Yup, the liberal media wants it both ways - that is they
want to attack Bush without any real evidence & they
insist on not reporting any negative stories against
liberal presidential candidates unless the evidence is
100% accurate & completely irrefutable........
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Hugh Hewitt - The New Republic's Peter Beinart and I mixed it up today, when after dancing around the fact that he and the staff at TNR had been discussing the Kerry allegations he chastised me for bringing up the DrudgeReport's allegations on air without any evidence for their veracity. Trap sprung. I asked Peter for the evidence supporting the allegations that Bush was a "deserter" or "AWOL", allegations that he and the TNR staff have been rolling about in for days. The only "evidence" he could cite was General Turnipseed's alleged charge.
Understand that Turnipseed has never alleged that Bush was AWOL or a deserter. Never. Four years ago he said he doesn't recall seeing him. On Tuesday he stated that Bush could well have been on the base, but that he just didn't see him.
In other words, there is no evidence whatsoever to support Terry McAuliffe's slanderous charge that was repeated in Congress yesterday by a Democratic congressman and by countless pundits including the increasingly repugnant Begala, and widely read websites of the left like Joshua Marshall's.
But while Beinart and his colleagues of the left have no problem covering the Bush story and shifting coverage from the lack of evidence for the charges leveled at Bush to their dissatisfaction with the completeness of the Bush denials, they are feigning shock that a report from Matt Drudge on alleged Kerry infidelity should be mentioned outside their newsrooms.
The timing of the new allegations is wonderful especially because it throws such a defining light on the bias of the Washington media --ever ready to carry the water of the Democrats and dismayed that they might be obliged to cover some nasty business about the front-runner from the left.
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Hugh Hewitt - Across the country today Beltway political pros, reporters and pundits were talking about one issue and one issue only --off air. But while the radio hosts openly discussed the accusations swirling around John Kerry that first surfaced at the Drudge Report, television talking heads stayed far away from the story. Incredibly, Judy Woodruff did not ask Wesley Clark about the allegation that the retired general had himself launched the allegations into play! Over at Editor&Publisher the question is "Will Press Pounce on Drudge's Kerry Rumor?" Of course, "the press" will. The real question is whether they will tell the public before the information is irrelevant.
This reluctance to discuss on air what they are all chatting about off air is both a relic and transparently hypocritical. The days of a media elite deciding which stories the public got to know and those which had to be held back are long gone.
Recall that the Los Angeles Times tried to burn Arnold by holding its slam piece on him until days before the California recall election. There the manipulation was in timing the drop. With the Kerry story, if there is anything to the allegations, the release should be immediate so that their is no manipulation of the primary cycle to stick the Dems with a wounded duck. The two spokesmen interviewed by E&P, the AP's Jack Stokes and the Washington Post's Leonard Downie, wouldn't confirm that investigations into Kerry's fidelity to his wife were even underway.
Even more interesting: Will the standard of proof attaching to any Kerry statement on the subject be the same as the standard being applied to President Bush's record of service in the Air National Guard, where no combination of statements, records, and third party testimony is sufficient to satisfy the swamp dwellers with a political interest in keeping the story alive? Once again there will be a standard established by the left which the left will resist applying to its own candidate. Calpundit, consumed by the details of dental records and the like these past few days, has at least mentioned the odd silence of the Kerry campaign and the media. No word from Beltway insider Joshua Micah Marshall, leading me to conclude that Sydney Blumenthal hasn't yet been told by the Clintons how to respond.
In the age of the internet, blogging and Fox News, however, the glaring inconsistencies of the media's coverage of its favorites and its foes are quickly noted and absorbed by the public. A very amusing few days ahead |
