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National Review, Fox News, and "Bush Haters:"
Efforts to paint Bush critics as a "fringe group" may have worked six months ago, but not any more
TBTM Commentary by Don Waller, Co-Founder, Take Back The Media

Here at Take Back The Media, we make no secret of our dislike for George W. Bush and his administration's policies, both foreign and domestic. We've also been known to take metaphorical aim at the current resident of the White House with our flash animations - in fact, the reason we actually started this site was to provide a showcase for those animations. A quick look at our Flash page shows no less than 10 flash animations poking fun at the Whistle Ass administration on a variety of topics, from the economy to the rollback of civil rights to the lies he told in the wake of Afghanistan and in the run-up to Iraq. It would be an understatement to say that satirizing Bush provides a target-rich environment.

From time to time, members of the So-Called Liberal Media "discover" TBTM all over again - mostly when they need a new target of feigned outrage. Last year, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Los Angeles Times went on the attack over a then-current flash animation by Symbolman entitled "Bush Is Not A Nazi, So Stop Saying That!" We were accused at the time of being unpatriotic, anti-American, and unnecessarily critical of a "popular wartime president." The words "disgusting," "ill-informed" and "history-twisting" were used to describe our animation and our web site. We took that criticism and moved on, after taking time to correct the record as we saw it.

The correction that was needed was this - those who criticized Symbolman's flash and our web site were missing the point of the animation. The point was that George W. Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, had the assets of the family business seized by the U.S. Government under the Trading With The Enemy Act of 1941. Much of the Bush family fortune was made by dealing with Nazi Germany - both before and during World War II. Click here for the history.

These facts are not in dispute - but the critics of our web site would not acknowledge them.

Flash forward. Today, the Iraq invasion has not been the "cakewalk" that Bush's cabal promised us it would be. His poll numbers are falling. People are asking questions about the lies he told to get his invasion of Iraq, the lies the EPA told about air quality near Ground Zero, the lies he told to First Responders when he promised them plenty of funding and then stiffed them. For the first time in his "presidency," more people are saying they'll vote for someone - anyone - other than Geroge W. Bush than those who say they'll re-elect him.

Bush supporters in the media see their control of the news slipping away, due to the growing influence of numerous "bloggers" and alternative news sites such as this one. And their reaction has been as bewildering as it has been predictable - they're labeling us "Bush haters."

The most recent instances of this have shown up this week, as a tag-team effort between The National Review and Fox News. NR's Byron York wrote a feature article entitled "Annals of Bush Hating," and Fox News was only to happy to have Mr. York on to discuss this article. Here is a portion of the Fox transcript (in italics), with our commentary. Let's roll the tape...

BYRON YORK, WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT, NATIONAL REVIEW: Well, there's a very energetic world of Bush-hating on the Internet. If you remember, during the Clinton years the president, and Mrs. Clinton, paid a lot of attention to things like The Clinton Chronicles, which was a video that accused President Clinton of being involved in: all sorts of unsolved murders, of drug running and all sorts of other things.

Stop tape. Notice how York cites but one example of anti-Clinton material, as if The Clinton Chronicles was the only piece of anti-Clinton trash being circulated. Don't forget for a moment that not only was the National Review running anti-Clinton material for the entire length of Clinton's presidency, but most mainstream media were echoing every charge against Bill and Hillary Clinton, no matter how far-fetched.

If you remember, in her famous vast right-wing conspiracy appearance on the Today show in January of 1998, Mrs. Clinton said, you know, to show the unreasonableness of her opponents. She said they've even accused my husband of murder and drug running. Today, there's something very similar going on, on the Internet. There are sites that regularly portray the president as a Nazi, in Nazi regalia; compare him to Hitler, really quite seriously.

Once again - York is disingenous enough to disassociate Bush from his family's history of literally being in business with Nazi Germany. He prefers to present it without context - all the better to paint sites like ours as a "fringe element." Let's fast-forward a moment...

HUME: Now, there's something called takebackthemedia.com, where we were able to find a little bit of video and sound that's available to people who visit that site. Let's listen to a little bit of it, and let's see if you can tell us what it's all about.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When the fuehrer says we is the master race, we hail; hail right in the now the fuehrer face. Now to the love the fuehrer is the greatest grace so we hail, hail right in the fuehrer's face...

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUME: What is that? What's takebackthemedia anyway…take backthemedia.com?

YORK: Well, it is an anti-war website that regularly produces what are called, flash animations, which are little movies produced for the Internet. That one is called, Bush is Not a Nazi, So Stop Saying That. And the whole point is that Bush, of course, is a Nazi. His...

We'll stop here. York makes the same "mistake" that Bill O'Reilly made, the same "mistake" that Joe Scarborough made. They all refer to TBTM as an "anti-war" site, as if that's the reason we started the site in the first place.

None of them will tell the truth - that we are first and foremost an anti-media site. Roll tape...

HUME: Yes. The juxtaposition of pictures of Bush doing his...

YORK: Exactly.

HUME: ... being president with...

YORK: Right.

HUME: ... with pictures with Hitler.

