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Murdoch journalist slimes President Bush
Gerard Jackson
Stephen Ellis is a Bush-hating Murdoch journalist who sports a permanent anti-Republican sneer. Like all Bush-haters this lefty feels free to distort facts, and even lie, if he thinks it will damage President Bush’s reputation.
Not waving, drowning (The Australian, 9 June) was just another unfortunate example of Ellis’s style of character assassination and complete contempt for the truth and anything remotely resembling journalistic standards. But hey! Whoever said you needed integrity to work for Rupert Murdoch?
Pushing the Democratic National Committee Party line for all it’s worth, Ellis made the outrageous charge that it was “plutocrats who underwrote the Bush campaign”. In other words a super rich and evil cabal is pulling the President’s strings. This is a typical leftwing trope and a dead give away as to the direction the author is about to take.
Sure enough he homed in to what he described as the “Republican Party’s two key constituencies — the self-righteously devout and the conspicuously rich”. This is the Howard Dean line, one that reflects the hateful thinking of the Democratic Party’s Leninist hardcore and one that Ellis clearly subscribes to. (See what happens when you spend four years being indoctrinated by lefty lecturers: Murdoch puts you on his payroll).
Ellis deliberately omitted the embarrassing fact — embarrassing for him that is — that it is the Democratic Party that is the party of the hyper rich and not the Republicans. Let us now look at facts rather than Ellis’s lies and politically motivated bigotry.
Last year the Democrats ran an external-party campaign that was unprecedented in US political history. The campaign was led by 527s that were in turn generously funded by five billionaires, the sort of people Ellis would have scathingly condemned as “plutocrats” if they had been Republicans. This funding is an indisputable fact despite the Democrats’ dishonest whining that the 527 movement was entirely driven and funded by grass roots activists. Curiously enough, this situation managed to completely elude “Super Scoop” Ellis.
These five moral giants and outstanding pillars of the community were currency speculator George Soros, that paragon of moral virtue Hollywood mogul Stephen Bing, Progressive Insurance chairman Peter Lewis and the self-righteous – and is that an understatement — California investors Herbert and Marion Sandler.
Let’s take a quick gander at the Dems’ lucky quadrella.
One of Stephen Bing’s jolly good friends is Dominic Montemarano, a New York Mafia figure currently doing time on racketeering charges.
Dear old Dom’s street moniker was Donnie. His main occupation when he and Bing weren’t enjoying each other’s company was acting as a hit man for the Colombo family. Try to imagine a heavy Republican donor getting away with that kind of connection.
Then there is the silvertailed Peter Lewis. It’s a pity that Ellis didn’t bother to go into Lewis’s links to the crooked Webster L. Hubbell through the Clintons’ White House aide Marcia Scott. Could this link explain Lewis’s generous offer to the disgraced Hubbell? And why should such an offer be made to a man who was in jail? Well I know one thing — these are questions Ellis will never ask.
The Sandlers are a lovely couple, a real gem. Herbert and Marion founded Golden West Financial Corporation, a bank whose worth is estimated at $17 billion. Their idea of contributing to the country that allowed them to become fabulously rich is to demand heavy progressive taxes and inheritance taxes on the little people. This is pretty rich (excuse the pun) coming from a couple whose vast wealth would allow them to avoid these taxes.
(Strange that so few people have cottoned on to the fact that extremely wealthy Democrats are always demanding tax increases for Americans that they themselves would be able to avoid. If these Democrats were serious about raising taxe they would demand heavy wealth taxes. See Teresa Heinz Kerry: You pay taxes, I don’t).
We now come to the adorable Mr Soros. And what a sweet guy he is. I say, George, do you remember that day in your office when a bloke with whom you were trying to do business insisted that you sack your chief ‘executioner’. (Executioner is a trading term). Remember your response, George? It went something like — “OK”. Twenty-odd years with the firm, George, and you were going to throw him straight on to the street. Fortunately wiser, and certainly more compassionate, heads prevailed. No wonder you think you are above the law.
This bunch of hypocrites donates nearly US$80 million dollars to the Democrats and what does the slimy Ellis do? He accuses Bush of being backed by “plutocrats” and the “conspicuously rich”.
Showing his loathing of Christians Ellis sneered at the “self-righteously devout” that supported Bush. What is it about Church-going, patriotic folk that drives the likes of Ellis nuts? Is it their faith or is it their patriotism?
According to the tolerant and ever so honest Ellis the problem with Christians is that they want to stick their noses into “adult bedrooms and academic laboratories”. Ellis believes in that oxymoron called gay marriage. Being a self-righteous lefty Ellis immediately assumes the worst of those who disagree with him. Therefore gay marriage is good, irrespective of the damage to traditional marriage and society at large, and Christian opponents are bad.
Getting into his stride, Ellis stated that President Bush has been “battling laws to expand stem cell research”. This is another lie. What Bush actually did was to ban federal funding of stem cell research that required the creation and destruction of human embryos, a practice that millions of Americans find morally offensive.
Yet Ellis tried to convey the false impression that Bush was opposed to stem cell research per se. In fact, under the Bush administration federal funding of stem cell research has grown from $306 million to $566 million. This is an 85 per cent increase. To read Ellis one would think that Bush had slashed funding to the bone.
Sticking closely to Dem talking points Ellis laments “all those hours spent on judges …” Funnily enough, Harry Reid basically said the same thing. What a coincidence, Mr Ellis. Why didn’t you tell readers that it was not Bush but the filibustering Democrats led by Harry Reid and egged on by party extremists who caused the delay?
Sounding more and more like Reid, Ellis complained that Bush wasted time “trying to get a handful of very conservative judges approved by the Senate”. But as any informed person knows, the delay was caused by the Dems violating the Senate’s traditional 51 per cent rule. A fact that Ellis deliberately ignored.
Anyway, what is wrong with appointing ‘conservative’ judges, Mr Ellis? The answer is simple. Lefties like Ellis are afraid that these judges would be strict constructionists, i.e., the Constitution means what it says and not what some interest group, ideologue, lefty journalist or Marxist academic thinks it should say.
As for social security reform, that has been generated by “conservative ideologues” and greedy financiers who have obviously “coveted” the fees. In other words, there is no crisis: it’s a beat up by greedy Wall Street types and conservative ideologues.
If this is so, Mr Ellis, care to explain why Clinton said that the US economy is “threatened by the looming fiscal crisis in Social Security”. And that was seven years ago. Moreover, Gore, Kennedy, Boxer and Gephardt publicly agreed with him. Not only that, in the December/January 1996-97 issue of the Boston Review, the Bush-hating Paul Krugman admitted that there was a social security crisis and suggested private social security accounts as a solution. But now that Bush is president ‘journalists’ are trying to wash all of this down the Dems’ Orwellian memory hole. Well, Ellis, it ain’t going to work.
Note: Bunyip rather sheepishly admitted that “RWDBs [rightwing dirt bags] never say a word against the Murdoch press”. How very true. Could this be because certain members of the Australian branch of the RWDB Club have NewsCorp connections? To attack Fairfax while allowing vicious liars like Stephan Ellis and
Peter Wilson to escape criticism doesn’t do much for this lot’s credibility. Perhaps they’ll bear this in mind next time one of them has the gall to state that Brookes should “shut down” because they are doing a far better job.
The following article reveals Ellis to have a pathological hatred of Bush and an equally pathological aversion to the truth. According to this excuse for a journalist Bush’s business supporters are “barbarians” and the President is a corrupt politician who has been bought and paid for by “polluters”.
Murdoch journalist libels Bush and his Texas record
Gerard Jackson is Brookes’ economics editor
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 13 June 2005