Observing the frenzied reactions of the blue state elites to the election results is like joining Alice in going through the looking glass and finding oneself facing giant white rabbits with oversized watches proclaiming they are late, and a strange gentleman wearing a collection of outlandish hats. All around these bizarre characters are discarded Kerry-Edwards buttons and signs.

In this modern wonderland, there is much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth – and some of the most outlandish jabberwocky ever heard. It is obvious that everybody here has suddenly become seriously unhinged.

There stands the queen (her name is Barbra), looking at a map showing tiny urban dots colored in blue and an ocean of counties swimming in red. She looks with astonishment at these defiant out-of-control areas peopled by despicable common folk, and repeatedly shouts, “Off with their heads.” She is joined by a chorus of her subjects - academics, journalists, and celebrities - each chanting different interpretations of what happened on Nov. 2, 2004.

You can’t avoid seeing what happened to the blue state denizens in these terms not when you are confronted with the absurdity of what they are saying about the avalanche of red state votes that buried their candidate, and what it all portends for America. The sky is falling, they screech – we are doomed. We have been done in by a horde of dolts.

Want a sample prediction of where the great unwashed in the south and in fly-over country are taking us?

In a requiem for all that is good and just entitled “The Gathering Darkness of the Blue State of Mind,” appearing on NewYorkMetro.com, one James Atlas saw the future Nov. 2 has thrust upon the enlightened citizens of the Big Apple:

“On the Fifth Avenue bus, I gazed blankly out the window. The trees in Central Park were still in their vivid autumn plumage, red, yellow, and green set on fire by the early sun. I found myself thinking that what my friend Edgar, the radical novelist, calls ‘incremental fascism’” doesn’t seem so incremental anymore.

“There will be a draft, and we’ll have to leave the country: No way I’m letting our 17-year-old son, Will, be sent to Iraq. They’ll drill the Alaskan tundra for oil, and the polar ice caps will melt; Manhattan will be inundated like in The Day After Tomorrow. They’ll teach creationism in the schools; our grandchildren will scratch their armpits like orangutans and laugh, “Can you believe people used to think we were descended from apes?” Anyone who belonged to Students for a Democratic Society 35 years ago will be fingerprinted. The Patriot Act will be broadened to stifle dissent in the media—Paul Krugman will be sent to Gitmo.

“The deficit will mount, and they’ll loot Social Security; I’ll end up in an SRO on upper Broadway. And the Jews will be rounded up like in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. Did only Paul Wolfowitz stand between us and concentration camps in Kentucky? New York will be attacked again and . . . Wait. Maybe the guys in power want us to be attacked. What better way to get rid of all those noisome New Yorkers than to have an Al Qaeda dirty bomb explode in Grand Central at rush hour? No more need to bail out New York, because there won’t be any New York.”

Because there are many sane clear-thinking people in New York, I will refrain from adding, “Good riddance.”

As many of my conservative colleagues have already noted, these people never, never, ever seem to get it. Cameron Kerry says with a straight face that John Kerry will run again, which is laughable. The New York Times sets out on a new four-year crusade to elect Hillary Clinton, which is also laughable. Even more laughable is the spectacle of Kerry voters in Palm Beach County seeking therapy for the psychological damage inflicted upon them by the Bush triumph of evil.

Can’t these people understand that what they represent - a veiled form of elitist welfare state socialism – is anathema to the real Americans who don’t live in La La Land and will vote against anybody who does? They don’t understand because they don’t know and will never “get” what the red counties know.

©2004 Mike Reagan. You must contact us if you would like to print this column in your publication or post on the internet. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley [email protected], (800) 696-7561

It was the elephant in the living room and during the election nobody wanted to admit it was there, even though it represents one of the most serious threats to the future of America as we know it.

During the campaigns both parties shied away from even mentioning illegal immigration, despite the fact that it was uppermost in the minds of millions of Americans now paying the price for our government’s failure to get a grip on the scandal.

