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Big mystery: Which of Chris Wallace’s words set off Bill Clinton?

I hope everyone saw Chris Wallace’s interview with former President Clinton yesterday. It caused quite a stir, but it ended in mystery.

The puzzle: What did Wallace do to send Clinton into an angry, raving, paranoid tirade? Which word did it?

Click here to check the transcript again. Clinton began his maniacal reaction to Wallace with the words, “So you did Fox’s bidding on this show. You did your nice little conservative hit job on me.”

Wallace’s questions. That’s a strong, almost scary response. But to what? Before that moment, what sort of questions had Wallace asked? Let’s see...

He asked:

1. In a recent issue of The New Yorker you say, quote, “I’m 60 years old and I damn near died, and I’m worried about how many lives I can save before I do die.” Is that what drives you in your effort to help in these developing countries?

2. Someone asked you — and I don’t want to, again, be too morbid, but this is what you said. He asked you if you could wind up doing more good as a former president than as a president, and you said, Only if I live a long time. How do you rate, compare the powers of being in office as president and what you can do out of office as a former president?

3. So what is it that you can do as a former president?

4. When we announced that you were going to be on Fox News Sunday, I got a lot of e-mail from viewers. And I’ve got to say, I was surprised. Most of them wanted me to ask you this question: Why didn’t you do more to put bin Laden and Al Qaida out of business when you were president?

There’s a new book out, I suspect you’ve already read, called “The Looming Tower.” And it talks about how the fact that when you pulled troops out of Somalia in 1993, bin Laden said, I have seen the frailty and the weakness and the cowardice of U.S. troops. Then there was the bombing of the embassies in Africa and the attack on the Cole.

Let me — let me — may I just finish the question, sir?

And after the attack, the book says that bin Laden separated his leaders, spread them around, because he expected an attack, and there was no response. I understand that hindsight is always 20/20… but the question is, why didn’t you do more, connect the dots and put them out of business?

5. [Not quite a question] Bin Laden says that it showed the weakness of the United States.

But, Mr. President… with respect, if I may, instead of going through '93 and…

6. May I ask a general question that you can answer? The 9-11 Commission … said about you … and I quote, “The U.S. government took the threat seriously, but not in the sense of mustering anything like the kind of effort that would be gathered to confront an enemy of the first, second or even third rank.”

But (crosstalk) … cruise missiles.

7. Do you think you did enough, sir?

Answers, then boom. That was it. About seven questions, broadly speaking. The first three were softballs. Then there were the substantive questions, on a level of difficulty that any former president should be able to handle.

Summing up: Why didn’t you do more? Was bin Laden right to say the 2003 Somalia pull-out showed weakness? Was the 9-11 Commission right to say the U.S. government didn’t strongly confront the enemy? Did you do enough?

Four straightforward questions on Clinton’s record, and boom, Clinton was accusing Wallace of a “conservative hit job.” Clinton actually answered the questions fairly well. Still, it’s not clear why he also felt the need to lash out madly. Which question screamed “hit job”?

‘False pretenses.’ Clinton bludgeoned on about Wallace’s motives:

“You set this meeting up because you were going to get a lot of criticism from your viewers because Rupert Murdoch’s supporting my work on climate change.

“And you came here under false pretenses and said that you’d spend half the time talking about — you said you’d spend half the time talking about what we did out there to raise $7 billion-plus in three days from 215 different commitments. And you don’t care.”

Wallace told Clinton that half of his prepared questions were on the Clinton Global Initiative, a foundation dedicated to solving a variety of world problems. Wallace said he didn’t expect his questions on al-Qaida to set Clinton off “on such a tear.”

‘You falsely accuse me.’ Clinton responded:

“You launched it — it set me off on a tear because you didn’t formulate it in an honest way and because you people ask me questions you don’t ask the other side….

“All I’m saying is you falsely accuse me of giving aid and comfort to bin Laden because of what happened in Somalia….

“And you’ve got that little smirk on your face and you think you’re so clever. But I had responsibility for trying to protect this country. I tried and I failed to get bin Laden. I regret it. But I did try. And I did everything I thought I responsibly could.”

