The Left's Blind Eye to the Obvious
The approach of the new year might be an appropriate time to summarize what I have learned in researching the several books and articles that I have written this decade. That I came to own -- or even break -- many of the stories involved, although satisfying to me, should appall any ordinary citizen.
- More than half of those incinerated during Janet Reno's tank attack at Waco on April 19, 1993 were ethnic minorities -- 39 out of 74, to be precise. Six of them were Hispanic, six of Asian descent, and a full 27 of them black, ages six to sixty-one. They did not commit suicide.
- About a third of the Jonestown dead did not commit suicide either. Three-year-olds typically don't know how. Authorities dumped the bodies of more than 250 of these children, most of them black, into a mass grave in Oakland's Evergreen Cemetery. There they lie to this day, unsung and unmourned because they serve no useful political purpose.
- They serve no purpose because their killer, James Jones, was a self-professed "communist" in deep with a slew of leading Democrats -- George Moscone, Harvey Milk, Willie Brown, Jerry Brown, and even Rosalynn Carter and Walter Mondale. Moscone appointed Jones to the Human Rights Commission and then to the chairmanship of the city's Housing Authority.
- All witnesses who saw Timothy McVeigh on the morning the Murrah Building blew up saw him with a short, swarthy fellow. According to the Washington Post, a judge detained McVeigh without bail "after listening to four hours of testimony from FBI special agent John Hersley in which he described eyewitness accounts of a yellow Mercury with McVeigh and another man inside speeding away from a parking lot near the federal building."
- Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, the so-called "field commander" of the Oklahoma City task force, played an even more aggressive role managing the TWA Flight 800 investigation a year later. The Clintons appear to have rewarded her for her steely performance with the vice-chairmanship of Fannie Mae, a job for which she had no known credentials.
- Six years and about $25.6 million in salary and bonuses later, Gorelick responded to the call of duty once more and took one of five Democratic seats on the 9-11 commission.
- By the FBI's own count, no fewer than 270 eyewitnesses gave formal reports to the FBI describing a red-tipped object with a smoky contrail striking TWA Flight 800. About a hundred witnesses tracked the object from the surface. Astonishingly, the New York Times would interview none of them.
- Four weeks after the disaster, the Times' Don Van Natta would report, "Now that investigators say they think the center fuel tank did not explode, they say the only good explanations remaining are that a bomb or a missile brought down the plane."
- Likely under White House pressure, and without any new evidence, the FBI immediately shifted its storyline away from a missile to a bomb, and a month later, from a bomb to a mechanical failure. The Times reporter who got the call to document both shifts was Andy Revkin, the same reporter at the center of the Climategate scandal.
- Bizarrely, Richard Clarke, Clinton's anti-terror czar who knew next to nothing about aircraft technology, claimed to have discovered the official cause of the TWA 800 crash months, if not years, before the NTSB did.
- Clinton Commerce Secretary Ron Brown was dispatched on his fatal plane flight that same election year, 1996, for no more noble a purpose than to broker a sweetheart deal between the neo-fascist president of Croatia and the Enron Corporation.
- The Air Force concluded that the controlled descent of Brown's USAF plane into a Croatian mountainside was "inexplicable." The maintenance chief responsible for the airport's navigation system showed up with a bullet hole in his chest the day before his Air Force interview.
- Brown's fatal head injury struck the forensic photographer and attending pathologist as having the size and shape of a gunshot wound. He was nonetheless buried (over the protest of the pathologists) without an autopsy. The photographer and three Armed Service pathologists would sacrifice their careers going public with their discontent. The major media reported close to none of this.
- As the Nation of Islam plotted to kill "heretic" Malcolm X, Malcolm's wife Betty Shabazz approached the one person with the clout to dissuade Malcolm's fellow Muslims. "You see what you're doing to my husband, don't you?" she pleaded. Muhammad Ali blew her off, saying, "I'm not doing anything to him." Malcolm was gunned down shortly thereafter.
- If a young Ali jeopardized his liberal chic by betraying Malcolm X, a reformed Ali risked it again when he publicly supported Ronald Reagan and even attended the Republican National Convention. Who would have guessed?
- Alex Haley plagiarized his Pulitzer Prize-winning non-fiction bestseller, Roots, from a book written by white novelist Harold Courlander, who sued Haley for damages. Midway through the trial, the judge threatened to charge a dissembling Haley with perjury unless he settled, which he did for big bucks.
- Sorry, Virginia, but there was no Kunta Kinte. Writing in the Village Voice, literary detective Philip Nobile would call Roots "one of the great literary hoaxes of modern times."
- Speaking of the literary hoaxes, not a single one of the scores of mainstream book editors who reviewed Christopher Andersen's Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage chose to notice Andersen's most newsworthy revelation: "In the end, [Bill] Ayers's contribution to Barack's Dreams From My Father would be significant -- so much so that the book's language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers's own writing."