With an estimated 8 million illegal aliens now already here, thousands more are flocking across our southern borders and nobody in authority seems to have the vaguest notion of what to do about this onrushing flood inundating America’s border states.

This is an out-of-control problem which is bankrupting our infrastructure and our hospitals. In California, Nevada, Arizona and Texas, states are being bankrupted and we have to get tough on illegal immigration which is undermining the infrastructure that was erected to take care of the citizens of the United States.

Thanks to the flood of illegal aliens and the burden they are placing on this nation, American citizens are being increasingly denied the health care and the schooling they need because we are spending too much money on the illegals who, in a fit of political correctness, we are now expected to refer to with the less harsh description of “undocumented aliens.”

According to a study issued in August, the Center for Immigration Studies - one of the first to estimate the impact of illegal immigration on the federal budget, based on Census Bureau data - households headed by illegal aliens used $10 billion more in government services than they paid in taxes in 2002. These figures are only for the federal government; costs at the state and local level are also likely to be significant.

The study also finds that if illegals were given amnesty, the fiscal burden at the federal level would grow to nearly $29 billion.

Among the findings:

• Illegal alien households are estimated to use $2,700 a year more in services than they pay in taxes, creating a total fiscal burden of nearly $10.4 billion on the federal budget in 2002.

• Among the largest federal costs: Medicaid ($2.5 billion); medical treatment for the uninsured ($2.2 billion); food assistance programs ($1.9 billion); the federal prison and court systems ($1.6 billion); and federal aid to schools ($1.4 billion).

• If illegal aliens were “legalized” and began to pay taxes and use services like legal immigrants with the same education levels, the estimated annual fiscal deficit at the federal level would increase from $2,700 per household to nearly $7,700, for a total federal deficit of $29 billion.

• With nearly two-thirds of illegals lacking a high school diploma, the primary reason they create a fiscal deficit is their low education levels and resulting low incomes and tax payments — not their legal status or their unwillingness to work.

• Because many of the costs are due to their U.S.-born children, who are awarded U.S. citizenship at birth, barring illegals themselves from federal programs will not significantly reduce costs.

The election is over and it’s now time to tackle the problem and get it under control before it controls us. We have emergency rooms closing every day in California, Arizona, Nevada and Texas where they are being forced to take care of people who have absolutely no right to be here, instead of taking care of American citizens.

Our school systems and our hospitals are being bankrupted because of the increasing presence of illegal aliens swarming across our border. Over the next four years the president is going to have to get this disaster under control or those Republicans who voted for him in droves while holding their nose on the illegal immigration issue will not hold their noses two and four years from now.

©2004 Mike Reagan. You must contact us if you would like to print this column in your publication or post on the internet. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley [email protected], (800) 696-7561

John Kerry, CBS, The New York Times, the U.N.’s Mohamed El Baradei, the other networks and most of the mainstream media surmised they had a dandy “October Surprise” to spring on President Bush just days before the election – but their surmise fizzled. Their planned October Surprise that was supposed to bring about the president’s defeat tuned out to be just more left-wing blather and they got hoisted by their own petards.

The story is a shocking revelation that the strong ties that exist between the liberal media and John Kerry and his corrupt political party actually amount to a conspiracy to hoodwink the American people by whatever means are necessary, be they fair (which they never are) or foul (which they usually are). The Times and CBS are nothing less than an integral part of the Kerry campaign - they are his willing stooges being used to defeat the president of the United States.

On Monday the Times broke a story that a cache of 380 tons of exceedingly potent HMX and RDX explosives in a storage depot at Al Qaqaa have been missing at some point since former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was ousted from power. In other words, after the U.S. became an occupying force responsible for keeping such munitions under lock and key.

According to CBS News executive producer Jeff Fager, the story about the missing explosives was going to be revealed on this Sunday’s episode of “60 Minutes” – two days before the election. Fager did not bother explaining that this would not allow the President time to adequately respond to the allegations.