‘Move your bones.’ Wallace later said that “smirk” really was “sheer wonder at what I was witnessing.” When Clinton took a breath, Wallace moved on to talk about Clinton’s recent activities:

Wallace: “Can I ask you about the Clinton Global Initiative?”

Clinton: “You can.”

Wallace: “I always intended to, sir.”

Clinton: “No, you intended, though, to move your bones by doing this first.”

So where did Chris Wallace go wrong? No, it isn’t that Wallace never asks tough questions of Bush administration officials. He does. Check the transcripts of his “Fox News Sunday” shows, and his even-handedness will become clear.

Where’s the ‘hit’? But let’s assume Wallace always presents only the Bush side of everything, never challenges Republican actions and blocks out everything the Democrats say. Let’s assume Chris Wallace is Tony Snow.

At which point in the interview did Wallace go too far? At exactly which point did the interview become a "conservative hit job"? Which of Wallace’s four al-Qaida questions were so biased that no objective newsman would have asked them?

And why has CNN never asked Clinton those questions?

Frank Warner

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SEE ALSO: Bill Clinton with Chris Wallace: The meltdown.

Hegemony or Survival: Noam Chomsky is alive, but he is one sick man

Noam Chomsky lives, contrary to Hugo Chavez’s misinterpreted statement to the contrary. Fine. I don’t wish death on anyone.

A few fanatics claim Chomsky is a brilliant man. But Chomsky has spent far too much of his life feeding the totalitarian monster. There’s nothing smart about that.

I’m convinced that Chomsky suffers from a mental disorder paralyzing that part of the brain that enables most human beings to see nations as places where real people live.

Mad metaphors. Chomsky instead sees nations as metaphors, and he perceives only the leader, not the people. I’ve described how this disability has manifest itself in the way personality worshippers see Cuba as Castro, or Castro as Cuba. They can’t imagine that Cuba is 11 million people imprisoned by Castro. To them, there’s only Castro, and since he’s on a relatively small, miserably poor island, he is the favored underdog; he must be a victim no matter how many Cubans he has tortured or murdered when the rest of us weren’t looking.

Chomsky sees the United States as big and powerful, and therefore bad. The fact that human freedom gives America its influence doesn’t matter to Chomsky. He can’t figure out that, if the people living in dictatorships suddenly were free, their creativity would be unshackled, too, and their nations eventually would claim a fair share of world influence. In his mind’s eye, he can’t see the people.

To those with Chomsky’s syndrome, the success of the thriving (big) nations has nothing to do with the freedom of their people; instead, thriving nations thrive because they stole something from the poor (little) nations.

World conquest. In Chomsky’s clouded view, a big, free nation ousts dictatorships not because it’s good for the people or the world, but because big bad Bush wants to rule the world and, to do it, he must beat up poor little Osama or Saddam or Ahmadinejad or Kim Jong-Il. Hence, the book title, “Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance.”

Start with Chomsky’s retarded premise, and all of his paranoid linguistics makes sense. Addition is subtraction. Multiplication is division. Freedom is fascism. To hell with people.

Chomsky simply cannot imagine people he cannot see. He cannot connect. He cannot understand how freedom inspires human progress, and he cannot empathize with the anguish of those in foreign lands who are forbidden to speak their minds.

Cruel exploitation. With Chomsky, it’s only the leaders who count, and it doesn’t matter how they govern or how they came to power. If a leader’s repression has crippled his economy or crushed “his people,” that doesn’t matter either. What matters is, if a nation is a chronic failure, its leader automatically represents goodness and victimhood. If a nation is a major success, its leader represents criminal conspiracies and cruel exploitation.

Noam Chomsky:

* “Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.”

* “I have often thought that if a rational fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.”

* “If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.”

* “Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the consequences and detest the reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony.”

* “The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control – 'indoctrination,’ we might say - exercised through the mass media.”

