Media Research Center CyberAlert -- 09/09/2002 -- Jennings "Raised with Anti-Americanism in My Blood"

Jennings "Raised with Anti-Americanism in My Blood"; Founder's "One Great Failure Was Race"; Hypocrisy on Iraq Ignored; Lauer Hostile to Arming Pilots; Germond: Liberals Are "Politically Correct Jerks"

1) Admitting his mother "was pretty anti-American," on Friday's Late Show ABC News anchor Peter Jennings, who grew up in Canada, conceded that he was "raised with anti-Americanism in my blood, or in my mother's milk at least."

2) During his Letterman appearance, Jennings also denounced the Founding Fathers for how they "blew it" on race. Matching that theme, he opened the final installment of his ABC series, In Search of America, by declaring that the founders acted "abysmally" on race since "they lived in a white, Anglo-Saxon society and they did not deliver equality and justice for all. Their one great failure was race."

3) For many weeks top Democrats have been demanding that President Bush get congressional approval in advance for any action against Iraq, but without pointing out Democratic hypocrisy, on Friday night NBC's Campbell Brown reported: "Democrats are beginning to question why the President is in such a hurry to get Congress's approval for a military strike, suggesting he wants to make Iraq an issue in the November elections."

4) On Friday's Inside Politics, CNN's Judy Woodruff raised with Senator Hillary Clinton how her husband "said it was Osama bin Laden who killed 3,000 Americans, not Saddam Hussein, and we should be going after bin Laden." But instead of asking about the hypocrisy of Bill Clinton and other leading liberal Democrats who were advocating action against Hussein just four years ago, statements laid out in a new Weekly Standard story, Woodruff simply prompted Senator Clinton: "Do you agree with him?"

5) Matt Lauer expressed his distress with the Senate's vote to allow pilots to carry guns in the cockpit, on Friday hitting both the Senate and House Leaders from the left. "It doesn't seem like all that long ago when most people thought this was a pretty terrible idea," he told Republican Senator Trent Lott. Turning to Congressman Dick Gephardt, he bemoaned: "Are you at all worried that this could come back to haunt Congress?"

6) Liberal columnist Jack Germond advocated profiling at airports, saying liberals are getting in the way of reason: "My liberal friends are such a bunch soft-headed, politically correct jerks they won't allow you to profile."

1
Admitting his mother "was pretty anti-American," on Friday's Late Show ABC News anchor Peter Jennings, who grew up in Canada, conceded that he was "raised with anti-Americanism in my blood, or in my mother's milk at least."

Jennings recounted for David Letterman how "Canadians grow up with this ambiguous feeling: Loving the United States, admiring the United States, fearful of the United States, resentful of the United States." But, he promised, "I've got America in my soul now."

Jennings made his comments during an appearance on the September 6 Late Show with David Letterman on CBS to promote his In Search of America series on ABC and accompanying book.

Recalling how Jennings left Canada for the U.S. as an adult, Letterman wondered:

Peter Jennings told David Letterman his mother "was pretty anti-American" so he was "raised with anti-Americanism in my blood."

     "When you're a kid, a Canadian kid, what is your view of the United States? Are you like peeking over the border or is it not a factor?"
     Jennings replied by citing his mother's anti-Americanism: "I think it very much depends how you were brought up. My mother, well my father tried to come here in the depression. He was offered a job by NBC and they threw him off the train at the border. So by the time he got back to Toronto everybody was still pretty hung over from his going away party [laughter from the audience]. This is serious, they still were. And the guy said you're coming to America to take an American's job. Go back. And he went back and never came.
     "My mother, who was an imperialist, and her father had served in the first world war with a Canadian regiment. She was pretty anti-American. And so I was, in some respects, raised with anti-Americanism in my blood or in my mother's milk at least."