“(Ou)r plan was to run the story on October 31, but it became clear that it wouldn’t hold,” Fager said in a statement. CBS – the same network that gave us Rathergate and the forged documents - then handed the hatchet job off to the Times, which ran the story under the headline “Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished From Site in Iraq.”

The Times reported that the Iraqi interim government warned the U.S. and the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency that the explosives were missing from “one of Iraq’s most sensitive former military installations.” The Times claimed that hundreds of tons of high explosives had been removed from the Al-Qaqaa weapons depot while the facility was under U.S. control.

The story began to fall apart before the day was over when NBC reported that one of their correspondents had been at the weapons site before Baghdad had fallen and saw no evidence of the explosives, indicating that they were gone before the war ended.

John Kerry, obviously alerted that the story would run on Monday, immediately attacked the president for failing to safeguard these munitions, which could be used to trigger a nuclear weapon. The rest of the mainstream media jumped on the story, backing Kerry’s allegations. And together with Kerry they are trying to keep this bogus story alive.

Moreover, the Times knows the story is bogus! In February 2003 they reported that the removal of the munitions was set in motion by none other than the government of Saddam Hussein and not by looters or insurgents after the U.S. had liberated Iraq, according to the U.N.’s Bush-hating Mohamed El Baradei.

Here’s what the president said today at a rally in Pennsylvania: “After repeatedly calling Iraq the wrong war, and a diversion, Senator Kerry this week seemed shocked to learn that Iraq is a dangerous place, full of dangerous weapons…”

“If Senator Kerry had his way… Saddam Hussein would still be in power. He would control those all of those weapons and explosives and could share them with his terrorist friends. Now the senator is making wild charges about missing explosives, when his top foreign policy adviser admits, quote, ‘We do not know the facts.’ Think about that: The senator is denigrating the actions of our troops and commanders in the field without knowing the facts…”

America has a problem here – a serious problem. A major segment of the media have allowed themselves to become part and parcel of a political campaign, promoting the interests of their candidate and seeking to smear his opponent, the president of the United States. And that’s more than a scandal – it’s a dagger pointed at the heart of this republic.

©2004 Mike Reagan. You must contact us if you would like to print this column in your publication or post on the internet. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley [email protected], (800) 696-7561

Who do you want sharing the White House with the president? Does it matter who becomes first lady, or must all the focus be on the man of the house?

It may seem to be a frivolous pursuit to let the question of who is best suited to be the president’s first ladies influence our votes, but the fact of the matter is that the kind of woman who serves as the lady of the (White) House has an impact far beyond merely being the president’s wife.

If you doubt that, remember the real impact Jackie Kennedy had on enhancing the image of the United States abroad. Whenever she accompanied President Kennedy on his foreign trips she was the apple of her host’s eyes, so much so that the President once identified himself as merely the man who accompanied Jackie Kennedy.

So what qualifications should a would-be first lady possess? In my mind the most important qualification is that the first lady be a lady. The second, and maybe the key quality, is that she be in every sense of the word her husband’s helpmate, always there supporting him, especially in times of stress. Her ability to be a gracious hostess is also important. She must be her own woman, have her own independent opinions, but at the same time not come across as, well, pushy or brash.

Which brings us to the question of who among the women now seeking to become America’s next first lady is best qualified? Ask yourself who do you want to be first lady for the next four years, Laura Bush, or Theresa Heinz Kerry? How do they stack up against each other? And while we’re at it, who do you think should be the Vice President’s wife – a woman who will be one heart beat away from becoming first lady?

We know Laura Bush – after all she’s been our First Lady for the last four years. She has proven to be a lady right down to her finger tips. She stands by her husband’s side, giving him her full support. She is gracious, intelligent, has her own opinions but never contradicts her husband, and she is never pushy or brash.

What about Theresa Heinz Kerry, John Kerry’s second wife? How does she match up with Laura Bush?

Theresa Heinz Kerry is no shrinking violet – she is so outspoken that her husband’s campaign has done everything but put a gag on her. They should - they never know what outrageous comment she’s going to make next.

