Mary Katharine Ham has a very interesting post on the importance of staging and advance work in sending a message on television. She has posted two pictures of the Obama rally in NC held tonight - one the television shows and the other from a little more…uh, inclusive angle.

As Seen On TV:

As Seen In Real Life:

Now anyone in politics can tell you that every campaign in the world tries to master the angle the media depicts in photos and on television in addition t orchestrating countless other things to portray an bigger, more excited, all around better crowd than might actually be there. But Miss Ham (is it Miss or is she a Mrs.? I just don’t know) brings up an interesting point here about the lack of media scrutiny of such facts with the Obama campaign and an overzealousness to report them about Republicans like John McCain:

I realize it’s standard practice to rope off an area of a venue for crowd-wrangling and appearances, but this is a little drastic. McCain’s event at the Wait Chapel at Wake Forest today was nicely filled if not overflowing, but I imagine if he had held it at Groves Stadium and filled only the endzone seats, someone in the media might have said something about it. Obama doesn’t have such worries, I guess.

Indeed.

Check out the primary coverage from IN on Election Journal. They have same great footage of grassroots primary action and more importantly coverage of primary voter fraud.

While Barack Obama is out chastising McCain for supporting “Bush’s war”, he seems to be missing some fairly important facts claiming that al-Qaeda was never in Iraq before the war in 2003. That’s all great and everything, except that the facts and the former Iraqi regime disagree. Newly released and translated Iraqi documents reveal a very extensive operation run by Saddam’s regime to recruit, train, and finance terrorism around the world including with the al-Qaeda network and people working within it.

Take these excerpts from a tremendous article found in The Australian:

Newly published Iraqi documents reveal just how extensive Saddam’s involvement with international terrorism was. The summary of these documents, published under the heading Saddam and Terrorism, has been reported across the world and read by almost no one.Its first paragraph reads: “The Iraqi Perspectives Project review of captured Iraqi documents uncovered strong evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism. Despite their incompatible long-term goals, many terrorist movements and Saddam found a common enemy in the US.

These documents, researched and translated by the US Institute for Defense Analyses show a major, extensive effort in Saddam’s Iraq to work with terrorist enemies of the US and Israel around the world.

At times these organisations worked together, trading access for capability. In the period after the 1991 Gulf War, the regime of Saddam Hussein supported a complex and increasingly disparate mix of pan-Arab revolutionary causes and emerging pan-Islamic radical movements.

And yes, al-Qaede is among those he was supporting:

It is reasonable to assume the most sensitive stuff in a paranoid state such as Saddam’s was not written down. George Tenet, the former director of the CIA who became broadly an opponent of the Bush administration, states in his memoir as a matter of plain fact that 200 al-Qa’ida fighters relocated to Iraq with Saddam’s permission. Richard Clarke, who was director of counter-terrorism at the National Security Council on 9/11, and who went on to become a bitter foe of the Bush administration and is advising the Democrats, states as plain fact in his memoir that Saddam had engaged in sponsorship of al-Qa’ida.

200! 200 al-Qaeda terrorists were sheltered in Iraq before the fall of his regime. It only took the Greek 300 soldier to hold of the Persians, and yet Barack Obama thinks that 200 terrorists enjoying the shelter of Saddam (freakin!) Hussein isn’t a big deal!

But don’t worry…no one is hearing a thing about it:

We get too little real journalism about these subjects and too much “churnalism”, in which a single sometimes misleading wire report is repeated by thousands of commentators while nobody bothers to read the source document.

…

Acknowledging this support, but saying there’s no smoking gun directly to al-Qa’ida itself, means the report is taking an incredibly restrictive and precise view of al-Qa’ida.

But in any event this report is not claiming, as wrongly reported in the wires, that there was no link with al-Qa’ida, merely that it found no absolute smoking gun in the translated documents.

As Reagan said a while back, facts are stubborn things Barack…stubborn.

Another article (with quick bullet-points) detailing the relationships between Saddam’s Iraq and terrorist groups is here.

National Review has an awesome quote from one of Obama’s advisors on his unpreparedness: 

 In it, Susan Rice, a foreign policy adviser to Senator Barack Obama, discusses the foreign policy credentials of both Democrats against the tableau of Mrs. Clinton’s 3 a.m. phone call advertisement about who would be best prepared for an international crisis. (While your children are safely asleep.)

