Topic: NewsBusters
Thanks to P.J. Gladnick, NewsBusters is no longer allowed to cite humor or context to defend conservatives.
In an Oct. 16 post, Gladnick ridiculed Robert Reich's claim that his statements that an honest politician would make about health care, repeated by conservatives, were a "mock exercise" taken out of context. Gladnick called Reich's explanation "lame" and insisted that Reich was speaking in context.
Similarly, in a Oct. 17 post, Gladnick rejected Anita Dunn's explanation that her referencing of Mao Zedong with Mother Teresaas her favorite philosophers "was intended as irony," retorting, "You peons just don't have the mental ability to see that Anita Dunn was merely being ironic despite the fact that was absolutely nothing in her facial expression, vocal tone, nor in what she said that displayed the slightest sense of irony. In fact, she was dead serious as you can plainly see in the video of her speech."
Gladnick went on to dismiss both Reich and Dunn as offering "incredibly lame excuses those on the left come up with to try to explain away statements they made that have come back to haunt them."
The problem here is that humor and context are lame excuses NewsBusters has used to defend conservative remarks, particularly those by Rush Limbaugh.
An December 2008 post by Kathleen McKinley, for instance, complains about "leftwing bloggers" who don't understand that the "Barack the Magic Negro" song Limbaugh has frequently played on his show is an "example of Rush being a racist" rather than the parody it was purportedly meant to be.
An Oct. 12 post by Matthew Balan lamented that "Limbaugh has been taken out of context yet again by the mainstream media" -- a lament he repeated in an Oct. 15 post.
Well, no more. Thank you, P.J. Gladnick, for dismantling those excuses as a conservative defense.
