2003 Soap Box Archives

Dinosaurs 04/15/03

I believe that the war in Iraq will bring about not only political but
cultural change in our nation.

Political change because whether you happen to agree with President
Bush’s policies or not, if you’ll be honest with yourself, you have to
admit that he is a leader.

He looks neither left nor right, ignores the polls and the sometimes
scathing criticism and forges ahead on the path that he believes to be
right for America.

The military loves and respects him, which is a far cry from the way
they felt about the previous administration which decimated their ranks
and equipment to the point of being dangerous to the defense of this
country.
He has surrounded himself with experienced people who understand how
the world works instead of politically correct appointees whose
monumental ineptness muddied up the waters and left much undone. Cases
in point, Janet Reno, Hazel O’Leary, Joycelyn Elders and the list goes
on.

The President of the United States is the leader of the free world, and
he or she, as the case might be in the future, should lead and not let
the country be run by opinion polls and sound bites.

Needless to say there are a lot of words floating around out there that
people wish they could take back, some of them by noted politicians
such as Mr. Kerry’s remarks about the U.S.A. needing a regime change.
Terrible choice of words Mr. Kerry.

And Tom Daschle’s desperate statement about President Bush
making such a mess of diplomacy after twelve years of failed diplomacy.

And worst of all, the French and their buddies who wanted to give the
inspectors more time. We could have given the inspectors until
judgment day and they wouldn’t have found any weapons of mass
destruction. I don’t think that Hans Blix really wanted to find any.

Secondly, I believe that there will be a shift in the way Americans
perceive the media.

So many of the media personalities and columnists are literally
dinosaurs, Vietnam era reporters who still view the world with the
elitist, socialistic, blame America attitude which was so pervasive
during the Sixties with the journalistic crowd. To a lot of them
patriotism is archaic and they slant their views accordingly.

We had unprecedented coverage of the war in Iraq with the satellite
phones and the embedded reporters.

For the first time in a war we had something to compare the network
coverage to as Fox News devoted twenty four hours a day to on the scene
coverage, actually covering the same stories as the networks but doing
it in such a different way.

If you did as I occasionally did and flipped back and forth between
CNN, the three major networks and Fox, you may have noticed as I did
that the networks and CNN dwelled on the negative, getting as much
mileage as they could from an incident of collateral damage or whatever
they could find to cast our role in Iraq in a negative light.

NBC, CBS and ABC News all lost ratings during the war while Fox’s
ratings went through the roof.

Al Jazeera and the other Arabic networks got caught with their
journalistic pants down when the war wound down so quickly and they had
been giving the impression that the Iraqis, if not winning the war,
were at least holding their own.

All of a sudden they got up one morning and had to report to their
audience that they had been feeding them a line of barnyard substance,
that the Saddam Hussein regime had fallen and the war had been lost to
the coalition forces.

I hope that this experience will encourage Americans to think for
themselves, to look behind the scenes and read between the lines. The
truth shall set you free.

Pray for our troops.

What do you think?

God Bless America

Charlie Daniels

 

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