Letterman asked: "When you're a kid growing up do you kind of ignore an envy the United States or is there no envy about the United States, is there a curiosity about the United States?"
Jennings answered: "I think there's tremendous confusion about the United States. The former, the late Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau said it was indeed like living and sleeping next to, being a mouse and sleeping next to an elephant. And when the elephant rolled over you sure notice. Because everything that was done by the United States, and this is true today as it was then, has an impact on Canada. So Canadians grow up with this ambiguous feeling: Loving the United States, admiring the United States, fearful of the United States, resentful of the United States. I came here so long ago, somebody asked me the other day about being Canadian-American, I said 'I sometimes forget I'm not American because I've got America in my soul now I think.'"

Politically liberal America, that is.

2
ABC's Peter Jennings, before he told CBS's David Letterman about how he was raised on "anti-Americanism," denounced the Founding Fathers for how they "blew it" on race. Matching that theme, he opened the final installment of his ABC series, In Search of America, by declaring that the founders acted "abysmally" on race since "they lived in a white, Anglo-Saxon society and they did not deliver equality and justice for all. Their one great failure was race."

On the September 6 Late Show, Jennings relayed: "One of our programs is about race. We've two programs on tomorrow, two prime time hours. One done in Gary, Indiana. The Founding Fathers kicked race, they missed it, they blew it. It was their, it was their great omission and so our hour about race reflects that."

Indeed, his introduction to the hour of In Search of America aired at 10pm EDT/PDT, 9pm CDT/MDT on Saturday night, which looked at the history of Gary, Indiana over the past 40 years, matched what he told Letterman:
"The Founding Fathers did brilliantly on many things and abysmally on one. They lived in a white, Anglo-Saxon society and they did not deliver equality and justice for all. Their one great failure was race. In America, race has been the most divisive issue ever since..."

As if eliminating slavery 75 or 80 years earlier would have prevented the departure of U.S. Steel and the rise of crime which destroyed Gary in the 1970s.

And Jennings' supposition failed to address how the Founding Fathers were ahead of their time in setting up a system which gave the nation the ability to correct shortcomings so that the United States is well ahead of any other multiple race nation on the rights of all races.

3
For many weeks top Democrats have been demanding that President Bush get congressional approval in advance for any action against Iraq, but now with the Bush administration deciding to follow that advice, NBC News reported that Democrats are upset. But instead of pointing out Democratic hypocrisy, on Friday night NBC News White House reporter Campbell Brown relayed without criticism the new Democratic spin about how Bush is trying "to make Iraq an issue in the November elections."

     During a story on the September 6 NBC Nightly News, after a soundbite of British Prime Minister Tony Blair expressing support for Bush's Iraq policy, Brown asserted:
     "But here at home Democrats are beginning to question why the President is in such a hurry to get Congress's approval for a military strike, suggesting he wants to make Iraq an issue in the November elections. If so, it's a strategy some analysts say could backfire."
     Charlie Cooke, National Journal: "People seem to be rallying behind the President because of Iraq, but at the same time they're getting more worried about the economy and where the country's going and that might actually hurt Republicans in congressional elections."

4
On Friday's Inside Politics, CNN's Judy Woodruff raised with Senator Hillary Clinton how her husband "said it was Osama bin Laden who killed 3,000 Americans, not Saddam Hussein, and we should be going after bin Laden." But instead of asking about the hypocrisy of Bill Clinton and other leading liberal Democrats who were advocating action against Hussein just four years ago, statements laid out in a new Weekly Standard story, Woodruff simply prompted Senator Clinton: "Do you agree with him?"

On the September 6 Inside Politics from New York City, Woodruff asked Hillary Clinton:
"Much of the focus is continuing to fight the war on terror, on Iraq, on the minds of every member of Congress. Yesterday, your husband, former President Clinton said in California that what President Bush should focus on is not Saddam Hussein right now, but Osama bin Laden. In so many words, he said it was Osama bin Laden who killed 3,000 Americans, not Saddam Hussein, and we should be going after bin Laden. Do you agree with him?"

