Hillary Clinton's Police State
By John Perazzo When Don Imus was fired in the wake of his April 4th “nappy-headed ho’s” remarks about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team, a great deal of attention was focused, appropriately, on the influence of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, each of whom expressed outrage over the broadcaster’s racial insensitivity and demanded that he be fired. The real guiding hand over Imus’ downfall, however, belonged neither to Sharpton nor Jackson, but to Hillary Rodham Clinton. This is not widely understood, because Mrs. Clinton’s pristine fingerprints were kept off her victim by the intercession of a velvet glove called Media Matters for Media Matters had been building a dossier on Imus for some time, lying in wait for an opportune moment to pounce on him. At Established in May 2004, Media Matters identifies itself as “a Web-based, not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the Obviously, Media Matters makes no secret of its animus for political conservatives and its desire to publicly discredit them. That being said, it is difficult, at first blush, to see why such an organization should have wished to drive Don Imus, of all people, from the airwaves. After all, no one could possibly have mistaken Imus for a conservative. His liberal-left views were well known, and he had a well-established reputation for deriding his conservative radio and television counterparts—calling Rush Limbaugh “a fat, pill-popping loser” and “an undisciplined slob,” and calling Tucker Carlson “a bowtie-wearing pussy,” to cite just two examples. On another occasion he called a Jewish reporter a “boner-nosed, beanie-wearing Jewboy.” Not even the mean-spirited crudeness of comments like these—a crudeness that was standard operating procedure for Imus and his irreverent brand of humor—had ever previously jeopardized his career. What, then, made the “nappy-headed ho’s” case different? To answer this, we must understand that the To truly understand Media Matters’ motives, we must look at the organization’s special relationship with Hillary Clinton, who has deeply despised Don Imus for more than a decade. Hillary’s contempt for the broadcaster dates back to More recently, Imus had been particularly critical of Mrs. Clinton and her presidential candidacy. According to Media Matters, the broadcaster had “repeatedly and unapologetically” referred to the Senator as “Satan,” Bill Clinton’s “fat ugly wife,” a “buck-toothed witch,” “the personification of evil,” and an individual who was “worse than” Osama bin Laden. Not surprisingly, Imus steadfastly refused to invite Mrs. Clinton to be a guest on his program. (It is noteworthy that in the wake of the “nappy-headed ho’s” incident, Mrs. Clinton disingenuously portrayed the fact that she had never appeared on Imus’ show as the result of a unilateral, righteous choice she had personally made: “I’ve never wanted to go on his show and I certainly don't ever intend to go on his show, and I felt that way before his latest outrageous, hateful, hurtful comments,” said Clinton.) So far, then, we know for certain that Hillary Clinton loathes Don Imus, and that Media Matters was actively engaged in trying to topple the broadcaster’s career, as evidenced by the assignment of Mr. Chiachiere to monitor every minute of Imus’ program. But how do we know there is a connection between Hillary’s antipathy for Imus and the deadly blow that Media Matters dealt to his radio program? We know because Media Matters’ links to Hillary are at once intimate and multitudinous, and the organization’s devotion to her is nothing short of profound. In 1996 (eight years before Media Matters’ creation), the then-conservative David Brock was commissioned (with a $1 million advance) by the Simon & Schuster subsidiary Free Press to write a hard-hitting expose of Hillary. But the book, completed in 1997, turned out to be nothing more than a tepid, distinctly sympathetic account of the former First Lady’s life. That same year (1997), Brock publicly announced his political epiphany, unequivocally recanting his previous negative writings about the Brock’s affinity for Mrs. Clinton grew over time, and vice versa. According to Glenn Thrush of Newsday, Hillary “advised Brock on creating” Media Matters in 2004, “encouraging the creation of a liberal equivalent of the Media Matters, Hillary, and the Center for American Progress Media Matters and Hillary Clinton are further linked by their respective relationships with three of the most influential leftist operatives in the world—George Soros, Morton Halperin, and John Podesta. All three of these men are intimately involved with a vital think tank called the Center for American Progress (CAP)—which, according to Cybercast News Service’s research, “was instrumental in getting Brock’s media group off the ground”; which helped launch Media Matters on Soros and Halperin first proposed CAP’s creation in 2002 to promote generally the cause of the Left and the Democratic Party. But CAP’s overarching objective is considerably more specific than that: As an inside source told reporter Christian Bourge of United Press International, CAP is in fact “the official Hillary Clinton think tank.” Not long after its formal founding in the summer of 2003, Mrs. Clinton told reporter Robert Dreyfuss of The Nation: “We’ve had the challenge of filling a void on our side of the ledger for a long time, while the other side created an infrastructure that has come to dominate political discourse. The Center [for American Progress] is a welcome effort to fill that void.” According