March 9, 2004 -- To hear some folks tell it, families of the 9/11 victims have risen en masse to denounce President Bush for using brief images from Ground Zero in his campaign commercials.
We have no doubt that the use of the images is appropriate - given that the president's leadership in the wake of 9/11, and his conduct of the War on Terror, are under drumbeat assault by John Kerry and the Democrats.

But now it turns out that this whole furor is driven by a tiny group that's motivated by a far-left agenda and a festering hatred of the president - and has some quite dubious financial ties.

Leading the rhetorical charge has been an outfit called September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows - which, the group admits, has only a few dozen members and represents relatives of no more than 1 percent of the 9/11 victims.

More to the point, the group was formed specifically to oppose the entire War on Terror: Not just the campaign against Saddam Hussein, but also the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Indeed, the group's leaders traveled to Afghanistan, drawing a detestable moral equivalence between the 9/11 attacks and U.S. bombing of the Taliban and opposing "violent responses to terrorism."

Then, before the onset of Operation Iraqi Freedom, a Peaceful Tomorrows delegation went to Baghdad to "demonstrate solidarity" with Iraqis - a move that Saddam's deputy, Tariq Aziz, termed at the time "a very important international development."



They also demanded that Congress set up a $20 million fund to compensate Afghan "victims" of the U.S. military.

And back in January 2003, the group said had it had gotten a "verbal commitment" to the fund proposal from the junior senator from Massachusetts - John F. Kerry.

Little surprise there - because Peaceful Tomorrows' parent group, the San Francisco-based Tides Foundation, has received millions from foundations controlled by Kerry's heiress wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry.

A spokesman for Kerry insists that her donations to Tides were earmarked specifically for environmental charities based in Pennsylvania. But money is fungible - and the Tides Foundation has a lot more than greening the earth on its plate.

It has given millions to anti-war groups since 9/11 - particularly the extremist MoveOn.org.

Tides has also funded groups like United for a Fair Economy, which has been involved in violent anti-globalization street protests.

For example, the Ruckus Society, which was largely responsible for the anarchy in Seattle in 1999 and trains would-be environmental terrorists in the practice of "monkey-wrenching" - the willful destruction of construction equipment and so on.

Tides gets much of its funds from philanthropists like Mrs. Kerry and billionaire George Soros - who has made defeating President Bush his top personal priority.

As Richard Berman, director of the Center for Consumer Freedom, told Congress in 2002: "The Tides Foundation distributes other foundations' money, while shielding the identity of the actual donors."

Call it charitable money-laundering.

This, then, is the fringe crowd that declares itself "offended" by the Bush ads.

They're people who are offended by anything this president does - and they are working hard to put John Kerry in the White House.

Remember that the next time you hear a news report about "widespread popular outrage."

-- Source --

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Here's more on the bogus outrage:

quote:

U.S. News and World Report http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/...nion/22john.htm Science & Society 3/22/04 By John Leo The not-so-perfect storm Call it "three green suitcase" journalism. Let's say a feature writer thinks green luggage is becoming popular. So the reporter taps out a story citing three people in different states who have given up black suitcases and bought green ones. The second paragraph begins: "All across America, people are switching to green suitcases." This creates a media trend that might be real but is probably bogus and certainly isn't established by three sales. The uproar over President Bush's 9/11 ads was a classic three-green-suitcase story. The New York Daily News broke the story on March 4, with a huge headline "STORM OVER BUSH 9/11 AD." As howling front-page storms go, this one was small. The story quoted three unhappy members of victims' families and one fireman. There were more bylines (four) than outraged family members (three). The size of the headline letters, 2 inches tall, in a famous big-city daily, established that a major story was underway. With an extra day to rewrite the News, the Washington Post kept the story rolling, although, it could find only two displeased family members and one fireman. So did USA Today. TV and print media blossomed with furor stories, prodded along by a quick press release from the Democratic National Committee that pointed to the storm in that morning's Daily News. By dinnertime, the story was all over TV. The next day, CBS.com was talking about "a flood of anti-ad criticism." This "flood" consisted mainly of 10 or 12 people quoted over and over. Some people turned up in stories because they were already in reporters' Rolodexes as complainers, unhappy about many different 9/11 issues. This group included a lot of vocal anti-Bush activists, who were not really representative of the victim-families movement but were fairly well known to the media. One of the conservative bloggers, John Hawkins at RightWingNews.com, figured out early what was happening. He pointed out that in the big Associated Press story on the alleged furor, "5 out of 6 people interviewed had an ax to grind with George Bush." Monica Gabrielle, who called the ad "despicable," is a Bush-basher who turned up on at least nine news sites. David Potorti, who was also quoted in many stories, said last October, "I feel like the foreign policy of the Bush administration is almost like a second assault on us." Readers and viewers were not told about these anti-Bush sentiments in stories about the ads. Potorti is a founder of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, identified by reporters as "an advocacy group," "a victims' families group," or "one of the families' organizations." More accurately, Peaceful Tomorrows is the antiwar segment of the victims' families movement, long hostile to Bush policies and affiliated with MoveOn.org, a Web-based organization of the left that wants Bush censured and then defeated. Reporters kept quoting leaders of Peaceful Tomorrows without mentioning their leftward push or their small membership (they claim 120 members, out of a population of victims' family members that surely tops 10,000). Partisans. Harold Schaitberger, president of the International Association of Fire Fighters, denounced the ads in nearly every story. Most reports pointed out that his union had endorsed John Kerry. But I saw no report mentioning that Schaitberger is national cochair of the Kerry for President committee and therefore the most important nonpolitician in the Kerry leadership. Quoting Schaitberger on Bush's ads is like quoting Karl Rove as a detached analyst of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Amazingly, the AP story left the impression that Schaitberger resented the Bush ad because money for first responders had been cut. According to the AP report, "He said his union is politically independent even though it endorsed Kerry and has donated money to Republicans." Good thing the reporter mentioned this evenhandedness. Otherwise, readers might have concluded that Schaitberger's highly abusive remarks about the Bush ads were coming from some sort of partisan. We ought to have some discussion of how these stories were constructed, why reporters didn't go beyond the first wall of savvy and activist family members, and why so many of the small decisions reporters made on deadline seemed to go so heavily in one political direction. It would also be nice to learn why reporters think that three or four people constitute a storm. Once the story line was set, of course, there was a storm. But some of us would like an ombudsman or two to discuss where the storm arose. Was it in the outside world or in the newsroom?

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FLUSHED THE JOHNS!

oh come on and shut-up.

If Gore was in office, he would use 9-11 as well

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