* (Dismissing reports of 2 million Cambodians murdered in “the killing fields” of the Khmer Rouge:) “Space limitations preclude a comprehensive review, but such journals as the Far Eastern Economic Review, the London Economist, the Melbourne Journal of Politics, and others elsewhere, have provided analyses by highly qualified specialists who have studied the full range of evidence available, and who concluded that executions have numbered at most in the thousands; that these were localized in areas of limited Khmer Rouge influence and unusual peasant discontent, where brutal revenge killings were aggravated by the threat of starvation resulting from the American destruction and killing.”

*  “The invasion of Iraq had a number of motives, and one was to illustrate the new National Security Strategy, which declares that the United States will control the world permanently by force if necessary and will eliminate any potential challenge to that domination.”

Worst best. Chomsky’s sick world view inevitably perceives politics and economics in reverse. The leaders of open and democratic societies are bad. The leaders of secretive and oppressive societies are good. Never mind if dictatorship is too bleak to bear.

Chomsky will mention people in his writings, as if he cares, but humans seem an abstraction to him. Occasionally, he’ll even condemn dictatorship, but the reasoning is obtuse. Ultimately, the worse the dictator, the more Chomsky seems to like him.

No, I can’t admire Chomsky’s research or writing. It’s the counterproductive result of bizarro-world thinking. But his books aren’t the problem. The syndrome is. (As Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz has noted, someone buys Chomsky’s books, but no one actually reads them.)

Angry sorrow. In a way, I feel sorry for Chomsky. He cannot feel the joy most of us feel when the tyrants are toppled and oppressed people are freed. He never saw the problem. He couldn’t celebrate the solution.

But I’m angry, too. I feel much sorrier for the countless millions of innocents who today suffer horribly harsh lives in police states while emotionally retarded writers like Noam Chomsky provide pretty, pompous words to justify the suffering.

While most of us fight the monster, he feeds it. Chomsky doesn’t have to die to stop doing that. He should just stop doing that.

Frank Warner

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SEE ALSO: Hugo Chavez: Passing ugly as clever.

End the death penalty: This is a small but lovely victory

Cory Maye, the Mississippi man convicted of murdering police officer Ron Jones in a 2001 drug raid, has been spared the death penalty, at least for a time.

Judge Michael Eubanks found that Maye’s lawyer represented him adequately during his trial, but not during the penalty phase. Two days ago, the judge, who had ordered Maye’s death by lethal injection in 2004, ordered a new sentencing hearing.

Radley “the Agitator” Balko calls this “a small but lovely victory.”

Chance for life. A new hearing might present just enough mitigating testimony to reduce Maye’s sentence to life in prison. And that’s about the harshest penalty there is.

Frank Warner

Chirac says France doesn’t know if Osama bin Laden is dead or alive

A French newspaper reported today that French intelligence sources had concluded Osama bin Laden died Aug. 23 in Pakistan of typhoid. However, French President Jacques Chirac said the report is “in no way whatsoever confirmed.”

The last we heard of bin Laden was in a June 29 audiotape praising the serial murderer Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who had died June 7 in a U.S. air attack. These new news reports on bin Laden sound like rumors, nothing more.

Frank Warner

Cut the partisanship: Give Clinton a break, and Bill, you do the same for Bush

Bill Clinton is defending his failure, in eight years as president, to eliminate Osama bin Laden. He says in a new Fox News interview, “At least I tried. So I tried and failed.”

It’s sad that Clinton has to reopen the bin Laden file, a record so embarrassing that former Clinton national security adviser Sandy Berger went to the National Archives on Sept. 2 and Oct. 2, 2003, and stole top-secret papers documenting Clinton’s inaction. Berger later destroyed the documents.

Now, asked by reporter Chris Wallace about the missed chances to halt bin Laden, Clinton points his famous index finger and says:

“All of President Bush’s neocons claimed that I was too obsessed with finding bin Laden when they didn’t have a single meeting about bin Laden for the nine months after I left office. All the right wingers who now say that I didn’t do enough said that I did too much. Same people.

“At least I tried. That’s the difference between me and some, including all the right wingers that are attacking me now. They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try, they did not try. I tried. So I tried and failed.”

Move on. Look, I’m willing to give Clinton a pass on his failure to kill or capture bin Laden when he had the chance. The threat looks so much bigger and clearer in hindsight. To me, the larger mystery is why he didn’t do more to catch Abdul Rahman Yasin.

