Meet the Press: You can do better....

Liz Cheney and her father, Darth Vader... spreading the darkness and blowing up planets....


to Mr. Charles David (Chuck) Todd
Meet the Press

RE: December 29, 2019 show on lies and disinformation

Dear Mr. Todd,

Although I enjoyed and appreciated your special Meet the Press program on lies and disinformation and journalism's responsibility, I have a few bones to pick.

First and foremost: you had the Executive Editor of the New York Times on your program, yet you failed to raise the most serious and tragic lie of the last 50 years- probably the worst since the Gulf of Tonkin "attack" back in 1964, that led to a Congressional authorization, the vast expansion of the War in Vietnam, 58,220 American dead, untold Vietnamese casualties, and a war that transformed this country. That lie was the infamous "weapons of mass destruction" canard that the Bush Administration used to get us into a war in 2003 that has transformed America and the Middle East. It was not "faulty intelligence" that got us into that war. That war was ginned up by the Bush Administration- you only have to read the stories on The Project for a New American Century which had been promoting an invasion of Iraq since the Clinton years, and whose members ended up in the highest positions in the Bush Administration, including the Department of Defense and the Vice President's office.

https://buildabettermousetrap.blogspot.com/search?q=pnac

"The fundamental essence of PNAC's ideology can be found in a White Paper produced in September of 2000 entitled "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century." In it, PNAC outlines what is required of America to create the global empire they envision. According to PNAC, America must:

* Reposition permanently based forces to Southern Europe, Southeast Asia and the Middle East;

Vice President Dick Cheney is a founding member of PNAC, along with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz is the ideological father of the group. Bruce Jackson, a PNAC director, served as a Pentagon official for Ronald Reagan before leaving government service to take a leading position with the weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin.

PNAC has recently given birth to a new group, The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which met with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice in order to formulate a plan to "educate" the American populace about the need for war in Iraq.

The PNAC plan calls for the US to take control of the Gulf region with overwhelming and deadly military force. "While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification," the PNAC document explains, "the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." In other words, Saddam is little more than an excuse for "maintaining global US pre-eminence... and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests." After the PNAC document was leaked to the Sunday Herald, Tam Dalyell, the British Labor MP, hit the nail right on the head when he declared, "This is garbage from right-wing think-tanks stuffed with chicken-hawks -- men who have never seen the horror of war but are in love with the idea of war. Men like Cheney, who were draft-dodgers in the Vietnam war.""

The lies told by the Bush Administration were swallowed whole by The New York Times, and there was a spectacular fail on the part of their "WMD" coverage reporter, Judith Miller.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-reporters-defense-of-her-flawed-reporting/2015/04/09/5bf93f14-de15-11e4-a500-1c5bb1d8ff6a_story.html

And you had the Washington Post's Executive Editor, whose paper wrote the above story in 2015, debunking Judith Miller and her credulous WMD reporting in The Times. That same story contained the following mea culpa:

" (Full disclosure: The Washington Post editorial board admitted that it had been “insufficiently skeptical of intelligence reports” in its pro-war editorials.)"

So the upshot is that you committed the same sin of insufficient journalism with both editors that you have been committing for years with the lying liars (mostly Republican politicians, others, like Hugh Hewitt and other Republican "operatives" masquerading as the "press" on your panels): you failed to take them to task for their lies or their failure to discern lies in their reporting.

The difference? When Trump lies, it's to feed or protect his ego. When Bush lied, it led to the deaths of 4,571 American servicemen and women, the wounding, some permanent, of tens of thousands more, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, the rise of ISIS, and the permanent destabilization of the Middle East.

The second bone? You had Congresswoman Lynn Cheney on your program in March of 2019, and you let go by unremarked the following bald statement she made to your face: "The Democrats have been in charge for about 2 1/2 months in the House. In that time, they’ve been the party of anti-Semitism, the party of infanticide, the party of socialism."

https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr2=piv-web&p=lynn+cheney+on+meet+the+press+democratic+platform+of+infanticide&hspart=att&hsimp=yhs-att_001#id=1&vid=bf521e412abdef5454a4e8bbbe82f604&action=view

Just because she said it quickly, in the middle of a paragraph, near the end of her segment, was no excuse to let those breathtaking lies go unchallenged. Take it apart: she is claiming that Democrats murder live babies. I haven't heard that slander since the Cossacks slaughtered Jews for allegedly killing Christian children on Passover. You should have stopped her cold and told her:

"Unless you have proof that Democrats are killing babies or that their "platform" urges the killing of live babies, you will have to admit that this is a gross and disgusting slander. And although I'm sure that proof will not be forthcoming, but I'll reserve a slot on next week's show for you. If you don't have it, then we'll rerun your comment and allow experts in Nazi propaganda to appear and explain your "Big Lie" tactic. Same goes for claiming that the Democratic platform is anti-Semitic. Given that the leading lights in the Democratic Party- including Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders are Jewish, and given that polls consistently show that a majority of Jews self identify (and vote for) as Democrats, that was also a bald faced lie. But I'll give you a chance to come back and prove that the official Democratic platform- not a few quotes taken out of context from Congresswomen from Minnesota or Detroit- has as its official policy "anti-Semitism." And if you can't do that, we'll rerun your quote and have some top Jewish lawmakers- including Senators Sanders and Schumer, and Congressmen Nadler and Raskin- appear and debunk your lie."

https://www.jta.org/quick-reads/half-of-american-jews-identified-as-democrat-in-2018

The "socialism" comment has been thrown around on your show as well by every Republican politician and most of their "press" commentators, and you have never bothered to press them to define the term. The term "socialism" means the government owning the means of production (i.e., steel mills, cell phone plants, car manufacturers). It doesn't mean allowing more persons to buy into Medicare, although that is a "social program." Here's Merriam Webster's definition of "socialism":

"1. any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods

2a: a system of society or group living in which there is no private property
b: a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state

3: a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done"

There is no Democratic candidate for president who advocates any of those things- not Bernie Sanders, not Elizabeth Warren, not Andrew Yang. There is no Democratic "platform" that advocates it. So how about correcting your panelists and your politicians, or at the very least, ask them to crack open a dictionary (you can provide it) and have them read the definition to the audience. Tell them that if they want to make up their own definition, they will have to publish a dictionary that is generally accepted by the public and by English teachers. Then tell them that the term is banned from your air until they use it properly.

That's about it. I'm available if you ever need any advice on how to cross examine a witness. I'm a trial lawyer with 43 years of experience and more jury trials- civil and criminal- than I can remember. My reputation is sterling (better than I deserve, actually).