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USA Today: How Not to Report the News

From today's print version of USA Today:

NAACP urges Bush to address convention

NAACP Chairman Julian Bond, who has condemned the war in Iraq and
administration policy on education and the economy, is urging President Bush to attend the civil rights group's annual convention that opened Sunday in Washington.

"We are extremely hopeful that the president will come," he said. Bush has not attended the conventions since taking office in 2001. Bush is the first president in decades not to have spoken to the NAACP, the nation's oldest and largest civil rights group. As a candidate, Bush addressed the group once but has since declined, citing scheduling conflicts.

Hmmmm... why oh why has Bush declined such invitations? The reader is left wondering. Nodoby knows, really. Perhaps it's that Bush simply won't speak to anyone who has disagrees with administration policies, as the first paragraph implies. Or perhaps it's just that Bush is one of those horrible racists, as the last paragraph implies.

Of course, we wouldn't expect a newspaper to fill in the missing details, like these, so that it's readers could draw an informed conclusion:

NAACP chairman compares GOP to Nazis

Civil rights activist and NAACP Chairman Julian Bond delivered a blistering partisan speech at Fayetteville State University in North Carolina last night, equating the Republican Party with the Nazi Party and characterizing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her predecessor, Colin Powell, as tokens.

"The Republican Party would have the American flag and the swastika flying side by side," he charged.... He referred to former Attorney General John Ashcroft as J. Edgar Ashcroft. He compared Bush's judicial nominees to the Taliban.

The talk so infuriated at least one black family in attendance among the 900 in the auditorium that they got up and walked out in protest. "He went on and on name calling," said Leon Delaine. "I walked out in the middle of his speech with my wife and three kids"

Bush didn't merely cite a "scheduling conflict." He also said this:


The White House said Bush had a scheduling conflict, but Bush also has described his relationship with the NAACP leadership as "basically nonexistent."

"You've heard the rhetoric and the names they've called me," he said last week.

Once the NAACP represented a wide spectrum of black views, now it is simply another mouthpiece for the left. Wise or unwise, there is nothing inherantly anti-black about the war in Iraq, yet Bond feels free to continually focus on that issue. Bush has appointed more blacks to cabinet-level posts than any President in history (and his appointees were certainly not tokens), yet, because they were not Democrats, Bond feels free to call them the "Taliban" and imply that anyone who opposes the Democratic party, must be a "Nazi". Meaning, of course, that the Democratic party is the only solution for blacks.

Leftists like Julian Bond throw bricks, stones, and Molitov cocktails and their opponents, and then accuse their opponents of incivility for failing to drop by.

Comments

This summary gives a little better detail of what Bond said.

Bond didn't specifically say "Bush is a Nazi." He has an odd habit (apparently) of referring to the confederate flag as "the confederate swastika" meaning, I assume, that the confederate flag has the same meaning for African Americans as the swastika does for Jews.

Bond said;
“Their (Republicans) idea of equal rights is the American flag and the Confederate swastika flying side-by-side,”

in reference to conservative defense of flying the confederate flag.

He also didn't say that Bush's appointees were token figures. He said their appointment shouldn't serve to shield the Bush administration from what Bond sees as a horrible civil rights record.

Of course, none of this was helped by Fayetteville State University stalling on releasing details of Bond's speech.

Posted by: Ryan on July 17, 2006 11:04 PM

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