Yasin was the man who mixed the chemicals for the first attack on the World Trade Center. That blast killed six people on Feb. 26, 1993. When Clinton left office on Jan. 20, 2001, Yasin was free and living in Iraq.

I’d leave Clinton alone on bin Laden and 9-11. Most of the criticism is partisan politics. Considering bin Laden’s distance from the U.S. and our perpetually sketchy intelligence on al Qaida, any president might have taken the same approach. And Bush didn’t stop bin Laden either.

Sucker punches. But I also would like Clinton to quit making President Bush’s job harder with his little cheap shots. Greta Van Susteren asked Clinton about Hugo Chavez calling Bush a devil, and this was the reply:

Clinton: He [Chavez] shouldn’t have said that. … It makes him look small and it undermines his effectiveness and president of Venezuela. He’s trying to tap into this big anti-American feeling that’s out there. Some of it always exists because of our size and power. Some of it has been fueled by disagreement with our policies in Iraq, plus our unilateral withdrawal from the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the Kyoto Climate Change Treaty, the International Criminal Court and a lot of other international efforts.

Hold it. Was that supposed to be a defense of Bush against Chavez’s thuggery? Clinton says Chavez shouldn’t have called Bush a devil, but then Clinton recites the angry Democrat’s party line on why the world should hate us. How does a statement like that help Bush attract other nations to help us out on the many huge problems of our time? Clinton simply feeds nations like France, Germany and Russia excuses to do nothing, or at least to do nothing good.

(Omitted facts. By the way, wasn’t it Clinton who signed the Iraq Liberation Act on Oct. 31, 1998? OK, that was just saying we were for Iraq’s liberation, but doing nothing about it. And by the way, Bush stepped out of the Test Ban Treaty to consider stockpiling smaller nuclear weapons. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing in itself. As for the Kyoto protocol, we were never in it to pull out of it. On July 25, 1997, when Clinton was president, the Senate voted 95-0 not to even consider it. Funny how Clinton forgot. And Clinton himself would not have subjected Americans to the whims of an International Criminal Court.)

It’s obvious that Clinton was tossing out those misleading talking points simply to score political points for the Democratic Party. It was a partisan cheap shot disguised as a generous helping hand. And every time he takes that kind of sucker punch, Clinton sets back the work of our diplomats. He should know better.

The world is full of hopes and fears right now. In Iraq, Iran, North Korea and Venezuela, there are vile people playing to our worst fears. It’s best if we Americans stop the purely partisan attacks and work together toward our highest hopes.

Frank Warner

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SEE ALSO: Bill Clinton with Chris Wallace: The meltdown.

Bill Clinton with Chris Wallace: The meltdown

I was shocked to read this transcript.

It’s an interview of former President Clinton by Fox News reporter Chris Wallace. It will be broadcast tomorrow. OH MY GOD.

Wallace asks Clinton a few questions about a 9-11 Commission finding that the Clinton administration did too little to stop Osama bin Laden. Suddenly Clinton is transformed into the paranoid Captain Queeg in “The Caine Mutiny.” You can almost hear the steel balls.

Breathless. Wallace, son of CBS’ Mike Wallace, is one of the most level-headed and even-handed newsmen on television. Clinton’s performance seemed to take his breath away:

Wallace: May I ask a general question that you can answer. The 9-11 Commission … said about you … and I quote, “The U.S. government took the threat seriously, but not in the sense of mustering anything like the kind of effort that would be gathered to confront an enemy of the first, second or even third rank.”

Clinton: That’s not true with us and bin Laden…

Wallace: Do you think you did enough, sir?

Clinton: No, because I didn’t get him.

Wallace: Right…

Clinton: But at least I tried. That’s the difference in me and some, including all the right wingers who are attacking me now. They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try, and they did not try. I tried. So I tried and failed.

When I failed I left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy and the best guy in the country, Dick Clarke…

So you did Fox’s bidding on this show. You did your nice little conservative hit job on me. But what I want to know..

