BY MARK SHIELDS
An incorrect statement left uncorrected leads often to deception, disillusion and dishonesty. Take this hypothetical: I’ve agreed to speak at a local event, and the emcee, in her introduction, says something like, “Mark Shields went to the University of Notre Dame, where he played basketball.” It’s true that Notre Dame is my alma mater and that I regularly played pickup games of basketball while there. But the misimpression would be created that I’d played (SET ITAL) for (END ITAL) my school on the men’s basketball team. Before long, another imaginative emcee embellishes the intro to read, “Shields was a star college basketball player.” And error would take wing.

Recently, Jay Nordlinger (whom I do not know) of National Review wrote: “The term ‘chickenhawk’ was coined by Mark Shields, a Democratic operative, columnist, and pundit. He used it to tar Dan Quayle, Dick Cheney (et al.) … The rule was this: If you did not serve in combat, you could not advocate American military action. … Only combat veterans had the right to support military action.”
Nordlinger is wrong on virtually every count. Forget that I did not coin “chicken hawk,” which was used as early as 1967 by Rep. Mo Udall, D-Ariz., in a speech opposing the Vietnam War, some 12 years before I ever worked for a newspaper. Forget that I have not worked in politics for 36 years.
More importantly, he incorrectly defined terms. For the record, the disparaging term “chicken hawk” was reserved for those American men who during the Vietnam War, when all males 18 or older were subject to the military draft, employed a student deferment, a family contact, a contrived medical malady or even a calling to divinity school to avoid serving and who then later, as wounded and decorated Marine veteran of Vietnam Robert Timberg unforgettably wrote in the 1996 book “The Nightingale’s Song,” would reappear “loudly endorsing a confrontational stance with the Soviet Union, aid to the Nicaraguan guerillas, and military ventures into Lebanon, Grenada, and the Persian Gulf.” Chicken hawks, Timberg continued, were “men whose testosterone gland abruptly began pumping after age twenty-six, when they were no longer vulnerable to the draft.”
Yes, former Vice President Dick Cheney — with his five student deferments and with his under-oath explanation “I had other priorities in the ’60s than military service” (when 58,303 Americans of his generation were giving their lives in Vietnam) — who appears since never to have seen a world trouble spot where he would not want to send American soldiers and Marines, qualifies as a chicken hawk.
The chicken hawk can be counted on to endorse a national policy of military escalation, as long as it involves no personal participation.
U.S. Army Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, after his successful leadership in the Gulf War, dispatched all the fawning flatterers this way: “It doesn’t take a hero to order men into battle. It takes a hero to be one of those men who goes into battle.” It would be irrational to say — and nobody I know has ever said it — that only Americans who have served in combat can advocate American military action. By that absurd standard, of the past 11 U.S. presidents since Harry Truman, only John F. Kennedy, Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush would have been qualified to serve as commander in chief.
In the last analysis, character is destiny. Just as we would spurn the self-proclaimed tax reformer who turned out to be a tax evader, we refuse to honor the call to battle from those who, when summoned to defend their nation, went AWOL. The record is corrected.
To find out more about Mark Shields and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2015 MARK SHIELDS
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BY L. BRENT BOZELL AND TIM GRAHAM

On Inauguration Day 2009, the White House website declared President Obama’s administration would become “the most open and transparent in history.” By the end of the next day, Obama had issued high-profile orders pledging “a new era” and “an unprecedented level of openness” across the massive federal bureaucracy.
This has become a cosmic joke.
The entirety of the Obama era is marked by secrecy, obfuscation and, if all else fails, sheer dishonesty. Even allies in the network news acknowledged on Tuesday it was a damaging story that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had never used a public email account during her four-year tenure at Foggy Bottom.
What is it about these elites that they believe rules just don’t pertain to them?
But even then, the reporters didn’t seem to admit this was an (SET ITAL) Obama (END ITAL) administration problem, not just a Hillary problem. On the same day, news was breaking in The Washington Times that Mark Levin’s Landmark Legal Foundation had spurred federal judge Royce Lamberth to broadside the Environmental Protection Agency that the Freedom of Information Act is for all citizens, not just your biggest supporters. EPA dragged its feet on Landmark’s requests for documents — especially before the 2012 election — and generally treated them like pond scum.
“The recurrent instances of disregard that EPA employees display for FOIA obligations should not be tolerated by the agency,” the judge said. “It is plain to this court that EPA perceives Landmark as an enemy. … This court would implore the executive branch to take greater responsibility in ensuring that all EPA FOIA requests — regardless of the political affiliation of the requester — are treated with equal respect and conscientiousness.”
Ouch.
Network coverage of Levin vs. EPA? Zero.
“Afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.” The press is infatuated with that self-awarded grandiosity. They are the people’s representative, speaking truth to power, casting spotlights on injustice. Blah, blah, blah. When Democrats are in power, transparency goes out the window and our knights in shining armor are nowhere to be found.
It’s not just Levin’s lawyers who have demonstrated Team Obama’s disregard for answering Freedom of Information Act requests. Conservative activist and author Christopher Horner laid out an astonishing case against the Obama administration in his book “The Liberal War on Transparency.”
Just like Hillary, former EPA administrator Lisa Jackson conducted government business illegally using her private email account. Just like Hillary, staffers of Obama’s Department of Energy enjoyed conducting government business from private email accounts.
In the scandal surrounding Solyndra’s bankruptcy after government “investments,” Energy Department official Jonathan Silver instructed department staffers: “Don’t ever send an email on DOE email with personal email addresses.” He wanted to hide these communications from a subpoena.
Why is this administration so bold in its lawlessness? Perhaps it is their confidence that the news media will look the other way.
How Team Bush would have enjoyed that treatment.
In January of 2007, with Democrats newly in control of Congress, the networks attacked the Bush administration for interference with “scientists” inside EPA to withhold information on “climate change.” Transparency was all the rage.
Matt Lauer’s stubbly hair was on fire: “Now to a controversy in Washington over what literally could be the end of the world as we know it. Did the Bush administration freeze out scientists trying to sound the alarm on global warming?” Not to be outdone, ABC ran a report predicting doom within 10 years, asking the onscreen question “Will Billions Die From Global Warming?”
The only thing that becomes transparent from observing the Obama administration’s war on transparency is the shameless partisanship of the “news” media. It won’t be long before they begin to insist that any protest against Hillary’s private emailing is just another in a long string of desperate vast right-wing conspiracies.
L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Brent Bozell III and Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
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