Traditionally, I get tired of people making up things and attributing them to me, but I don't really care that much any more. This thread is getting close enough to all war propaganda, all the time, that it doesn't matter.
URLs? I suppose you'd deny W's handlers played the war card in the last election that everybody's so busy gloating about around here too. W's handlers know how to play the plant and leak game well, I doubt if you could find a direct reference to them claming McCain was unstable in SC in 2000 either, but the game was pretty obvious to everybody.
Some choice tidbits that the local right seem to be quite proud of, from a site that paul recommended. I've egregiously edited out the heinous crimes of the broadly circulated liberal equivalents, Tom Tomorrow and Michael Moore. From spinsanity.org
While Daschle may feel there is a correlation between criticism by talk radio hosts and the number of threats he receives, there is no evidence suggesting that the hosts are the cause of the threats. Moreover, it is unreasonable to suggest that talking heads are responsible for the actions of a deranged few without specific proof that they have actively incited their actions.
Yet Limbaugh, especially, is guilty of extremely vicious rhetoric. Consider just a few examples from his frequent diatribes against Daschle over the last two years. On Nov. 15, he asserted that Daschle's criticism of the conduct of the war on terrorism amounted to "an attempt to sabotage the war on terrorism," called him "Hanoi Tom" and suggested that he is " a disgrace to patriotism." On other occasions, Limbaugh has suggested that "In essence, Daschle has chosen to align himself with the axis of evil" and has drawn an extended analogy between Daschle and Satan.
Many pundits downplayed Limbaugh's statements or were simply unaware of them. In his online Media Notes column, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz asks, "Has the Senator listened to Rush lately? Sure, he aggressively pokes fun at Democrats and lionizes Republicans, but mainly about policy." Kurtz then cites a few generic quotes from Limbaugh as though they discredit the thesis that Limbaugh uses vitriolic rhetoric, writing, "Golly gee. We've heard worse on "Crossfire."
On the Fox News Channel's "Special Report with Brit Hume," Fred Barnes also denied the obvious:
I doubt if he's listened a lot to Rush Limbaugh. Rush Limbaugh a pretty conventional conservative, you know. He talks up -- he was a big supporter of Bush One and now he's a supporter of George W. Bush as president and the Bush agenda. He's not an extremist. He's a conventional conservative, as are so many talk radio people... Now what information do they get from Rush Limbaugh? For heaven's sakes, he does such radical things as read editorials from "The Wall Street Journal." Boy, that will really drive people to an emotional frenzy.
Perhaps the most egregious spin, however, came from Sean Hannity, the co-host of Fox's "Hannity and Colmes," who didn't even bother to address the substance of Limbaugh's attacks on Daschle, instead blaming him for tactics Hannity says Democrats use to attack Republicans. On Wednesday's show, Hannity said, "You want to talk about shrill rhetoric ... the attacks by Daschle and the likes of him saying Republicans want to poison the air, water, and kill children, that Republicans every year we have the ads, grandma thrown down the stairs. If you elect a Republican, another black church is going to burn, a Democratic party ad ran that in a recent election. They are the ones with the shrill, mean- spirited hateful rhetoric."
While Daschle's comments were certainly unfair, it's absurd to deny that Limbaugh is consistently more mean-spirited and nasty than virtually anyone else in the mainstream discourse. . . .
wo of them, Jonah Goldberg of National Review Online and Michael Kelly of the Washington Post, claimed that Gore's endorsement of single-payer is hypocritical because he attacked former Senator Bill Bradley for backing the approach during the campaign for the 2000 Democratic presidential nomination.
In his a column criticizing Gore's recent spate of media appearances, Kelly wrote that "Gore had 'reluctantly come to the conclusion' that the solution to the 'impending crisis' in American health care was the 'single-payer national health insurance plan' -- the idea he savaged his 2000 Democratic primary opponent, Bill Bradley, for supporting."
Goldberg made a very similar accusation, stating, "he's come out in favor of a single-payer health-care system, which must be of little comfort to former opponent Bill Bradley, who favored such a system only to be relentlessly mocked and attacked for it by Gore."
Bradley, however, did not support a single-payer health care system during the primary campaign. Instead, he proposed expanding the current mix of public and private health insurance coverage to reach universal health coverage using government subsidies and tax deductions (for full details on Bradley’s proposal, see this CNN report).
Gore did vigorously oppose this proposal, but it was distinctly not the single-payer approach that he now supports. Not only do these two pundits get the facts here wrong, but Goldberg even says it's part of a pattern of lying by Gore, and uses the disproven charge that he "lied about fixing love canal." The only pattern in this case, though, is the pundits who accuse a politician of contradicting himself, but don't take the time to accurately report just what it is they claim he's contradicting.
