Walter Cronkite is dead at the age of 92.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,533660,00.html
The so called “most trusted man in America” morphed into a disreputable hack in 1968 when he let his ego get in the way of “just the facts”, and veered left. During a national T.V. broadcast on February 27, 1968, on the CBS Evening News, he used his influence on public opinion to declare that Vietnam was “unwinnable”.
This, in spite of the fact that we beat back the NVA and Vietcong during the Tet offensive. Tet was a disaster for the Communists, who were estimated to have lost over 8000 combatants. We dealt the Vietcong insurgency in South Vietnam a devastating blow. The North Vietnamese were forced to push more of their regular army troops into combat operations, to compensate for the loss of VC fodder.
Cronkite’s feckless editorializing scored a huge propaganda victory for the enemy. The Democrats in Congress did their bit and subsequently yanked funding for the war, thus ensuring that it became unwinnable.
Fast forward to 19 April 2007, when Harry Reid tried a similar stunt on the floor of the Senate, shilling for Al Qaeda in Iraq by declaring “the war is lost”. This time, the Democrats would not succeed in cutting off support, and American troops flipped the proverbial bird at asslowns like Harry by decimating the AQI and routing them out of Iraq.
Cronkite’s fatuity gained momentum in the late 1980’s and carried right through the Iraq/Afghanistan War. He thought we “overreacted” to the Soviet threat, he vented his spleen at our “unilateralism” against Islamic aggression, he loathed President George W. Bush, he called Jimmy Carter “the smartest president he ever met”, and he espoused the moronic idea of a ‘one world government’.
Roger Kimball at Pajamas Media sums up Cronkite’s reporting style:
He was a partisan news reader whose reputation for impartiality survived only because he espoused the same ideology as those in the media who determine who is awarded points for impartiality. Liberals like Cronkite suppose they are objective because they are secure in the belief that their opinions represent a neutral state of nature. It is (they believe) only those who dissent from those opinions who bring politics into the equation.
http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerkimball/2009/07/19/walter-cronkite-worlds-most-overrated-reader-of-the-news/
The Media Research Center has a compilation of Cronkite’s leftist pontifications:
http://web.archive.org/web/20120119101256/http://www.mrc.org/Profiles/cronkite/welcome.asp
Buh bye, Walter. You weren’t really a wise, authoritative news anchor; you just played one on T.V.
“And that’s the way it wasn’t.”