Hillary Clinton replied: "Well, I think the war on terror has a lot of targets, and from my perspective, we have to pursue those who would use weapons of terror against us, no matter who they are or where they are. Clearly, we have a lot of work still to do in rooting out and eliminating the al Qaeda network, but the president is going to make his case to the Congress and to not only America but the world as to why he believes that Saddam Hussein is also a very significant target in this war on terror. And we are all going to be listening. The real goal, I think, all of us share is that we do everything necessary to defend our country, to defend Americans and defend freedom-loving people throughout the world, and we have got, unfortunately, some committed, dangerous adversaries, more than one out there."

Woodruff followed up: "But it sounded as if your husband was saying the president's priorities are not correct, that Osama bin Laden should be first before Saddam."

Clinton still avoided answering: "Well, I think that that's a question a number of members of Congress and people generally raise..."

In a piece in this week's Weekly Standard, Stephen Hayes recounted how in 1998 Democrats, starting with President Clinton, were gung-ho for the action against Hussein they are now criticizing President Bush for pursuing. An excerpt from the story by Hayes in the September 16 Weekly Standard:

The President mulls a strike against Iraq, which he calls an "outlaw nation" in league with an "unholy axis of terrorists, drug traffickers and organized international criminals." The talk among world leaders, however, focuses on diplomacy. France, Russia, China, and most Arab nations oppose military action. The Saudis balk at giving us overflight rights. U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan prepares a last-ditch attempt to convince Saddam Hussein to abide by the U.N. resolutions he agreed to at the end of the Gulf War.

Administration rhetoric could hardly be stronger. The president asks the nation to consider this question: What if Saddam Hussein "fails to comply, and we fail to act, or we take some ambiguous third route which gives him yet more opportunities to develop his program of weapons of mass destruction and continue to press for the release of the sanctions and continue to ignore the solemn commitments that he made? Well, he will conclude that the international community has lost its will. He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction."

The president's warnings are firm. "If we fail to respond today, Saddam and all those who would follow in his footsteps will be emboldened tomorrow." The stakes, he says, could not be higher. "Some day, some way, I guarantee you, he'll use the arsenal."

These are the words not of President George W. Bush in September 2002 but of President Bill Clinton on February 18, 1998. Clinton was speaking at the Pentagon, after the Joint Chiefs and other top national security advisers had briefed him on U.S. military readiness. The televised speech followed a month-long build-up of U.S. troops and equipment in the Persian Gulf. And it won applause from leading Democrats on Capitol Hill.

But just five days later, Kofi Annan struck yet another "deal" with the Iraqi dictator -- which once more gave U.N. inspectors permission to inspect -- and Saddam won again.

Of course, much has changed since President Clinton gave that speech. The situation has gotten worse. Ten months after Saddam accepted Annan's offer, he kicked U.N. weapons inspectors out of Iraq for good. We complained. Then we bombed a little. Then we stopped bombing. Later, we stepped up our enforcement of the no-fly zones. A year after the inspectors were banished, the U.N. created a new, toothless inspection regime. The new inspectors inspected nothing. If Saddam Hussein was a major threat in February 1998, when President Clinton prepared this country for war and U.N. inspectors were still inside Iraq, it stands to reason that in the absence of those inspectors monitoring his weapons build-up, Saddam is an even greater threat today.

But not, apparently, if you're Tom Daschle. The Senate majority leader and his fellow congressional Democrats have spent months criticizing the Bush administration for its failure to make the "public case" for military intervention in Iraq. Now that the Bush administration has begun to do so, many of these same Democrats are rushing to erect additional obstacles.

"What has changed in recent months or years" to justify confronting Saddam, Daschle asked last Wednesday after meeting with President Bush. Dick Gephardt wants to know what a democratic Iraq would look like....