Since he became Majority Leader, Senator Tom Daschle, D-S.D., has been the subject of repeated vicious attacks, particularly since Sept. 11. But when Daschle raised questions about the success of the war on terrorism last week, Rep. Mark Foley, R-FL, and radio host Rush Limbaugh took the attacks on him to a new low, explicitly questioning Daschle's motivations and branding him as unpatriotic.
This is the latest chapter in a troubling history of unfair attacks on critics of the conduct of the war on terrorism -- and Daschle in particular. In particular, when he suggested in February that success in the fight against terrorism was in doubt and that it would not be a victory unless bin Laden and other leaders were caught, prominent Republicans retaliated by suggesting, as Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA), head of the National Republican Campaign Committee, did, that Daschle's "divisive comments have the effect of giving aid and comfort to our enemies". (Read the whole column.) . . .
Today, the Wall Street Journal is the latest voice on the right to question the Democratic claim that Senator-elect Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., won his campaign against Senator Max Cleland, D-Ga., by attacking his patriotism, calling it "misinformation" and "a cock-and-bull story". This supposed spin-busting, however, is little more than an exercise in deception.
According to the Journal, "Mr. Chambliss never dishonored Mr. Cleland's Vietnam sacrifice." Instead, he "won by exposing Senator Cleland's voting record on the issues that mattered most to Georgians, such as taxes, missile defense and especially homeland security."
This may be the reason Cleland was defeated. But in its outrage, the Journal somehow fails to mention a notorious Chambliss press release accusing Cleland of "breaking his oath to protect and defend the Constitution." The alleged evidence? Cleland's vote for a successful 1997 amendment to the chemical weapons treaty (supported by several prominent Republican senators) that removed language barring inspectors from certain countries from being part of United Nations inspection teams in Iraq -- hardly sufficient grounds for such a grave and inflammatory charge.
As syndicated columnist Mark Shields has argued:
This is not the usual garbage of cheap political campaigns. This comes close to a charge of treason. To break that oath --"to defend ... against all enemies foreign and domestic" -- which Max Cleland first took as a young Army second lieutenant before volunteering for combat in Vietnam in 1967 and then took again following his 1996 election to the Senate -- would be nothing less than an act of deliberate disloyalty to his nation.
The editorial also fails to address a Chambliss ad associating Cleland with bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. "As America faces terrorists and extremist dictators," the announcer said as images of bin Laden and Hussein appear on screen, "Max Cleland runs television ads claiming he has the courage to lead." While this ad did not directly question Cleland's patriotism in the same way as the press release, many have criticized its disreputable suggestion that Cleland lacks "courage" to defend the country against bin Laden and Hussein -- yet it goes unaddressed in an article purporting to debunk a supposed myth.
The subtext of Chambliss's accusations against Cleland is clear. Unfortunately, the Journal did not fairly present the facts so that its readers could make up their own minds.
From one of Bill's (many) favorite bloviators in siliconinvestor.com
I assume it's superfluous to mention that there is nothing illegal about Ailes giving advice to the president -- though admittedly, I have not consulted the "living Constitution" in the past 24 hours to see if a new penumbra specifically about Fox News has sprouted. But the Times was a monument of self-righteous indignation because hard news men are supposed to stay neutral between America and terrorism.
Of course, the Times hasn't been reticent in giving the president advice on the war. (Surrender now!)
Nor was there much neutrality shown between George Bush and the Nobel Peace Prize Committee. After the Norwegians -- who gave us the term "quisling" -- awarded former President Jimmy Carter the Peace Prize citing his vocal opposition to President Bush's war policies, the press sprang to action. The whole chorus began calling this comically inept president one of America's "greatest." Good Morning America's Charles Gibson said Carter had "become, in the opinion of many, the greatest ex-president of modern times."
From the sometimes thread authority in Message 18242264
Now there are many people, senior administration officials high among them, who have indeed inflated threats, exaggerated capabilities, distorted the historical record, and so forth in order to "sell" the war on Iraq. But the clear target of this particular piece is Ken Pollack, who is quoted by name and who has been the chief intellectual purveyor of the anti-deterrence line. As anybody who bothers to look at Pollack's book can tell, however, this is not someone who--whether one agrees with him or not--is guilty of those particular crimes. To accuse him of such, therefore, is to lower the level of debate to a very mean and nasty personal level without any justification--something quite on a part with the neocons' frequent slandering of opponents of war as appeasing scum, traitors, anti-Americans, etc.
The very mean and nasty personal level seems to be pretty much par for the course around here, the local neocon types all seem rather proud of keeping the ( off topic political interjection ) dialog at that level as near as I can tell. A current favorite bit of mine:
It's just tough to be an American right now. Message 18268392
Yeah, it's tough. The local war propagandists just don't get no respect. Snort. |