In the Sept. 27 issue of The New Yorker magazine Judith Thurman chronicled some of Heinz Kerry’s better known verbal outrages before noting : “She dismissed voters skeptical of her husband’s health-care proposals as ‘idiots,’ and, in a television interview with a Pittsburgh anchorwoman, employed the word ‘scumbags’ to describe some of her detractors,” Thurman said.

“There are these bizarre moments that make you shudder,” one Kerry adviser told Thurman. “Like calling herself African-American to black audiences.”

She also once suggested that President Bush was holding Osama bin Laden in some secret hideout, preparing to announce just before the election that he had captured the terrorist leader.

Her latest outburst is another case in point – that Laura Bush had probably never held a job. “But I don’t know that she’s ever had a real job — I mean, since she’s been grown up.” When informed that Laura Bush held jobs as a teacher, a librarian and a mother, Mrs. Kerry backed off.

She never backed off when she told a reporter to “shove it.” Fortunately she did not specify where he was to shove it, or what it was she wanted shoved. But anyone observing her could easily imagine her going that far.

Imagine having that loose cannon along with the President on a foreign trip. As the record shows, Jackie Kennedy she’s not!

As for Elizabeth Edwards, John Edwards’ wife, her comment about Lynne Cheney being ashamed of her daughter Mary because of her chosen life style, is all you need to know. She’s not on the same planet as Mrs. Cheney.

©2004 Mike Reagan. You must contact us if you would like to print this column in your publication or post on the internet. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley [email protected], (800) 696-7561

The behavior of candidates for political office often reflects what they are seeing in their private polls. That being so, I suspect that the Kerry/Edwards private polls look pretty grim, unlike the public polls which purport to show them running neck-and-neck with the Bush/Cheney ticket.

To put it bluntly, both John Kerry and John Edwards are beginning to look more than a little loony.

Take for example Kerry’s astonishing comparison of terrorists with prostitutes and gamblers. In an interview with the New York Times Magazine, Kerry said ”We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance. As a former law-enforcement person, I know we’re never going to end prostitution. We’re never going to end illegal gambling. But we’re going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn’t on the rise. It isn’t threatening people’s lives every day, and fundamentally, it’s something that you continue to fight, but it’s not threatening the fabric of your life.”

A nuisance? The killers of 3,000 innocent people in the World Trade Center can be reduced to the status of “nuisances?” The people who chop off the heads of their kidnap victims as if they were chickens can become mere “nuisances” under his guidance?

There’s something seriously out of kilter in the mind of a U.S. senator who makes such statements, and I think it’s a sign of growing panic – his fear that his campaign is going down the drain.

I can just picture a man driving to work calling his boss on his cell phone and telling him he’s going to be late because a terrorist bomb has just blown up a school bus and killed a lot of kids and it has stacked up the freeway, and that this sort of thing is getting to be a real nuisance.

And Kerry is not alone out there in Cloud Cuckoo Land. His running mate, a man who once stood in front of a jury and channeled the thoughts of a dead baby, telling jurors exactly what she was thinking from her heavenly abode, has now promised that electing John Kerry will somehow usher in a world of miraculous healing.

”If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to get up out of that wheelchair and walk again,” Edwards told listeners in Iowa.

Perhaps he’s looking beyond a possible vice presidency to the day be becomes known as St. John of Lourdes - he who makes the paralyzed walk, the blind see, the deaf hear, and juries travel into the world beyond where they can commune with dead little girls.

It reminds me of the movie “The Sixth Sense” where there is a little boy who sees dead people. St. John of Lourdes not only sees dead people, he tells us what they’re thinking.

Let’s face it, these people aren’t just far-out liberals, they’re just plain nuts.

©2004 Mike Reagan. You must contact us if you would like to print this column in your publication or post on the internet. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley [email protected], (800) 696-7561

If you believe what John Kerry and his stooges in the media say, there was never any connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden and his terrorist al Qaeda organization.

