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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (765787)	10/8/2007 1:22:17 PM
From: longnshort	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

wrong Rush was refering to the 'fake' soldiers. Spin it all you want only BDS victims believe you

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (765787)	10/8/2007 1:24:48 PM
From: longnshort	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

Democrats Getting High on Limbaugh By Jack Kelly "Maybe he was just high on his drugs again," said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa. "But that shouldn't be an excuse." That sounds suspiciously like the sort of personal attack Democrats claim to decry. And Sen. Harkin was just one of an impressive number of big foot Democrats to take to the Senate floor last Monday to calumniate conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh. It's odd enough to have the Senate Majority Leader, his deputy, and the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, among others, take up the Senate's time to attack a radio talk show host, instead of, say, working on the appropriations bills that were supposed to have been enacted into law before the new fiscal year began Oct. 1st. But there was something odder still about Monday's performance. One would think Democrats would find enough to criticize in the things Rush Limbaugh actually says, since he rarely has kind things to say about them. But Mr. Limbaugh was being attacked Monday for something he didn't say. And the timing of the attack makes it clear the Democrats knew perfectly well that what they were saying about Rush wasn't true. The charge they made is that in his radio broadcast Sept. 26, Mr. Limbaugh described Iraq war veterans who oppose the war as "phony soldiers." Rush's comment was "so beyond the pale of decency that it cannot be left alone," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. But the transcript of the broadcast makes it clear that Mr. Limbaugh was referring to antiwar activists who claim to have been soldiers but weren't. Specifically, he was referring to Jesse Adam Macbeth, who claimed to have been an Army Ranger who had witnessed atrocities in Iraq. "Jesse MacBeth never was an Army Ranger, much less a corporal, never received a Purple Heart for wounds inflicted by a foreign foe, and neither saw nor participated in war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, claims for which he became a poster boy for the antiwar movement," wrote Mike Barber of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sept. 21, the day Mr. Macbeth was sentenced to five months in jail for falsifying a Department of Veterans Affairs claim and an Army discharge record. The controversy arose when a caller, "Mike in Olympia," who identified himself as an Iraq war veteran, complained Democrats and journalists "never talk to real soldiers. They like to pull these soldiers that come up out of the blue and talk to the media." "The phony soldiers," Mr. Limbaugh responded. After the caller hung up, Rush elaborated: "Here is a morning update that we did recently, talking about fake soldiers. This is a story of who the left props up as heroes. They have their celebrities and one of them was Army Ranger Jesse Macbeth..." The left wing group Media Matters passed out an edited transcript of the conversation that omitted all references to Mr. Macbeth, to bolster their claim that Mr. Limbaugh had been referring to all antiwar veterans. Few Democratic senators listen regularly to Mr. Limbaugh's program, so they could be forgiven for initially taking the word of an ideological ally over that of the man they love to hate. But the full transcript was readily available days before the senators trooped to the floor. No longer merely deceived, they were now deceivers themselves. It's seems particularly reckless for Sen. Harkin to have taken part in the smear, because in 1991 he had been caught embellishing his own military record. He claimed he was a Naval aviator who had flown combat missions in Vietnam. Mr. Harkin was indeed a Navy pilot, but he never got near the war zone. Let us leave aside for the moment the unpleasant things this sorry episode says about the character of the Democrats engaging in this smear. What does it say about their intellect? Why on earth would they lie, when the truth is so easy to discern? Perhaps the Democrats felt they could lie with impunity, because the news media wouldn't call them on it. If so, this assumption, alas, has largely proved to be true. But why this lie? Jane Hamsher, a liberal Web logger, thinks its an effort to compensate for the embarrassment Democrats suffered over the MoveOn.org ad attacking the patriotism of Gen. David Petraeus. (MoveOn.org and Media Matters are both heavily funded by leftist billionaire George Soros.) Ms. Hamsher wasn't impressed: "They're only in this jam because they foolishly let the (Texas GOP Sen. John) Cornyn MoveOn censure bill onto the floor in the first place," she wrote. "But now that it's done, they can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. (c) Pittsburgh Post-Gazette