Smear Tactics

by Miner, Brad

• ISBN13: 9780061140143
• ISBN10: 0061140147
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-11-07
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

In this spirited survey of liberal lies and dirty tricks, Brad Miner, one of America's leading conservative insiders, offers a look at the American liberal tradition of slander, insult, and character assassination throughout history. Smear Tactics mines both today's papers and the classic campaigns of history for tales of liberal deception and manipulation. Tracing smears from the early days of our nation right through the run-up to the 2008 elections, Miner highlights the Left's most atrocious campaigns against: Soldiers: The media's attacks on our troops, from Vietnam to Iraq The Faithful: The Left's campaign to vilify Christians in American life Entrepreneurs: Is the American Dream dead? The Left says yes, and Girl Scout cookies, Wal-Mart, and Legos have all played a part. President Bush: He caused global warming and Hurricane Katrina? Smears against the man the Left loves to hate. As Brad Miner shows, American politics has never been a sport for gentlemen-but recent campaigns have proven dirtier than ever, full of negative ads, rumormongering, and worse. With the coming election a wide-open race, full of polarizing candidates of all stripes, the mud is about to start flying across the American landscape, and in Smear Tactics Brad Miner returns the fire-with a vengeance.

Table of Contents

Vipers Loosed: An Introduction to Smear Tactics	p. 1
Smearing Patriots	p. 41
Smearing Soldiers	p. 87
Smearing the Faithful	p. 127
Smearing Entrepreneurs	p. 157
Shining Through: A Depreciation of Smear Tactics	p. 195
Acknowledgments	p. 241
Notes	p. 243
Index	p. 259
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Smear Tactics
The Liberal Campaign to Defame America

Chapter One

Vipers Loosed

An Introduction to Smear Tactics

The serpent you cherished and warmed, bit the hand that nourished him, and gave you sufficient specimens of his talents, his gratitude, his justice, and his truth. When such vipers are let loose upon society, all distinction between virtue and vice are leveled, all respect for character is lost.
—Abigail Adams in 1804 to Thomas Jefferson about James T. Callender, whom Jefferson had paid to smear her husband, John—and who then smeared Jefferson too.1

The President of the United States is a racist.

So say liberals, who also assert—vehemently—that George W. Bush is stupid, lazy, bloodthirsty, demagogic, venal, and, well, pick your most scarifying adjective. One Web site even declares the President to be the Antichrist. (Did you know that if you add up the numerical positions of the letters in his name as spelled in Hebrew the total is . . . 666? So claims www.bushisantichrist.com, although it is not explained why his middle name is not included or why Bush 43's name works, Bush 41's does not.

You can call Mr. Bush or any American a lot of things—insult him with bitterness and without restraint—but if you're really out to hurt him, call him racist, because then he'll be true and royally smeared. And if in addition to racist you can throw in fascist, well then, you've made the Perfect Smear. You've made the man an enemy of the state, not chief of state.

But whatever other faults W may have, racism—to take the first instance (we'll get to "fascist" soon enough)—certainly isn't among them. This is clear from, yes, his "compassionate conservatism" (tired as that phrase may be after nearly two terms of his presidency), which has led, among other things, from his commitment to spend upward of $15 billion to address the AIDS pandemic in Africa—a dramatic increase by any measure over all previous American administrations—and to his appointment of African Americans (and other minorities) to key cabinet positions. No other president of the United States has had a black secretary of state; Mr. Bush has had two. But, as the saying goes, no good deed will go unpunished. And the punishment was meted out with vigorous viciousness in the wake of the great storms that rocked the world a few years ago.

The year 2005 was indeed a low point for high water. At the start of the year, the whole world was still reeling from the emotional aftershocks of the Indian Ocean earthquake/tsunami that killed nearly 300,000 people, and it was not long after that America's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was predicting a "95% to 100% chance of an above--normal hurricane season" in the Atlantic.

To paraphrase the poet: They builded better than they knew.

In the end, the Atlantic hurricanes of 2005 would obliterate all previous records. As NOAA reports, it was the first year ever with twenty--six named storms, the first with thirteen hurricanes, the first with three Category 5 storms, and the first in which four major hurricanes made landfall in the United States.

According to the American Red Cross, 2005 "was the 'worst--case scenario' for the United States," and it cites three of the storms as most destructive: Katrina, Rita, and Wilma.2

True enough, but were you aware that this period of increased hurricane activity actually began a decade earlier?3 In fact, all hurricane seasons since 1995 have been above normal. However, in the wake of Katrina, this didn't stop some commentators, as you'll recall (we were all watching), from laying blame for the failure of New Orleans's levees squarely at the feet of President Bush. Such assertions were clearly the stuff of political smear tactics, howevermuch of the sarcastic rants may have been selectively couched in the semblance of science.

You want sarcasm? The Web site SourceWatch, a sort of media encyclopedia for the American Left, begins its coverage of "George W. Bush: Hurricane Katrina" with this: "President George W. Bush was nearing the end of a month--long vacation at his Crawford, Texas, ranch on August 29, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast of the United States."4 This pointed juxtaposition is certainly a subtle smear: What, we may ask, does the president's vacation have to do with the storm? What difference to the path of a natural disaster would the president's presence in the Oval Office have made? What difference, indeed, if he had been on the ground along the banks of Lake Pontchartrain piling up sandbags? The concurrence can only have been made by SourceWatch to evoke the popular liberal charge that Mr. Bush is lazy and uncaring. In an open letter to Mr. Bush, filmmaker Michael Moore mockingly wrote: "I know you didn't want to interrupt your vacation and I know how you don't like to get bad news. Plus you had fund-raisers to go to and mothers of dead soldiers to ignore and smear."5 And as another liberal columnist put it: "George W. Bush, the least hardworking president in history, continued playing at his Texas ranch while his fellow citizens drowned and starved in New Orleans."6 That's beginning to get a lot less subtle.

Others, of course, weren't subtle at all in leveling similar smears. There were some who accused the president of inaction and indifference before and after the storm, and a few who actually accused him of being a cause of the various calamities associated with Katrina—even of the hurricane itself!

But, to begin with, there were those charges of racism.

Now racism is a very serious matter, and the history of the United States since at least the 1960s has made the charge against an individual positively—and properly—toxic. It is a terrible smear when applied unjustly, and likely to wreck a political career if it can be made to stick—which is, after all, the point of a smear.

It is probably true that black citizens in New Orleans were affected by Katrina more than others were, but this was . . .

Smear Tactics
The Liberal Campaign to Defame America. Copyright © by Brad Miner. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Excerpted from Smear Tactics: The Liberal Campaign to Defame America by Brad Miner
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