During the debate between Vice President Cheney and John Edwards the other night, Edwards attacked Cheney for maintaining that there was a real connection between the two, and the media rushed to claim that there is no evidence of any such connection.

Among them was ABC News, which either has a very short memory or is willing to cover up what they know about the connection. And they know plenty – they just won’t talk about it. The fact is, ABC interviewed bin Laden and had disclosed the ties that existed between Baghdad and the master terrorist as far back as 1999 when Bill Clinton was president.

Here’s what ABC News reported on January 14, 1999: Citing an alleged key military adviser and a man believed to be “privy to bin Laden’s most secret projects” who had been apprehended, ABC News said: “The U.S. government alleges he was under secret orders to procure enriched uranium for the purpose of developing nuclear weapons. These are allegations bin Laden does not now deny. ‘It would be a sin for Muslims not to try to possess the weapons,’ bin Laden told ABC. ‘But how we could use these weapons if we possessed them is up to us.’”

Commented ABC: “With an American price on his head there weren’t many places bin Laden could go unless he teamed up with another international pariah, one also with an interest in weapons of mass destruction. ‘Osama believed in the enemy of my enemy is my friend and is someone I should cooperate with. That’s certainly the current case with Iraq,’ ” an ABC reporter involved with the bin Laden interview said.

And the ABC narrator added, “Saddam Hussein has a long history of harboring terrorists, Carlos the Jackal, Abu Nidal, Abu Abas – the most notorious terrorists of their era all found shelter and support at one time in Baghdad.

“Intelligence sources say bin Laden’s long relationship with the Iraqis began as he helped Sudan’s fundamentalist government in their efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Three weeks after (Clinton’s bombing of a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory) on August 31st, bin Laden reaches out to his friends in Iraq and Sudan. Iraq’s Vice President arrives in Khartoum to show his support for the Sudanese after the U.S. attack.

“ABC News has learned that during these meetings senior Sudanese officials acting on behalf of bin Laden asked if Saddam Hussein would grant him asylum. Iraq was indeed interested. ABC News has learned that in December an Iraqi intelligence chief … (who in 1999 was Iraq’s ambassador to Turkey) made a secret trip to Afghanistan to meet with bin Laden.” During the meeting, ABC says their sources reported that “bin Laden was told be would be welcome in Baghdad.”

ABC News was not alone in revealing this trip. In 1999, The Guardian, a British newspaper, reported that Farouk Hijazi, a senior officer in Iraq’s mukhabarat (Iraq’s intelligence service), had journeyed deep into the icy mountains near Kandahar, Afghanistan, in December 1998 to meet with al Qaeda men. Mr. Hijazi is “thought to have offered bin Laden asylum in Iraq,” The Guardian reported.

ABC News continued: “Intelligence sources say they can only speculate on the purpose of an (Iraqi-bin Laden) alliance. What could bin Laden offer Saddam? Only days after he meets Iraqi officials, bin Laden tells ABC that his network is wide and there are people prepared to commit terror in his name that he does not even control.”

Here’s what bin Laden told ABC News: “It is our job to incite and to instigate. By the grace of God we did that.”

Do you hear ABC telling that story today?

©2004 Mike Reagan. You must contact us if you would like to print this column in your publication or post on the internet. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley [email protected], (800) 696-7561

Democrat attacks on President Bush’s fly-in appearance on the USS Abraham Lincoln after its triumphant return from the war in Iraq, and the sign that proclaimed “Mission Accomplished” hanging from the carrier’s bridge, are a sign of their party’s desperation. It’s their mission impossible.

What really bothers them is the image of the president clad in flight gear – an image they feared would remind the voters that we have a jet pilot in command who had just led the nation in toppling a brutal dictator and had done it in record time. They just can’t live with that so they resort to the laughable complaint that the mission was not really accomplished since we are still engaged in combat with insurgents in Iraq and we are still fighting the war on radical Islamic terrorism.