“Clinton hasn’t had to answer the phone at three o’clock in the morning and yet she attacked Barack Obama for not being ready,’’ Ms. Rice said. “They’re both not ready to have that 3 a.m. phone call.”

Check out the full article 

Ahh the media is finally beginning to pay some attention to this Rezko mess that around Barack Obama.

Here’s a new blog from the Chicago Tribune following the day-by-day Rezko trial updates.

Add it to your daily reading list.

The Bush Doctrine appears to (gasp!) be working. Somewhat shocking news to the liberal media, this represent something that conservatives have been familiar with for a while - that peace comes through strength and freedom.

A good breakdown of the article is here.

Update: Another analysis here.

I think this SNL skit sums it up pretty well:

In a shocking (although sadly not so) article in Sunday’s New York Times, two reporters, Deborah Sontag and Lizatte Alvarez, launched into typical talking points about bloodthirsty soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan as maniacal killers.

Town by town across the country, headlines have been telling similar stories. Lakewood, Wash.: “Family Blames Iraq After Son Kills Wife.” Pierre, S.D.: “Soldier Charged With Murder Testifies About Postwar Stress.” Colorado Springs: “Iraq War Vets Suspected in Two Slayings, Crime Ring.”

Individually, these are stories of local crimes, gut-wrenching postscripts to the war for the military men, their victims and their communities. Taken together, they paint the patchwork picture of a quiet phenomenon, tracing a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak.

The NYT patched together 121 of these stories to paint the picture of rabid young men returning to America as crazed murderers - following the leftist portrait of American soldiers who are either psychopaths to begin with or are made so by the military.

The problem here is that 121 veteran-murderers, although sad, is a tremendously small amount as Ralph Peters explains in a counter-article in the NY Post:

Had the Times’ “journalists” and editors bothered to put those figures in context - which they carefully avoided doing - they would’ve found that the murder rate that leaves them so aghast means that our vets are five times less likely to commit a murder than their demographic peers.
The Times’ public editor, Clark Hoyt, should crunch the numbers. I’m even willing to spot the Times a few percentage points (either way). But the hard statistics from the Justice Department tell a far different tale from the Times’ anti-military propaganda.
A very conservative estimate of how many different service members have passed through Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait since 2003 is 350,000 (and no, that’s not double-counting those with repeated tours of duty).
Now consider the Justice Department’s numbers for murders committed by all Americans aged 18 to 34 - the key group for our men and women in uniform. To match the homicide rate of their peers, our troops would’ve had to come home and commit about 150 murders a year, for a total of 700 to 750 murders between 2003 and the end of 2007.
In other words, the Times unwittingly makes the case that military service reduces the likelihood of a young man or woman committing a murder by 80 percent.

I don’t know whether to assume the reporters are simply bad at their jobs because they are lazy and incompetent, or because they ignore basic journalistic standards and impose their leftist propaganda upon their audience, but either way they owe our veterans a very serious apology.

Please tell the NYT editors how you feel by here!

Click here to view an interview I did with TCW regarding the GOP primary field thus far.

We all remember the giant Flip-Flops and Flipper the dolphin trailing John Kerry around to his fundraisers, speeches, and rallies. They were so eager to help the good Senator, that they seemed to never leave his side and were constantly appearing on TV to represent his positions.

Of course, Flipper couldn’t have done it all by himself, he needed CRs to don the costume and trot into enemy territory - but hey, that’s what we’re for! CRs are made to do bracketing events!

The post below captures a perfect example of the Rhode Island CRs pulling off a spectacular bracketing event. They took an issue that Hillary really didn’t need to have in the press, and made it the story of the event by injecting some dry humor into the situation and having a few dozen CRs there to make he point. Congrats!

Bracketing is like putting bookends on either side of an opponent’s event to make sure that the story coming out deals not with how great a fundraiser Hillary had, but instead that she has always been a supporter of the war and will continue to be. The purpose is to expose the truth to the people watching at home, and humor usually is the most effective way of accomplishing this in a short 10 second shot on the nightly news.

College Republicans nationwide should be engaging their local political scene with such bracketing events. Don’t wait until next fall to get started; now is the time to excite your membership, dust off that old Flipper costume, and storm the enemy’s barricades! The public deserves to hear the truth!

PS: Remember to always bring your video camera (or digital camera at the very, very least) and capture the whole thing on film. Do a little editing for quality’s sake and throw it up on YouTube for the world to see. You can then include the link in any post-event press releases.