to Dreyfuss, CAP bears the distinct “imprint of the CAP is heavily funded by the aforementioned billionaire financier George Soros, and in turn works closely with Media Matters to remove potential roadblocks (like Don Imus) from Hillary Clinton’s path to the White House. According to Bill O’Reilly, some of the money Soros gives to CAP eventually finds its way into the coffers of Media Matters, though Media Matters disputes this. Soros in 2004 spent some $26 million trying, unsuccessfully, to defeat President Bush’s reelection bid, a task Soros called “the central focus of my life” and “a matter of life and death.” He has likened Republicans generally, and the Bush administration in particular, to “the Nazi and communist regimes” in the sense that they are “all engaged in the politics of fear.” “Indeed,” he wrote in 2006, “the Bush administration has been able to improve on the techniques used by the Nazi and Communist propaganda machines by drawing on the innovations of the advertising and marketing industries.” Soros elaborated on this theme at the January 2007 World Economic Forum in Today Soros remains committed to ousting the Nazi-like Republicans from the White House. And because Hillary Clinton appears to be the person most capable of making his dream a reality, Soros is heavily invested in abetting her quest for the presidency. He does this in part by funding the Center for American Progress, with the knowledge that CAP will work synergistically with pro-Hillary organizations like Media Matters. Soros and Hillary have long held each other in high regard, as demonstrated by Hillary’s declaration at a 2004 Take Back America Conference in Washington, DC: “Now, among the many people who have stood up and said, ‘I cannot sit by and let this happen to the country I love,’ is George Soros, and I have known George Soros for a long time now, and I first came across his work in the former Soviet Union, in Eastern Europe, when I was privileged to travel there, both on my own and with my husband on behalf of our country….[W]e need people like George Soros, who is fearless, and willing to step up when it counts.” (Cited in David Horowitz and Richard Poe, The Shadow Party, p. 53) Morton Halperin is Senior Vice President of the Center for American Progress and Director of the When laying the groundwork with Soros for CAP, Halperin sought the input of John Podesta, a former chief of staff in the Media Maters, Hillary, and Democracy Media Matters has received additional assistance from another entity with close ties to Hillary Clinton, Democracy Alliance, a self-described “liberal organization” of at least 80 ultra-wealthy leftists—one of them being George Soros—whose long-term objective is to raise some $200 million for the political Left. As Newsday’s Glenn Thrush explains, Democracy Alliance members report that their organization, which “advises Democratic donors on where to spend their political contributions,” “steered more than $6 million to Brock’s group” between 2004 and 2006. And who is the official leader of Democracy Alliance? None other than Rob Stein, a former chief of staff at the Washington office of the Clinton-Gore Transition, and thereafter an official in Bill Clinton’s Treasury Department. According to author Joseph Klein, Democracy Alliance has also “received significant support from some of Hillary Clinton’s most important backers including Susie Tompkins Buell and her husband, Mark Buell, and financier Alan Patricof.” Moreover, Democracy Alliance reports that one of its officials, Jonathan Adler, “served as Regional Campaign Coordinator for Senator Hillary Clinton’s successful 2006 Senate re-election campaign.” The current Managing Director of Democracy Alliance, Kelly Craighead, is, according to Glenn Thrush, “one of the Media Matters, Hillary, and the Democratic Party Hillary’s ties to Brock’s organization are further cemented by the largesse of such donors to Media Matters as Susie Tompkins Buell (Hillary’s close ally and a co-founder of the fashion company Esprit) and James Hormel (a While Hillary is Media Matters’ sacred cow, Brock’s group also has many ties to the Democratic Party generally. This only serves to increase Media Matters’ devotion to Hillary, because she clearly represents the Democrats’ best hope for recapturing the White House in 2008. Among Media Matters’ 58 staffers and advisors are the following noteworthy individuals: Such are Media Matters’ deep ties to the Democratic Party and, by extension, to the political fortunes of Hillary Clinton. Media Matters, Hillary, and the Stifling of Free Speech Media Matters’ desire to eliminate voices critical of Hillary dovetails perfectly with its support of the so-called Fairness Doctrine, a policy (repealed by Congress in 1987) whose re-establishment Hillary Clinton likewise advocates, just as she did during her years as First Lady. The Fairness Doctrine was originally instituted in the early days of the Federal Communications Commission “to ensure that all coverage of controversial issues by a broadcast station be balanced and fair.” At that time, however, the American public had few broadcasting channels from which to select, and each of those conceivably could have held identical positions on various issues of import—thereby precluding people from having access to a spectrum of different viewpoints. But in the current era of the Internet and the proliferation of radio and cable television stations, the Doctrine is a pointless anachronism. Nevertheless, the political Left seeks to restore it because talk radio is dominated by conservative voices, whereas liberal/Left enterprises