But the mission was accomplished, as anybody with two cents worth of common sense understands.

What was the mission? To defeat Saddam Hussein and his armed forces, and that was done so quickly it makes one’s head spin. Moreover, the USS Abraham Lincoln’s mission was also accomplished. The carrier was sent into the Gulf to help fight the air war against Saddam, something their pilots and flight crews did with great bravery and efficiency. Their mission was accomplished.

The Kerry campaign simply cannot grasp an eliminatory fact – that the administration’s mission and that of the carrier were both clearly accomplished. Pacifying Iraq was a new mission entirely, and it is still going on.

Look at it this way: when the Marines on Iwo Jima scaled Mt. Suribachi in World War II and raised the flag, the mission assigned to them, that mission was accomplished. That didn’t mean that the battle was over – that blood bath would go on for another month - but raising the flag was their immediate mission when they climbed that volcanic hill and they accomplished it. There would be other missions before the battle was over. They would attack and overcome hundreds of enemy positions before the battle was won, and each attack was a different mission and each victory a different accomplishment.

When a football team gets the ball, their mission is to make a touchdown. When they make it, that’s a mission accomplished, and they celebrate it, just as the president celebrated the mission of defeating Saddam. The game isn’t over, but the mission is. They will then face another mission – to stop the other team from making a touchdown. And if they do that they have accomplished another mission. And the missions won’t be over until the game is over.

When George W. Bush stood under that “Mission Accomplished” banner and hailed the accomplishments of the carrier’s crew and all the other troops in Iraq, he was correct - their missions were accomplished, and the Democrats know he was correct in celebrating their victory. They just won’t admit it because it’s the truth, and for them, the truth hurts.

Yet Kerry and company think the American people are too stupid to realize that the president was not saying that the war was over – they understand that he was merely saying that the mission was over – which it was.

In their effort to con the voters, the Democrats avoid the truth about the whole USS Abraham Lincoln episode. They don’t bother telling the American people that the “Mission Accomplished” theme was not the slick Karl Rove political ploy they claim it was, but was instead urged on the president by General Tommy Franks – a fact he reported in his book, “American Soldier.”

He recalls that he went to the President and asked him to do it because he believed it would help enlist the aid of those who promised they’d help out in Iraq if they were assured that the mission had been accomplished. And it was. Saddam had been toppled.

©2004 Mike Reagan. You must contact us if you would like to print this column in your publication or post on the internet. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley [email protected], (800) 696-7561

The long reign of the liberal-dominated old media is over, and Dan Rather and CBS gave it the coup de grace.

It’s been in its death throes for quite a while, ever since talk radio and internet bloggers and Fox News arrived on the scene and began to tell the other – and true - side of the stories the mainstream media had been spiking or slanting leftward for decades.

But the old crew of far-out liberals still had plenty of clout left, especially the networks which were the sole source of news for millions of Americans. Now, thanks to Dan Rather and his crew of 60 Minutes lefties, the credibility of not only CBS but the other two networks will always be open to question. From now on, their biased slant on the news will be open to question and carefully monitored by the alternative media which have proven their credibility once and for all.

CBS’s bias has been obvious for a long time – they’ve been recognized as being practically an adjunct to the liberal Democrat party. But it took Rathergate to expose the extent of the network’s slavish obeisance to the Democrat party line.

You have only to ask yourself why the people who passed the forged documents passed them to CBS, and not to ABC or NBC – both bastions of liberalism - and the answer jumps out at you. Those forgeries were manufactured for just one reason: to defeat President George Bush in November, and the forgers and those who abetted them knew that Rather and CBS shared their burning desire to see the president lose his re-election bid and would join them in their bash-Bush campaign.

Think about it – both ABC and NBC have their own investigative shows similar to 60 Minutes. Yet as far as we know, they were never approached by the forgers. And for good reason - they knew whom they could depend on to join them in smearing the president with their phony documents and attempting to change the outcome of the election, and it was CBS.

