Who are these unmasked men?

Question: Who are Martin Kramer, Daniel Pipes, Peter Berkowitz, Nile Gardiner, and Norman Podhoretz?

Answer: They are Norman Podhoretz, Martin Kramer, Daniel Pipes, Peter Berkowitz, and Nile Gardiner, respectively.

Confused? So is Newsweek, the author of this pictograph-riddle.

Newsweek, the weekly personality tabloid, recently went after presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani with disastrous results. Not only was the article — which focused on his team of experienced and highly respected conservative advisers — embarrassingly inaccurate, the magazine offered a sidebar with the pictures, names, and descriptions of the six top advisers to help its reader(s) keep track.

Except five out of six headshots are mislabled; only Robert Kasten's photo matches his name and description.


Anyone who still reads Newsweek knows by now that the magazine's writers and editors have never heard of Republicans; they have, however, heard of "neoconservatives" and have been known to appoint "neocons" sans research or contact with said "neocons".

Which makes it even less acceptable to have made such a huge mistake — if you only know one group ("neoconservatives") you should at least know that group. Newsweek admittedly knows nothing of the one thing it claims to know anything about.

Of course, the magazine's hatred of these fine people has to do with the fact that most of them are clear-thinking experts on Middle Eastern affairs. What is striking, however, is that the MSM has championed defeat in Iraq for so long, they are actually getting bored; it's time for them to defeat any prospects for peace in Israel — which is why champions of logic and reasoning like Pipes, Kramer, and Podhoretz are in their crosshairs.

Giuliani recently questioned the wisdom of establishing an independent Palestinian state when it's clear that that state would sponsor terrorism against Israel and the United States. That is a logical approach to the situation, but one that earns you the label "neoconservative" by the MSM.

As president, Giuliani would be careful not to undermine the safety and security of the United States and its important strategic and moral allies. But the MSM isn't concerned with the United States or its allies, so why would Giuliani, who is steadfast in his loyalty to Americans and our Israeli friends, appeal to Newsweek?

Newsweek is a New York-based publication, and New Yorkers are famously protective of the man whose accomplishments as mayor of NYC are still not even fully appreciated by many in the tri-state area. (He helped NJ and NYC simultaneously by catching welfare double-dippers, and his use of the trigger/broken windows crime theory to clean up some of the uncomprehendingly dirty and dangerous parts of the city was more creative and intellectually impressive than most people give him credit for.)

Yet, all it took for the MSM to turn on him completely was his brainy-yet-tough approach to brokering the Arab-Israeli conflict only in such a way that would not sign the Jewish state's death warrant.

Time Warner, Inc., is also based in New York. Yet its current events magazine TIME decided to report on the upcoming Annapolis peace parley from... Cairo. The article, titled "Can Annapolis Forge a Mideast Peace?" unsurprisingly includes exactly zero quotes or comments from Israeli sources.

What it does include, however, are 14 separate references to "Arab sources". Only three are named, and they are the peaceniks Bashar al-Assad (Syria's dictator), Ahmed Abul-Gheit (Egypt's foreign minister), and Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal — and those references are either attributed to other news sources or public statements.

The only reference to Israeli points of view is the following sentence, written by the piece's author: "Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert apparently prefers a looser conference agenda, one unlikely to commit to fresh negotiations."

Some form of the word "skepticism" was used three times in the article — never in a quote.

Arab "worry" or "concern" about lack of Israeli or American effort and concessions is referenced four times, and the author, Scott MacLeod, even uses the term "separation wall" to describe the Israeli security fence.

The term "photo-op" is thrown around, as are doubts about Israel's willingness to make peace and President George W. Bush's true intentions. The author refers to Hamas as Fatah's Islamic rival, failing to note that Hamas is actually Islamist, and that Fatah is at best Islamic (clearly not secular). And MacLeod doesn't feel it necessary to challenge either the Saudi prince's implication that Israel's settlements are illegal, or the Arab self-portrait as victims should the parley fail and the region descend into violence. (When was the last time Israelis launched an intifada?)

In other words, MacLeod wrote the article not by paying attention to the news, but by looking at his MSM handbook and relying on (only!) unnamed Arab sources.

So, memo to Giuliani: If you are skeptical about the creation of a Palestinian state, the media will come after you, (A) because you're not Arab or a terrorist apologist and (B) because you and your "neoconservative" advisers only want to go after enemies who have waged war against us.

Memo to everyone: If you want to become a mainstream media darling in the the United States, start by attacking our allies.

Otherwise, Newsweek doesn't even want to know your name.

Ahmadinejad or Gingrich? Free speech laws have spoken

You know something is wrong when our free speech laws are effectively a boon to President Ahmadinejad and a ban on President Gingrich.

Ahmadinejad’s American adventure needs no more mention here, but suffice it to say that the whole affair happened in defense of “freedom of speech”, yet that same freedom’s restrictions, which don’t apply to someone like Ahmadinejad, will keep former House Speaker Newt Gingrich from running for president.