like Air America Radio have failed to draw much of an audience. In other words, the Left wants government control over the airwaves to do for its cause what the free market would not do—that is, turn down the volume of influential conservative voices and, consequently, affect the thinking and the voting decisions of the American people. As the conservative political blogger Ed Morrissey writes, the original Fairness Doctrine “did not require broadcasters to present issues in a ‘fair and honest manner’; it required them to turn their stations into ping-ponging punditry if they allowed opinion to appear on the air at all. It created such a complicated formula that most broadcasters simply refused to air any political programming, as it created a liability for station owners for being held hostage to all manner of complaints about lack of balance.” The Left is fully aware of this, and always has been. One former Kennedy administration official candidly acknowledged several decades ago: “Our massive strategy was to use the Fairness Doctrine to challenge and harass the right-wing broadcasters, and hope that the challenges would be so costly to them that they would be inhibited and decide it was too costly to continue.” Today Hillary Clinton and Media Matters seek to do precisely the same thing. During her years as First Lady, Mrs. Clinton witnessed how conservative talk radio helped to educate the public—in a way that the major news networks did not—on the details of her plan to socialize the American health care system by stealth. Similarly, in 2004 she observed how talk radio helped derail John Kerry’s presidential bid by bringing to light—again, in a way that the major networks did not—the Swift Boat veterans’ revelations about Kerry. As Joseph Klein points out, “Kerry himself blamed his defeat on the ‘profound and negative change in the relationship of America’s media with America’s people’ which ‘began, incidentally, when the Fairness Doctrine ended.’” In October 2004, Media Matters announced its campaign to “restore the Fairness Doctrine” as a means of rectifying the “imbalanced political discourse on our airwaves.” David Brock in 2005 supported a bill introduced by Hillary’s friend, Democratic Rep. Louise Slaughter, to give the Fairness Doctrine a new incarnation. In Slaughter’s view, conservative radio amounts to nothing more than “a waste of good broadcast time, and a waste of our airwaves.” Said Brock: “By restoring a diversity of fact and opinion to programming, Fairness Doctrine legislation restores a concept that has been lost since the 1980s—that because the public owns the airwaves, the public is entitled to be adequately informed by the broadcasters of news and opinion.” In the spirit of its proposed Fairness Doctrine, Media Matters, fresh off its victory over Hillary’s critic Don Imus, is now candidly preparing to challenge the broadcast rights of a number of notable conservative talk radio personalities for their alleged use of “bigotry and hate speech targeting, among other characteristics, race, gender, sexual orientation, religion and ethnicity.” (And, oh yes, these broadcasters just happen to be vocal critics of Hillary Clinton.) Just as Media Matters assigned Ryan Chiachiere to monitor Don Imus’ every utterance, for instance, so does it assign two researchers to monitor Rush Limbaugh’s program, transcribe his words, and catalogue his alleged transgressions. Such assignments are made possible by Media Matters’ $8.5 million budget, which is, by way of comparison, more than ten times as large as the budget of a website like FrontPage. In a 6,181-word report titled “It’s Not Just Imus,” Media Matters documents what it perceives to be the case against not only Limbaugh, but also Michael Savage, Bill O’Reilly, Glen Beck, Neal Boortz, Michael Smerconish, and John Gibson. By eliminating such conservative voices from the airwaves, Media Matters could effectively insulate much of the American public from ever hearing about the negative traits and hidden agendas of Hillary Clinton, and thereby, in essence, ensure her ascendancy to the Oval Office. Media Matters frames its motives in the rhetoric of pure-hearted concern about a lack of civility in the media. But the politically rooted double standard that actually underlies the organization’s activities are obvious when we consider the fact that Media Matters’ very own That is incivility by any definition. But in the eyes of Media Matters, it is entirely permissible because the author is a supporter of Hillary Clinton.
Twas Sir Hillary that slew the Imus dragon and if she has her way Rush Limbaugh Michael Savage, Bill O’Reilly, John Gibson and others will be losing their heads like the nappy headed Imus. OK maybe Clinton is right in the case of O'Reilly but we can just change the channel.
It was an organization run by Ms Clinton's friends that provided the Pseudo-Reverend Sharpton the info about Imus. This organization, Media Matters had a full time researcher scanning the Imus program transcripts to see if he would trip up..and he did in a big and very stupid way.
Now they've got two researchers on Rush, and more other conservative broadcasters on Ms Clinton's enemy list. Why is this such a big deal? When a Candidate for President of the United States helps create an organization dedicated removing broadcasters who disagree with her---that is not only very frightening but it is the beginnings of a Hillary police state. Media Matters: Hillary’s Lap Dogs
My Friend Spree has more on Liberal suppression of free speech in the post below:




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