Rather and his producer Mary Mapes, in fact, proved to be so eager to inflict serious damage on the president that they were willing to ignore all the warnings from their own experts that there was something so fishy about the documents that the network should not have used them. Those who fed the forgeries to CBS were confident this would be the case.

Had they approached NBC and ABC, the documents would have ended up in the trash can. They may be as liberal as CBS in many ways – ABC’s Peter Jennings certainly is - but they are not stupid. They would have recognized the documents as frauds and that using them would sound their own death knell as it has for CBS and Rather.

So CBS bit – and got bitten.

What is important to remember is that CBS would have gotten away with the scam if it hadn’t been all those quick-witted bloggers, the talk show hosts, internet journals and Fox News who told the world what the bloggers had revealed. The alternative media displayed their awesome power and put the old media on notice that their monopoly over reporting the news had ended.

What is most important to remember is the fact that in this episode the new media established their credibility as news sources and gave their fellow Americans an alternative to the liberal media, which in cases such as the New York Times Jayson Blair scandal and the Washington Post Janet Cooke fraud showed the public that the old media cannot be trusted.

The new kids on the block have shown the big media bullies that their days of pushing people around are over. Like murder, truth will now out.

©2004 Mike Reagan. You must contact us if you would like to print this column in your publication or post on the internet. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley [email protected], (800) 696-7561

It’s been happening right under their noses but it took Dan Rather’s Memogate disaster to alert the TV network bosses that their days of dominating the news are over.

And they brought it on themselves.

After decades of peddling all the news that fits their extreme liberal bias, while being the sole source of news for tens of millions of Americans, the three national networks are now in the process of rapid decline, with such upstarts as Fox cable news running circles around them.

Imagine, Fox cable news led all three networks in covering the conventions. A few years ago that would have been unheard of. And all it took to disprove the legitimacy of the CBS memos was a crew of alert internet-savvy ordinary Americans more devoted to the facts than Dan Rather and CBS proved to be.

Having lost their virtual monopoly on the dissemination of the news, the networks and the elite print media giants are also being humiliated by talk radio and, even worse, by the ordinary Americans who use the internet to monitor their output and do the fact checking their news staffs arrogantly avoid in their mistaken belief that their viewers have no choice but to swallow the swill they have been feeding them.

Those days are over, as Rather’s Memogate is demonstrating.

It’s perfectly clear where Rather’s sympathy lies; does anyone really believe that he isn’t going to vote for John Kerry and isn’t dedicated to helping him win the election? It’s obvious that in pushing the memos, which he may or may not have known were phony, he was hoping to show President Bush as a slacker in the Air National Guard who refused to obey orders and got away with it because of undue political influence.

Rather has joined John Kerry - who has spent more time talking about Vietnam than he spent in Vietnam - in going back over three decades to refight the Vietnam war. It seems the left doesn’t want to talk about today’s issues, they want to focus on Kerry’s alleged heroism and George Bush’s alleged dodging service in Vietnam by getting into the National Guard.

But it blew up in Rather’s face and all he can do now is continue to defend the indefensible by stonewalling in the face of undeniable facts.

He’s not alone in playing the old big media game of slanting the news to the left, a tactic that has now helped bring down the networks. NBC’s contribution to the networks’ anti-Bush campaign has been to showcase trash author Kitty Kelley on their Today show and promote her slanderous new book on the Bush family for three days running, which is three more days than they gave to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and their legitimate doubts about Kerry’s Vietnam service and his turncoat anti-war activities. The Swifties are simply ignored as potential guests by CBS, NBC and ABC.

Kitty Kelly has no credibility. She’s written books about the Kennedys, she’s written about the Sinatras, the British Royals, and Nancy Reagan; the tawdry things she has alleged in those books about her subjects have been thoroughly discounted. While she has been sued and won because of her First Amendment rights to be free to say whatever she wants to say about public figures, the bottom line is she’s nothing but a tabloid author writing tabloid trash.

