New York Times' strategy for defeat

Sen. John McCain

It's not about the adultery, dummies. It's about the lobbying. That's been the plan all along.

The New York Times built up John McCain to be the Republican nominee so it could beat him with a Democrat named Obama. To do that, it had to give this "triumph of puffery," in Thomas Carlyle's felicitous phrase, substance. The only substance he has, according to his avid supporters, is that in both the Illinois legislature and the Senate he has stood for bills to control lobbying and make it more transparent. The only other presidential candidate who took this issue as a tack was Ross Perot, and he knew what he was talking about, having built his empire by lobbying for government contracts.

The situation is bad, and it might take a maverick to break through it.

The only way Sen. Obama can divert from a widespread feeling that Sen. McCain might be a war leader who has some inkling of what he is doing is to focus on McCain's long career in Congress and the resulting coterie of lobbyist friends that Obama does not have. To do that, and make them hang around McCain's neck as an albatross, is to equate lobbyists from the likes of Halliburton with the war so the war becomes evil, along with McCain. It's all for oil, don't ya know? There is no "Empire of Freedom," as Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., has termed it.

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Thus, Obama wishes for us to lose a war we now might win in Iraq. Contrary to what Obama is representing, it is not change for the Democrats to want to lose a war. They already did that in Vietnam. They undermined us when we were winning. For short-term political gain, they undid our victories on the battlefield, starting with the TET offensive.

"Seems like they turned all our victories into defeats," Tom Moorer growled. They did it on the battlefields of our own campuses and in our newsrooms, as Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber pointed out so astutely in "The American Challenge." To the New York Times, in particular, it was more important to engineer our defeat than to print the truth. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger said he did not care if what the New York Times was reporting about the Vietnam War was true or not. He and the New York Times were against the Vietnam war, he said, and the paper would keep on reporting the way it had been. Now they set out to lose another war, and Obama is their instrument. Only this time, we don't yet have any "tigers" in place to pick up the pieces.

There is absolutely nothing new and different about the Democrats losing a war. They did it before, and they want to do it again. Those lefties, ain't they grand? Remember when Lord Bertie Russell, in the throes of his rabid anti-Americanism, told us that communism was winning because it was democratic. Isn't it funny to see America's "Jewish" paper cozying up to those who want to kill all the Jews? But, hey, they'll get those Republicans. The thing is, losing wars is not really the American way – far from it. But they sense that McCain, if they don't stop him, could win this war.

Now there's a grain of truth in this lobbying issue, even if McCain is not a great offender, so it is Obama's only hope. The New York Times knows that it cannot let this war be won, lest we keep Republicans in power and return Congress to them. McCain did build some friendships with lobbyists, but he is notoriously difficult to lobby (e.g. McCain says he stood up to big ethanol in Iowa and favors free market solutions instead of subsidies for farmers). Maybe after all these years of boondoggling with ethanol and a Department of Energy that has moved us from one-third oil dependency to a full two-thirds, here is a leader who could actually bypass the lobbyists and let inventors back in, leading us to solutions and not the subsidies Washington has been providing since the OPEC embargo in 1973.

McCain will lead, or he will fail. The choice is his, and it must be exercised before the election cycle if he is to show true leadership. In fact, it is the only real way he can guarantee that he will win. He knows the lobbyists, so he also knows how to stand up to them, if he so chooses.

Tom Moorer and I coined a term for this behavior by the New York Times and their ilk: The "central command media." They'd rather be in charge and lose wars than see those who might win in power.

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Larry Elgin is chairman of U.S. Defense-American Victory in Washington, D.C., of which the late Adm. Tom Moorer was honorary chairman. Members of USD-AV have published occasional columns in WND from its early days, specializing as what they see as blind spots in our strategic thinking, particularly energy.