Wallace: Now wait a minute, sir… I asked a question. You don’t think that’s a legitimate question?

Clinton: It was a perfectly legitimate question, but I want to know how many people in the Bush administration you asked this question of. I want to know how many people in the Bush administration you asked why didn’t you do anything about the Cole. I want to know how many you asked why did you fire Dick Clarke. I want to know…

Wallace: We asked...

Clinton: (inaudible)

Wallace: Do you ever watch Fox News Sunday, sir?

Clinton: I don’t believe you ask them that.

Wallace: We ask plenty of questions of…

Clinton: You didn’t ask that, did you? Tell the truth.

Wallace: About the USS Cole?

Clinton: Tell the truth.

Wallace: I…with Iraq and Afghanistan there’s plenty of stuff to ask.

Clinton: Did you ever ask that? You set this meeting up because you were going to get a lot of criticism from your viewers because Rupert Murdoch is going to get a lot of criticism from your viewers for supporting my work on Climate Change. And you came here under false pretenses and said that you’d spend half the time talking about…(...)

Wallace: [laughs]

Clinton: You said you’d spend half the time talking about what we did out there to raise $7 billion dollars plus over three days from 215 different commitments. And you don’t care.

Wallace: But President Clinton… We were going to ask half the question about it. I didn’t think this was going to set you off on such a tear.

Clinton: It set me off on such a tear because you didn’t formulate it in an honest way and you people ask me questions you don’t ask the other side.

Wallace: Sir, that is not true…

Clinton: …and Richard Clarke…

Wallace: That is not true…

Clinton: Richard Clarke made it clear in his testimony…

Wallace: Would you like to talk about the Clinton Global Initiative?

Clinton: No, I want to finish this.

Wallace: All right

Clinton: All I’m saying is you falsely accuse me of giving aid and comfort to bin Laden because of what happened in Somalia. No one knew al Qaida existed then…

Wallace: Did they know in 1996 when he declared war on the U.S.? Did no one know in 1998…

Clinton: Absolutely they did.

Wallace: When they bombed the two embassies? Or in 2000 when they hit the Cole?

Clinton: What did I do? I worked hard to try and kill him. I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since. And if I were still president we’d have more than 20,000 troops there trying to kill him. Now I never criticized President Bush and I don’t think this is useful. But you know we do have a government that think Afghanistan is one-seventh as important as Iraq. And you ask me about terror and al Qaida with that sort of dismissive theme when all you have to do is read Richard Clarke’s book to look at what we did in a comprehensive systematic way to try to protect the country against terror. And you’ve got that little smirk on your face. It looks like you’re so clever…

Wallace: [Laughs]

Clinton: I had responsibility for trying to protect this country. I tried and I failed to get bin laden. I regret it but I did try. And I did everything I thought I responsibly could. The entire military was against sending special forces in to Afghanistan and refueling by helicopter and no one thought we could do it otherwise… We could not get the CIA and the FBI to certify that al Qaida was responsible while I was President. Until I left office. And yet I get asked about this all the time and they had three times as much time to get him as I did and no one ever asks them about this. I think that’s strange.

Wallace: Can I ask you about the Clinton Global Initiative?

Clinton: You can.

Wallace: I always intended to, sir.

Clinton: No, you intended to move your bones by doing this first. But I don’t mind people asking me. I actually talked o the 9-11 Commission for four hours and I told them the mistakes I thought I made. And I urged them to make those mistakes public because I thought none of us had been perfect. But instead of anybody talking about those things. I always get these clever little political…where they ask me one sided questions… It always comes from one source. And so…

Wallace: I just want to ask you about the Clinton Global Initiative but what’s the source? You seem upset?

Clinton: I am upset because..

Wallace: …and all I can say is I’m asking you in good faith because it’s on people’s minds, sir. And I wasn’t…

Clinton: There’s a reason it’s on people’s minds. That’s the point I’m trying to make. There’s a reason it’s on people’s minds because they’ve done a serious disinformation campaign to create that impression. This country only has one person who has worked… against terror… under Reagan… only one, Richard Clarke. And all I’d say anybody who wonders whether we did wrong or right. Anybody who wants to see what everybody else did, read his book.