In defense of NBC I have to hand it to Matt Lauer because he’s done a great job of unmasking her in the things she has said, such as her allegations that George Bush did cocaine at Camp David when his father was president. That claim has been vehemently denied by the president’s former sister-in-law who Kelly identified as her only source for the claim.

Despite Lauer’s gutsy interrogation of the woman, his bosses at NBC are guilty of putting their leftist bias on display by giving Kelly three days of valuable air time to peddle her trashy book and slime the Bush family, three generations of whom have served this country nobly.

One of the wonderful things that has emerged in this election campaign is the rise of the alternative media, now the major source of real news for millions of Americans.

Another is that we may also end up getting rid of both John Kerry and Dan Rather at the same time.

©2004 Mike Reagan. You must contact us if you would like to print this column in your publication or post on the internet. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley [email protected], (800) 696-7561

The passengers and the crew of a plane due to travel from an Egyptian resort to Moscow refused to fly when two Chechnyan women got on board. The Egyptian authorities, however, asked that the women be allowed to get on the plane. Guess what? They got on the plane. They then acted suspiciously, locking themselves in the toilet right after they boarded and as a result they were kicked off the aircraft. Rightly so.

Some would say, “Hey, wait a minute. Isn’t this profiling?” Of course it is. When you look at what has happened in Russia in recent weeks – planes being blown out of the sky, subways being bombed and hundreds of children being held captive in a school with more than 200 being murdered and another 600 injured and hospitalized - is it too much to ask that we begin to recognize exactly what’s going on in the world and take steps such as profiling to prevent it?

As in the case of the Chechnyan women, isn’t profiling the appropriate measure to save lives? It’s long past time to begin profiling, even if the president won’t mention that politically incorrect word. We need to profile - we are, after all, at war. Does anybody doubt that there is a third world war in progress right now - a war between the freedom loving people in the world and the terrorists trying to destroy them? And isn’t it obvious that the terrorists attacking us are all radical Muslims?

Yet we worry we might offend the tender sensibilities of the terrorists by recognizing just who it is trying to kill us. These are people who don’t care about women, who don’t care about children, who wouldn’t hesitate a single minute to kill women and children. Yet we are afraid to offend them by taking the obvious precaution of profiling.

We need not look any further than the atrocity in Southern Russia where mothers were forced to choose which of their children held captive in their school by Chechnyan terrorists they could carry to safety, and which must be left behind, perhaps to die. One mother speaking from the safety of a nearby house was quoted as saying she could not understand how her friends could tell her how happy she should be that she had been allowed by the gun-toting thugs to take her son out of the school while leaving her daughter behind.

“People say they are happy that my son and I were saved,” she told a reporter. “But how can I be happy? My daughter is still inside the school.”

I can understand how she felt. I have two children. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have to choose which one could be saved and which one killed. The monsters who demand that innocent parents make such choices are the enemies we face.

These only the latest incidents in the war against fanatical Muslim terrorists – there will be many more such atrocities to come. Every single one of us could be faced with the sort of horror Russian parents endured in that Russian school. Our enemies don’t attack those who can fight back, they only war against those who are helpless. They attack women, they attack children.

We are at war, and that’s the kind of war we are fighting. It is a global war and it is being fought in Russia, in Israel, and the middle East, in Spain, in France - and it happened here in America on 9/11.

The Democrats and the media are outraged because Vice President Cheney had the courage to warn us that war could come home to our shores, should the American people choose to elect John Kerry.

He was right. We are either going to go after and kill these terrorists on their home grounds or we are going to have to face them here at home. President Bush has made it clear that he will fight them wherever they live. John Kerry can’t seem to decide where or how, or even if, he’d fight them. He would leave it up to the enemy to choose the battle ground, and you can be sure it would not be on their turf but on ours.

Dick Cheney was right.

©2004 Mike Reagan. You must contact us if you would like to print this column in your publication or post on the internet. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley [email protected], (800) 696-7561