NewsBusters Nonsense
Topic: NewsBusters
-- Lyford Beverage, in a Jan. 25 post, falls for the same fallacy that fellow NewsBuster Michael Rule did -- that anything the Bush administration says is automatically true because they're Republicans. Like Rule, Beverage claims that the NSA's eavesdropping isn't "domestic spying" simply because Michael Hayden said it wasn't.

(UPDATE: Beverage falls for it again in another Jan. 25 post, claiming that the Associted Press has "implicitly called him a liar by continuing to call the program 'domestic spying' when the White House has repeatedly pointed out the inaccuracy of the term.")

-- Clay Waters approvingly reported on an article by David Boaz of the Cato Institute in Reason magazine claiming "an undeniable pattern of media unease in the network and newspaper coverage of the nomination of conservative Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, compared to how those same outlets treated Bill Clinton's 1993 nomination of liberal ACLU lawyer Ruth Bader Ginsburg." But the report, by David Boaz, contains a serious whopper: "Obviously [Byron White's] replacement by the former general counsel of the ACLU was going to 'move the court dramatically to the left.'" Boaz makes no mention of the fact that Ginsburg compiled a largely centrist record on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals -- where she served for 12 years after her ACLU stint -- often voting with conservative judges such as Kenneth Starr and Laurence Silberman.

-- Cinnamon "The Terrorist Whitewasher" Stillwell weighs in with a Jan. 25 post linking Pete McCloskey, who is running as a Republican for Richard Pombo's House seat, to Lyndon LaRouche and Holocaust revisionists. Stillwell noted that "Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay’s names are invoked frequently" in articles on McCloskey, but she never says why. That would be because Pombo has been implicated in a Abramoff-like scheme to keep the FDIC from investigating a banking buddy of DeLay's. That seems like it would have been important to mention, but as we know, Stillwell isn't into stuff like that.

-- In a Jan. 24 post, Dave Pierre dismissed Los Angeles Times columnist Joel Stein, who wrote a column claiming that he didn't support our troops, as the product of a "sheltered, out-of-touch, Hollywood mindset." Pierre might want to rethink that stance: Stein also supports the great conservative cause of cutting off government funding for public broadcasting.