YORK: Exactly. And they'll have photos saying, you know, both men used crises. And they'll have a photo of the Reichstag Fire (search), and the World Trade Center attacks (search), saying they used these opportunities to suppress and to, you know, destroy civil liberties in their countries, etc., etc.

Comparing Bush to Hitler is really quite common. And it's not…it's not all...

Again - no mention of the Bush family history, which is where the bulk of these comparisons come from. Of course, for York to acknowledge the historical context would be to disclose the Bush family's dirty little secret. Let's roll...

HUME: Is this sort of what you'd call mainstream discourse in this country, among Democratic opponents, or is this just…is this just sort of stuff out there on the Internet where the buses don't run that...

YORK: Certainly you do not see it; I would say, in the mainstream. Just as you did not see, you know, mainstream Republicans who for example, thought that Hillary Rodham Clinton's health care plan was a bad idea.

Whoa. Everybody from the Republican party was on TV saying bad things about what they derisively called "Hillary-Care." They were lined up around the block at Fox News to take their swings at the health care pinata. Either York doesn't own a TV, or he's lying through his teeth.

You didn't see them accusing President Clinton of murder. So, certainly this is not something of mainstream Democrats. On the other hand, it's not entirely obscure. There is a website called counterpunch.org, which is a…run by a journalist named Alexander Coburn which...

HUME: Well, he's very much a mainstream journalist, he's a liberal but I mean left wing, but he's certainly not a…he's certainly nut a case.

YORK: This year ran a story that said, "It's going a bit far to compare the Bush of 2003 to the Hitler of 1933. Bush simply is not the orator that Hitler was; but comparisons of the Bush Administration's fear mongering tactics to those practice so successfully, and with such terrible results by Hitler, are not at all out of line." This is…this kind of stuff you see with some regularity.

And why not? Does anyone wonder why the color-coded Terror Alert system isn't in use any more? Because people began to feel like they were being manipulated. Coburn is on-point, despite York's attempt to strip that point of its context.

HUME: Now, what about the coverage of it?

YORK: There's been very...

HUME: There's a fair amount of coverage of these...extreme Clinton adversaries...as I recall.

YORK: You may remember the White House actually came up with a 300- plus-page report about conspiracy stream of commerce, that in which, they traced kind of crazy stories about the president, from far out media into mainstream media. There's been far less coverage of this. There's been a few articles about counterpunch.org. But if you do a nex…a search of the Nexus database, for example, you just won't come up with bushbodycount, or various other sites out there.

So what, exactly, is York's point here? If this stuff doesn't turn up in Lex-Nex (I have serious doubts about that), why even report on it? Is he accusing the "liberal media" of not reporting it? If that's the case, let me ask a question of Mr. York that has been asked to Mike Stinson and myself a number of times - You're on TV talking about it, aren't you? How can you say the media isn't covering this? To the tape.

HUME: What is…what do you think animates this? I mean, his father, while he was disparaged by a lot of people on the left as being, you know, light or whatever, he did not encounter this kind of thing.

YORK: Actually, I will say that there was some of that because there…as you know...

HUME: But I guess it's all…it's all coming back in this...

YORK: Right.

HUME: ... Bush family business. But I don't remember…when I was covering him then, and I don't remember, of course, the web wasn't what it is. What do you think accounts for this, quickly?

YORK: I think it accounts…it's mostly the internet. And mostly the anger that you see in mainstream Democrats going from Florida, all the way back to Clinton impeachment, and a variety of things.

Ah, finally, there's the point. Mr. York wants Fox viewers to believe that criticism of Bush is the output of a bunch of "Sore Losermans" who never "got over it."

Well, Byron and Brit, here's a news flash for you. Every day, I speak to conservatives who have long since given up on defending George W. Bush. They feel they've been lied to, manipulated and deceived. And a good number of them tell me that they don't know who they're going to vote for in 2004, but most of them are sure it won't be George W. Bush.

This is a fringe group that…whose accusations can sometimes seep into the mainstream.

Sorry, Byron, wrong again. There may be a small number of people who do what we do, but we are not a fringe group. Not any more. The number of Americans getting fed up with Whistle Ass and his administration is growing by the day. As a result, we end up seeing pieces like this one that equate any criticism of Bush with "calling him a Nazi." It may have worked six months ago, when Bush was still a "popular wartime president." But enlisted personnel are disenchanted with him. Families of the 9/11 victims want answers that Bush refuses to give them. There is still no Osama, no Saddam, no WMDs. It's coming to light that the White House lied about the threat from Iraq, about the deadly air quality in Lower Manhattan, about the amount of money Bush and Cheney's friends are making in Iraq. And that doesn't even take into account his utterly disastrous domestic policies.

This sort of dismissive tripe may have worked before the White House broke everything. But that was then, this is now. The gloves are off, and Bush is in for all the criticism that he deserves, be it on the internet or off.

And this time it's you, Brit Hume and Byron York, and those like you who need to "get over it."

Don Waller is co-founder of Take Back The Media, and co-hosts TBTM Radio with Michael Stinson. You can reach Don via email at stranger@takebackthemedia.com.