow Vietnam vets of “cutting of ears” and all the rest. Said Kerry in a remark that seems to go unnoticed today:
I have been to Paris. I have talked with both delegations at the peace talks, that is to say the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the Provisional Revolutionary Government and of all eight of Madam Binh's points it has been stated time and time again, and was stated by Senator Vance Hartke when he returned from Paris, and it has been stated by many other officials of this Government, if the United States were to set a date for withdrawal the prisoners of war would be returned.
Which is to say, as a young man whose only standing in the US government was as a lieutenant in the US Naval Reserve, Kerry had flown to Paris to to talk “with both delegations at the peace talks” to discuss whether “if the United States were to set a date for withdrawal the prisoners of war would be returned.” The media of the day made a liberal star out of Kerry for this, providing him for his PR base for the rest of his career. A career that now has him at the State Department where he treats these 47 ex-colleagues as, well, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George Shultz once treated him. The only difference is Kerry still gets to play the indignant hero - a role never accorded the Republican presidents or secretary of state when they were in the positions Kerry and President Obama now occupy.
As is plentifully recalled now, beginning with Richard Nixon’s tenure in the White House liberals in the Senate and House would spend the next several decades injecting themselves into the conduct of American foreign policy when there was a Republican in the Oval Office. Senators or even former senators included the aforementioned Kerry and Harkin as well as Vance Hartke (Vietnam), George McGovern (Vietnam), Ted Kennedy (the Soviet Union), Christopher Dodd (Nicaragua and Syria), Robert Byrd (the Soviet Union), John Tunney (the Soviet Union), James Abourezk, (the PLO), Adlai Stevenson III (the PLO), Bill Nelson (Syria) and Joe Biden (the Soviet Union). House members aside from Jim Wright and Lee Hamilton included Nancy Pelosi (Syria), Robert Toricelli (Nicaragua) and David Bonior and Jim McDermott, the latter two interfering in Iraq. Jesse Jackson, who never served a day in Congress, has busied himself over the years intervening with dictators from Syria to Venezuela to Kosovo and more.
The media ate it up as precedent after precedent after precedent was set while these liberals busied themselves getting in between a Republican president and American adversaries. To suddenly decry this,as Mr. Todd did when he said: “ And B, when did...I live in a world where two wrongs make a right? If that was wrong then, this is wrong now” is curious indeed. After almost five decades of this repeated precedent-setting? The horse, as they say, has long since left the barn.
Now? Now President Obama is suddenly sounding like George Shultz going after Kerry and Harkin on Nicaragua. CNN quotes Obama as saying: "I think it's somewhat ironic to see some members for Congress wanting to make common cause with the hard-liners in Iran. It's an unusual coalition."
Back in the 1980’s Tom Harkin made the news by calling this kind of thing “international McCarthyism.” Now? Perhaps “media McCarthysim” would be the more up-to-date phrase.
Now? Now, in the finest style of media McCarthyism, the New York Daily News - in bold capital letters - brands the 47 GOP senators who sent that letter to the Ayatollah as “TRAITORS”. But when it came to this veritable legion of liberals in the Senate and House who sought to beguile a succession of dictators and tyrants from Managua to Baghdad, from Moscow to Damascus?
The media loved them.
And they wonder why people turn to Fox News and spurn the mainstream media? Amazing.
