Is Newsweek magazine biased? Take a look at their cover story for their June 11, 2007 issue. "After Bush: How To Restore America's Place In The World." When I saw that headline at the newsstand, I was dismayed. First of all, it takes as a starting point that our place in the world needs restoring. Of course, any liberal will tell you that our place in the world does need restoring, that the years of the "Bush regime" have taken a toll on our friendships with other nations and the respect they show for us. But if you are like me, I believe that our place in the world needed restoring before Bush, and that he has taken steps to do that.
Should we go back to the pre-Bush mentality of keeping our collective head in the sand? Should we return to being the "paper tiger" that Osama bin laden mistakenly asumed us to be? Is that what they want? Should we go back to policies of appeasement, and of endless diplomacy that solves nothing, such as was practiced for years in the Israel-Palestinian conflict? Is it more important for us to be everybody's friend than actively defend ourselves by projecting power outward? Of course I did not buy the issue, as I was not going to subsidize such a biased publication, so I returned to my office and read the article online for free.
What did I find in this article? Pretty much what the headline suggests: a long detailed article bemoaning that by defending ourselves in the manner we have, many of our friends no longer like us, and by focusing on the very real dangers that we face, we are going down the wrong path. "We have become a nation consumed by fear," the article states, and "the Bush administration has contributed mightily to this state of affairs..." Yet in the decades before Bush took office, terrorists have been bombing us and taking our citizens hostage, and this article suggests we should go back to largely ignoring these attacks. It is precisely this ignorance and refusal to allow a bit of fear to strengthen our resolve and keep us on our toes that has allowed this world-wide terrorist threat to grow unchecked for lo these many years.
In addition, our "friends" that no longer respect us are the same people who made secret deals with Saddam Hussein, who have undermined the safety and security of the world for profit. They are the same people who act unilaterally when their interests are threatened, but according to Newseek, we should not do the same. Newsweek and the liberals who buy into this mentality subscribe to the idea that if we were just "nicer," we wouldn't be attacked. They are so concerned with being popular that they admonish us all to put our security at risk.
Newsweek, you are a mockery of journalism.
