What I and others do on this page is share an opinion about the news. Some of us may actually break news but the norm for most columnists is to analyze and opine. Unfortunately, in this present hostile environment, where many formerly reputable mainstream media outlets place an agenda ahead of the truth, much of what is opinion morphs into and then gets repeated as fact. This all happens under the guise of journalism. It is as though appearing in print bestows an air of officialdom on any prose no matter how outrageous the content. May the reader beware. 

This charade has spilled over into television. And so we witness the spectacle of bottom-of-the-food-chain politicians appearing as “Constitutional Scholars” on cable news shows. They offer legal opinions on matters which I am willing to bet they have only recently researched—like ten minutes before going on the air—and that research, having consisted merely of “talking points” to make them sound good in a forum that has devolved from intelligent and insightful debate into screaming matches where snappy and often vicious sound bites are hurled back and forth with all the vigor of a good case of road rage. 

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion—even the people who report the news. But none should ever distort or invent facts in order to form that opinion. And while not problematic if only an exercise in self-delusion, the real damage is inflicted when these most deplorable purveyors of hyperbole take it a step further and try to envelope the masses in their own dementia.

Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan recently wrote, “In a time of endless opinion, fact is king. Fact is rarer, harder to come by, more valuable.”

Nothing could be truer during wartime; a characterization of the era in which we now find ourselves and ironically, a subject for debate itself. Some have forgotten that only a little more than four years ago, we were attacked on our own turf by a group of ideologically-driven monsters from the pit of hell. Their efforts succeeded in immolating almost 3,000 innocent Americans whose only transgression on that beautiful September morning was to get out of bed and go to work.  

So now we find ourselves in a time and place where many Democrats and their accomplices in newsrooms across the country are desperately trying to sway a majority of Americans over to their side. They have used opinion—spin, innuendo and outright lies in some cases—to level outrageous charges including presidential prevarication, a charge which would almost be laughable except that Senate Democrats shared the same intelligence they blame the president for fabricating. Their denial is an admission to negligence—something that is not funny.

The most recent phony outrage, leveled by The New York Times and echoed by other MSM sycophants is that “King George”—as one newspaper put it—“spied on Americans.”

The facts speak otherwise. On December 22, The Wall Street Journal reported, “In the Supreme Court's 1972 Keith decision…the court said explicitly that it was not questioning the president's authority to [order wiretapping without warrants] in response to threats from abroad.” And “in the most recent judicial statement on the issue, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, composed of three federal appellate court judges, said in 2002 that ‘All the… courts to have decided the issue held that the president did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence…We take for granted that the president does have that authority.’”

It’s time for a refresher course, an “Islamo-fascist Terrorism 101” for Democrats, some Republicans, most members of the MSM and those Americans who have either bought into all this phony media spin or who have simply become soft in their own thinking. They should all be made to sit and watch video footage of fully fueled jetliners flying into the Twin Towers followed by workers jumping to their deaths from the flaming infernos that once were their offices. After that, videos that you and I have never been shown—like the torching and hanging of bodies from that iron bridge in Fallujah or the beheading of Nick Berg would perhaps steel their resolve against an enemy that will stop at nothing to kill us.

If given the opportunity, terrorists will strike again. And while we have taken them on in places away from the homeland; in Iraq and Afghanistan, some at least and hopefully most but perhaps, not all, suspicions linger over the possibility that there are terrorist cells here in the US. And if that is the case, then I want them discovered—spied upon if necessary—and then rooted out and destroyed like the vermin they are, before they can wrap themselves in a vest filled with C-4 and walk into a crowded mall or a subway station or an airport and blow themselves up along with more innocent men, women and children. Or something worse, something so unspeakable I dare not write it here.

And I don’t give a rat’s backside what the ACLU or The New York Times or any of the other self-anointed guardians of our civil liberties who have mastered the art of feigning outrage because a Republican occupies the Oval Office have to say about it.

And THAT is my opinion. n