Matters looked different in 1998, when Democrats were working with a president of their own party. Daschle not only supported military action against Iraq, he campaigned vigorously for a congressional resolution to formalize his support. Other current critics of President Bush -- including Kerry, Graham, Patrick Leahy, Christopher Dodd, and Republican Chuck Hagel -- co-sponsored the broad 1998 resolution: Congress "urges the president to take all necessary and appropriate actions to respond to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs."

Daschle said the 1998 resolution would "send as clear a message as possible that we are going to force, one way or another, diplomatically or militarily, Iraq to comply with international law." And he vigorously defended President Clinton's inclination to use military force in Iraq.

Summing up the Clinton administration's argument, Daschle said, "'Look, we have exhausted virtually our diplomatic effort to get the Iraqis to comply with their own agreements and with international law. Given that, what other option is there but to force them to do so?' That's what they're saying. This is the key question. And the answer is we don't have another option. We have got to force them to comply, and we are doing so militarily."

John Kerry was equally hawkish: "If there is not unfettered, unrestricted, unlimited access per the U.N. resolution for inspections, and UNSCOM cannot in our judgment appropriately perform its functions, then we obviously reserve the rights to press that case internationally and to do what we need to do as a nation in order to be able to enforce those rights," Kerry said back on February 23, 1998....

END of Excerpt

For the story in its entirety, with a lengthy excerpt from Clinton's 1998 speech, go to:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/607rkunu.asp

On Sunday's Meet the Press when Tim Russert asked Vice President Cheney about Bill Clinton's latest comments, Cheney responded by reading what Clinton said in 1998.

Now that Hayes and the Weekly Standard have reminded journalists of how what those opposed to Bush's Iraq policy now had advocated just four years ago, will reporters inform their readers and watchers of the hypocrisy? After all, Bush's supposed hypocrisy in getting a corporate loan 14 years ago, when he currently supports a bill to outlaw them, was the hook for a lot of stories just a couple of months ago.

5
Matt Lauer expressed his distress with the Senate's vote to allow pilots to carry guns in the cockpit, on Friday hitting the Senate Majority and Minority Leader as well as the House Minority Leader from the left. "It doesn't seem like all that long ago when most people thought this was a pretty terrible idea," he told Republican Senator Trent Lott. Turning to Democratic Congressman Dick Gephardt, he bemoaned: "Are you at all worried that this could come back to haunt Congress?"

The questions, MRC analyst Ken Shepherd observed, came during a Friday morning discussion with Lott and Daschle as well as the House Speaker and House Minority Leader, all in New York City for the ceremonial congressional session.

Lauer's questions on guns in the cockpit:

-- To Daschle: "The Senate yesterday overwhelmingly approved a bill to allow pilots to carry guns in cockpits. Before the vote, you said you were nervous about it, Senator Lott. Senator Daschle, you said this bill needs more work. Both of you ended up voting for it. Why the overwhelming support, Senator Daschle."

-- To Lott: "It doesn't seem like all that long ago when most people thought this was a pretty terrible idea, are you still nervous about it, Senator?"

-- To Daschle: "The House obviously approved this earlier. The airlines are vehemently opposed to this, they say we're spending billions of dollars, Congressman Gephardt, to keep guns off of aircraft and now here we're going to introduce weapons to airplanes. Are you at all worried that this could come back to haunt Congress?"

6
On Inside Washington over the weekend, liberal columnist Jack Germond advocated profiling at airports, saying liberals are getting in the way of reason: "My liberal friends are such a bunch soft-headed, politically correct jerks they won't allow you to profile."

Germond's blast at liberal came after NPR reporter Nina Totenberg expressed fear of pilots having guns. Asked, during a discussion of airline security, if she favored the idea of arming pilots, she responded: "No, I do not because I figure at some point he will shoot an air marshal or an air marshal will shoot him and I'll go down."

Germond then interjected: "The problem, quite simply is, is that my liberal friends are such a bunch soft-headed, politically correct jerks they won't allow you to profile. We have to."

Might I dare say it takes one to know one? -- Brent Baker

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