The people on my political right who say I didn’t do enough spent the whole time I was president saying why is he so obsessed with bin Laden. And that was wag the dog when he tried to kill him. My Republican secretary of defense — and I think I’m the only person since World War II to have a Secretary of Defense from the opposite party — Richard Clarke, and all the intelligence people said that I ordered a vigorous attempt to get Osama bin Laden and came closer apparently than anybody has since.

Wallace: All right…

Clinton: And you guys try to create the opposite impression when all you have to do is read Richard Clarke’s findings and you know it’s not true. It’s just not true. And all this business about Somalia — the same people who criticized me about Somalia were demanding I leave the next day. Same exact crowd..

Wallace: One of the…

Clinton: …So if you’re going to do this, for God's sake follow the same standards for everybody.

Wallace: I think we do, sir.

Clinton: …be fair (...)

That’s a lovely video scene to add to the Clinton Presidential Library.

Chris Wallace didn’t go off on some long tangent. He asked Clinton what amounted to one question, with a few follow-ups. Imagine the reaction had Wallace asked whether the Paula Jones suit, the Monica Lewisky affair and the impeachment distracted Clinton from al-Qaida.

As it was, Clinton’s face nearly exploded.

Frank Warner

* * *

SEE ALSO: Big mystery: Which of Chris Wallace’s words set off Bill Clinton?

SEE ALSO: Clinton boil-over boils down to this: Fox News can’t talk to Democrats, and CNN can’t talk to Republicans.

NYT: Hugo Chavez says he regrets never meeting Noam Chomsky before Chomsky died

The trouble is, Noam Chomsky is alive. And The New York Times misquoted Hugo Chavez on Chomsky.

Frank Warner

SEE ALSO: Hegemony or Survival: Noam Chomsky is alive, but he is one sick man.

Hugo Chavez: Passing ugly as clever

Do the people of Venezuela want ugliness and slavery as their future? Of course not. I hope they’ve noticed that’s exactly where their leader Hugo Chavez is taking them.

His speech two days ago at the United Nations is evidence of what he has in store. Instead of explaining what he’d do to make his country or the world better, he called President Bush “the devil” and milked the paranoid fear of “U.S. hegemony.”

“Hegemony”: There’s a word with just enough syllables to sound sinister. It refers to a phantom U.S. plot to take over the world, in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

World control? It should be clear by now that the U.S. promotes democracies -- nations that are free to choose their own way. We don’t control Germany, Japan or Italy, and these are nations we fought in World War II. We don’t control Russia, which we defeated in the Cold War.

We did all we could to make all of those nations democracies, and they are free to do as they please, whether or not their policies please the United States. Take over the world? We don’t even control France, which we liberated in 1944.

And Iraq? If anyone believes that any American, including the president, wants to stay in Iraq one day longer than it takes to stabilize its new democracy, he hasn’t been paying attention.

Moronic obsession. But Chavez obsesses on smells and imperialist plots the way so many simple minds enjoy bodily-function humor and the dependably moronic work of Noam Chomsky, notorious excuser of totalitarians.

At the U.N. a day after Bush spoke, Chavez lifted up a book by Chomsky and tried to blame everyone but tyrants for tyranny. Chavez declared:

“As the spokesman of imperialism he [Bush] came to share his nostrums, to try to preserve the current pattern of domination, exploitation and pillage of the peoples of the world. …

“As Chomsky says here clearly and in depth, the American Empire is doing all it can to consolidate its hegemonistic system of domination and we can not allow them to do that. We can not allow a world dictatorship to be consolidated.”

Dictator tour. At the same time Chavez claims to oppose a world dictatorship, he is doing his best to make Venezuela subservient to and dependent on the most abusive dictatorships on Earth.

Check the itinerary of his world tour. You’ll notice that, except for the prank stop in the United States, he spends most of his vacation time in lands with little liberty and no free press.

He’s made it clear he somehow wants Venezuela to be like Fidel Castro’s Cuba. He wants Communism for Venezuela’s economy? He wants that after the entire Communist world discarded that economic model as a massive failure?

