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In today�s CongressDailyAM (full story after the jump due to subscription), Sue Davis reports that Congressman Kingston got into a �discussion� yesterday in a closed-door meeting with two liberal Democrats regarding anti-war beatnik, Cindy Sheehan.
A closed hearing of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee turned contentious Thursday as Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., Subcommittee ranking member Jack Murtha, D-Pa., and others sparred over the meaning of anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, heroes and military service.
According to one Democratic source present at the hearing, Kingston commented that Sheehan was �a nutcase� and lamented that too many of the human interest stories coming out of the war in Iraq center on anti-war activists like Sheehan and filmmaker Michael Moore and do not give proper service to heroic tales of U.S. soldiers.
“Who would argue that Cindy Sheehan’s son is not a hero? I mean, come on,” he said, chalking the exchange up to election-year politics.
“I think she is a very flaky woman,” Kingston told CongressDaily. “I think we need more heroes. The only people that get press are people like Moore and Sheehan.”
Cindy Sheehan is a nutcase. In fact, you may remember Cindy Sheehan from her recent trip to Venezuela for the World Social Forum where she met with Venezuela�s anti-American leftist president, Hugo Chavez (pictured above).
Or you may recall how she refers to the terrorists who are killing American soldiers in Iraq as “freedom fighters.” Check out this story by WorldNetDaily for more. The problem is that what Howard Dean famously termed the “democratic wing of the Democratic Party” has now completely taken over.
This is not the first time Congressman Kingston has disagreed with the liberal Democratic “cut-n-run” Caucus (of which Jack Murtha is leading in the House).
In fact, in December 2005, Mr. Kingston wrote an editorial for the Washington Times where he said:
The realization that the radical left has completely hijacked the Democratic Party boiled over when Democratic Rep. Jack Murtha, a well-known defense hawk who serves on the same congressional defense spending panel as I do, called for our troops in the field to admit defeat and cut and run. In fact, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has already wrapped her arms around the cut-and-run proposal.
This is the latest example of a party which has been overcome by antiwar extremists, providing daily fodder to international media outlets like Al Jazeera, which emboldens our enemies and sends a defeatist message to our troops.
The Democrats, nationally, have embraced a new strategy for the war on terrorism: Lose, leave and wait. Democrats want to admit defeat, dishonoring the sacrifices of our soldiers. They want us to leave by cutting and running, signaling to the world that the United States no longer stands for freedom, democracy and the defense of human rights in the face of terrorism. And instead, Democrats prefer the French model - to wait for the terrorists to bring murder and destruction to the homefront.
Georgia’s First Congressional District is home to well over 20,000 soldiers and includes five major military installations (more than any other Congressional District in the country).
This past Saturday, Congressman Kingston was pleased to spend the day at a Welcome Home Celebration where up to 20,000 soldiers of the Third Infantry Division and their families gathered at Fort Stewart after spending the past year deployed in Iraq.
Of the soldiers Congressman Kingston said, “They have made our world safer and they’ve made a lot of progress in Iraq. So this is about soldiers.“
Congressman Kingston has visited Iraq twice, most recently in November as part of a bipartisan CODEL.
While in Baghdad, the Congressman spent time with many of the soldiers who are also his constituents. Soldier after soldier said their spirits were high, but that they couldn�t understand why the media would only report the negative news of the war.
Always skeptical of the MSM, Congressman Kingston worked with the Media Research Center to distribute a letter and report to every Republican in Congress outlining his thoughts.
Here’s the text of the letter:
This past week I traveled to Iraq as part of a bipartisan delegation to gauge the morale of our troops, talk with the officers and soldiers about the war, and witness the progress in Iraq and that of the Iraqi people. The bottom line: The war in Iraq is a much different war than the one we read about in the major media everyday. Progress is being made.
As you may have read in Tuesday’s Washington Times, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, “We’ve arrived at a strange time in this country, where the worst about America and our military seems to so quickly be taken as truth by the press and reported and spread around the world.” He continued, saying the reporting is “often with little context and little scrutiny, let alone correction or accountability after the fact.”
Attached is a report prepared by the Media Research Center, which studied the networks’ coverage of the war in Iraq in 2005 and found that, in fact, the networks HAVE BEEN biased.
For instance, the data show that the coverage has been: Overwhelmingly pessimistic; Increasingly negative over time; Highlighting terrorist attacks as centerpieces of the nightly news; Downbeat on the Iraqi political process; and Included only eight stories of heroism or valor by U.S. troops � out of 1,388 news reports!
This new study confirms what our troops told me in Iraq, that they wondered why only the bad news seemed to be getting reported to Americans through the media.
Journalists have an obligation and responsibility to report in a fair and balanced manner. Unfortunately, for our troops and the story about the war in Iraq, that is not happening.
Our nation’s media can do better.
Congressman Kingston will continue to stand-up to the angry liberals in Congress and Hollywood who continue to incite America�s enemies and hurt the morale of our troops in harms way.
UPDATE: Mark Kilmer blogged about this issue at RedState. Thx Mark. Congressman Kingston Issues Apology To Ms. Sheehan.
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