It’s not ironic, it’s just sad — and it needs to encourage a concerted call to the American legislature that something is indeed wrong with the chokehold the McCain-Feingold law has put on political free speech.

Gingrich was mulling a run for the White House after watching the Republican Party stray from its cost-conscious, value-centric roots. He was about to launch a Web site to try to raise the $30 million he felt was needed for a presidential campaign when he was informed that his candidacy would endanger the nonprofit status of his American Solutions for Winning the Future organization.

American Solutions is Gingrich’s idea engine; its very purpose is to get everyday Americans involved in finding solutions to some of the country’s most vexing issues. Dialogue and public brainstorming are staples of Gingrich’s theory that the private sector, run by citizens, are nonstop producers of solutions the government simply can’t (or won’t) figure out.

Gingrich’s point is that private citizens and their endeavors are part of the “world that works”; the government is clearly not. An example he likes to use is that anyone using FedEx or UPS can track a shipment from its point of origin to its recipient, yet the government simply cannot locate some 12 million people inside its own borders.

Gingrich’s exclusion from the field of presidential candidates because of American Solutions means that he cannot run precisely because he is helping solve the country’s problems without turning a profit.

“He had to make a choice between being a citizen-activist, raising the challenges America faces and finding solutions to America’s problems, or exploring a potential candidacy,” Rick Tyler, Gingrich’s spokesman, told Politico.

This should raise so many red flags you’ll think you’re in the middle of a Chinese national pride parade.

For one, it tells us that the most important prerequisites for the highest office in the land are cash, money, and cash money.

What matters is cents, not sense.

Well, sense is what Gingrich has aplenty, and it’s what we need in a president. But McCain-Feingold would open Gingrich up to all sorts of penalties for his efforts on behalf of American Solutions while running for president. What McCain-Feingold does, in this case, is legislate the supposed unfairness of Gingrich speaking for American Solutions, because it would also give his candidacy exposure.

Conveniently, Republican John McCain and his Senate friends in the Democratic Party, such as Mrs. H. Clinton and B. Hussein Obama, didn’t have a problem with being a representative of the people in the United States Senate — voting on any law they want and putting their own names on mountains of gratuitous resolutions — and running for president at the same time.

McCain would likely make an excellent president for a number of reasons, but his lack of foresight in “reaching across the isle” for this bill hurts his own party and his standing within that party. What’s more, it hurts the American voters, and Gingrich’s candidacy is quite a pricey bit of legislative collateral damage.

But long before the bill’s effect on the 2008 elections became clear, Reason magazine pleaded for the bill to be “fixed” in time for the 2004 elections.

The magazine article, written by Jonathan Rauch and published on Oct. 7, 2004, starts out:

“Now it is official: The United States of America has a federal bureaucracy in charge of deciding who can say what about politicians during campaign season. We can argue, and people do, about whether this state of affairs is good or bad, better or worse than some alternative. What is inarguable is that America now has what amounts to a federal speech code, enforced with jail terms of up to five years.”

The article went on to recite some of the more peculiar examples of the bill’s frustrating code.

It mentions conservative activist David Hardy, who was told by the FEC he could not advertise for his gun rights documentary during the pre-election season. Yet, it allowed a Republican group to promote the anti-terrorism efforts of congressional Republicans because no candidate was referred to in the ads.

The article’s most frustrating example was a case in July 2004 when an anti-abortion group in Wisconsin tried to encourage citizens to contact the offices of Senators Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl and tell them to “oppose the filibuster” of conservative judicial nominations.

Feingold was up for re-election, so the ads did not tell people who to vote for, they did not mention political parties (both senators are Democrats), and did not mention the senators’ positions on the issue addressed in the ad. Nevertheless, the ads were forced off air in August of that year until after Election Day.

The group’s then-executive director said this:

“They’ve taken away our speech rights in just giving information on candidates, and now they’re taking away our lobbying rights. Congress is in session, there are legitimate issues before the Congress, and the public has a right to know about them.”

While the bill targets “soft money” contributions effectively, most Americans’ opinions on the role of the almighty dollar in our elections haven’t changed. What has changed, however, is what can be said in public by or about an elected official who is running for re-election; too, the law runs red-tape circles around incumbents’ challengers and their supporters.

In recent elections, Senator McCain has registered some impressive victories over his GOP rivals; this year, his defeat of Gingrich almost assuredly means that neither of them will serve as our next president.

Because of his class status and values, Gingrich most represents the average American. Because of the McCain-Feingold law, the average American will be underrepresented in office yet again in 2008. Because of Gingrich’s preternatural ability to lead and unite, it is all too likely that McCain-Feingold means the American voter will also be underserved in 2008 and beyond.

So, no President Gingrich. But we may have President McCain. Americans would gain a lot if that is the outcome, but would gain even more if President McCain introduced the nation to Secretary of State Gingrich.

Now that would be an American solution.