Totalitarian tools. Venezuela has too many poor people, and they deserve help, but the solution isn’t to make all Venezuelans poor. The solution is fairer democratic laws and free trade, not repression and not the rejection of free trade as evil “globalization.”

And yet, maybe it’s not the old Communist economics that Chavez admires. It could be that he flirts with Communism principally because it offers him the deadly totalitarian tools to lock himself into power for 47 years, like Castro.

The ugliness is emerging in Venezuela. When the newspaper El Universal published articles critical of Chavez’s control of the courts, Chavez ordered an investigation. The inquiry was based on a new law, pushed through by Chavez, that punishes criticism of public officials.

Revoke TV licenses? When Venezuelan TV stations pointed out Chavez’s failings, he threatened to revoke their broadcast licenses.

“We can’t keep giving concessions to a group of people who use television stations against us,” Chavez said in June. “Every day they broadcast messages of hate, of disrespect toward institutions, of doubt among us, rumors, psychological war to divide the nation.”

“They hide behind a supposed freedom of speech. I don’t care what the oligarchs of the world say. We’ve shown that we aren’t authoritarian or arbitrary.”

In other words, Chavez says, just trust me with everything.

Press dictatorship. He has said he wants to “liberate the people of Venezuela from the dictatorship of the private media owners.” But what is a free press without the private ownership of printing presses and television news broadcasts? Nothing. If the press is owned by the government, count on this: That government is a dictatorship.

But Chavez marches on, winning laughs and applause with one cheap stunt after another. It’s as if he believes he can hide the ugliness of his ambitions with low humor and complaints for the sake of complaining.

Chavez is the charlatan who markets childish tricks as creative work. He’s the intentional fart at a funeral. He’s the crap in the burning bag. He’s the piss in “Piss Christ.” He is not a man with a good idea.

Bought friends. Hugo Chavez will not do well for his country. Sure, rising oil prices will buy him some friends for a while. But the day will come when Venezuela wakes up to the ugliness.

Frank Warner

SEE ALSO: Hegemony or Survival: Noam Chomsky is alive, but he is one sick man.

Did I imagine news stories with the phrase ‘increasingly unpopular Iraq war’? It turns out, I didn’t

Yesterday, we found out that American support for U.S. participation in the Iraq war is rising.

One poll last week (Sept. 12-13) found that 51 percent of Americans back “the U.S. war in Iraq.” That’s the first majority for the war since October 2003. A slightly newer (Sept. 15-17) poll showed that, for the first time since last December, less than a majority of Americans believe the Iraq war was a mistake.

In other words, our role in the Iraq war is increasingly popular.

[Update: This analysis was posted in September 2006. With the Rep. Mark Foley congressional page scandal at the end of that month, with U.S. forces taking relatively high numbers of casualties in Baghdad in October 2006, with the Democrats winning Congress in November 2006, and with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld resigning in response to the election, U.S. hopes for success in Iraq plummeted until February 2007. In March 2007, two months into the “surge,” public confidence rose slightly.]

Tired phrase. I recalled yesterday that, over the last year or two, news story after news story has referred to the “increasingly unpopular Iraq war.” I asked if now we could expect an endless string of news stories with the phrase “increasingly popular Iraq war.”

But hold it. Were there really all these stories referring to the “increasingly unpopular Iraq war”? Were they only nightmares? Well, no. I checked, and there are tons of stories with that discouraging phrase.

Here are just a few examples of straight news stories describing Iraq as the “increasingly unpopular war.”

Note this: News stories written between Aug. 20 and Sept. 12 are demonstrably wrong if they used the “increasingly unpopular war” phrase. An Aug. 18-20 poll showed American support for the war at 35 percent. By Sept. 12-13, support rose a stunning 16 percent! In case the math ain’t clear, even with the margin of error, that’s increasing popularity.

THE NEWS OF FALTERING SUPPORT:

Peter Wallsten, staff writer, Los Angeles Times, Sept. 13, 2006:

Bush, in a series of recent appearances, and other administration officials have stressed their view that the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq was part of the broader fight against terrorism and that critics were playing into the hands of terrorists.

Linda Feldman, staff writer, Christian Science Monitor, Sept. 8, 2006:

The question now is whether the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq -- long framed as a central front in the war on terror -- will undo the White House’s goal of portraying Republicans as more capable than Democrats of defending the nation.

Thomas Ferraro, Reuters, Sept. 6, 2006:

Polls show Lieberman with an early lead over Lamont, a wealthy businessman who beat Lieberman in the primary by portraying the senator as too supportive of the increasingly unpopular Iraq war and too close to President George W. Bush and other Republicans.

Anne E. Kornblut, The New York Times, Aug. 31, 2006:

Unlike the last two election cycles, when the threat of another attack helped bolster support for Republicans, strategists believe that the increasingly unpopular American presence in Iraq could hurt the governing party.

Marc Sandalow, Washington bureau chief, San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 22, 2006:

As Republican congressional candidates struggle to defend the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq, Bush said military withdrawal in the foreseeable future would increase the likelihood of a terrorist attack in the United States.

CNN, March 13, 2006:

President Bush launched a new effort to shore up support for the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq on Monday and accused Iran of providing explosives used to attack American troops.

Caitlin Johnson, ABC News, Dec. 21, 2005:

There have been several large-scale protests against the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq, but none has matched the anger, urgency and frequency of the Vietnam War rallies.

Jill Lawrence, USA Today, Nov. 20, 2005:

The 2006 campaign year is shaping up as the first to feature both parties splintered and edgy over the increasingly unpopular Iraq war.

Susan Milligan, staff writer, Boston Globe, June 29, 2005:

In an address filled with references to September 11 and Osama bin Laden, Bush repeatedly linked the increasingly unpopular Iraq war with the 2001 attacks that galvanized the country against Al Qaeda and terrorism.

Embarrassed reporters. Shouldn’t there be a few red faces in the press corps? In particular, Peter Wallsten, Linda Feldman, Thomas Ferraro, Anne Kornblut and Marc Sandalow (and probably others) were writing of an “increasingly unpopular war” at a time when the Iraq war clearly was increasingly popular.

I can’t wait to see the corrections, retractions and apologies by Wallsten, Feldman, Ferraro, Kornblut, Sandalow and all the others who carelessly used the boilerplate phrase.

And then I can’t wait to see the stories by Wallsten, Feldman, Ferraro, Kornblut, Sandalow and the others reporting new events in the context of the “increasingly popular Iraq war.”

Hope for our troops. How will it feel to read that in a news story? Our enemies will be discouraged. Our troops will love it. I’ll check today’s papers to see if it’s there yet.

Frank Warner

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Update: Julian E. Barnes and Peter Spiegel, Los Angeles Times, Sept. 20, 2006 (hat tip: Tall Dave):

As conditions have worsened for Iraqis, the war has grown increasingly unpopular with Americans, and promises to be the major issue in November's congressional elections.

Update, Oct. 10, 2006: OK, it’s safe to call the U.S. role in the Iraq war ‘increasingly unpopular’ again.

Update, March 27, 2007: From rock bottom, U.S. confidence rises in Iraq war role, from February to March 2007.

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SEE ALSO: Atrocity of history: Representing Castro as Cuba.

Did Bush just give China a pass?

Maybe President Bush already has given Communist China a pass on its poor human rights record for the traditional practical grounds: Even if the Chinese regime were murdering by the hundreds of thousands, there’d be nothing we could do to stop the nuclear-armed totalitarian bohemoth.

But I noticed something Bush’s speech yesterday at the United Nations that suggested he senses something good is happening in China.

“Asia has seen freedom progress and hundreds of millions of people lifted out of desperate poverty,” he said.

Hopes for freedom. Perhaps Bush was referring only to India, Taiwan, South Korea and the Philippines. But I think he was talking about China, too, and even Vietnam.

The theory is that, as dictatorships expand economic freedom, they inevitably will expand political freedom. We haven’t seen the big breakthrough yet, but let’s hope.

And let’s hope the Thailand coup doesn’t start a trend. Thailand’s democracy was just beginning to sprout roots.

Frank Warner