A March 2 Newsmax article by Jim Meyers perpetuates a falsehood about President Obama and a bust of Winston Churchill that was in the Oval Office of his predecessor, George W. Bush.
Discussing the controversy over Mike Huckabee's remarks on Steve Malzberg's radio show, Meyers writes:
Malzberg noted that Huckabee was referring to a bust of Winston Churchill, a gift to the White House from Britain, that Obama ordered returned after he took office.
“The bust of Winston Churchill, a great insult to the British,” Huckabee continued.
“But then if you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.”
In fact, Obama did not order the Churchill bust to be returned. The British Embassy confirmed that the bust was "uniquely lent" to Bush, and was scheduled to be returned at the end of Bush's term. According to the Associated Press, the bust is now in the White House residence -- in other words, it hasn't been returned at all.
Why would Meyers embrace such an obvious falsehood? Perhaps because Newsmax is where the falsehood got started. As we detailed, a March 2009 Newsmax column by James Humes purported to quote Obama saying of the bust, "Get that goddam thing out of here." But there is no evidence whatsoever to back up Humes' claim that Obama said anything like this. Rather than retract the column and apologize, Humes merely edited his column to state that the claim "was never fully substantiated, despite frequent repetition on radio talk shows." But that's a lie too; Humes never identified any talk show host who made the claim, or where specifically he picked it up from.
Humes even concocted the Mau-Mau theory to back up his illegimate claim: "Perhaps Obama, who grew up in Kenya, took umbrage at Prime Minister Churchill’s actions in 1953 of wiping out the Mau-Mau, the Kenyan terrorists who made a specialty of slitting throats of sleeping white and Black Kenyans."
Humes, as far as we know, was never punished for his falsehood. To the contrary: Newsmax rewarded it by giving him a speaking slot on one of its cruises.
No wonder Meyers thinks the Churchill bust story is true -- his employer let the perpetrator of the falsehood get away with it.
WND Embraces Huckabee's Kenya Remark; NewsBusters Tries to Spin It Away Topic: WorldNetDaily
Mike Huckabee's remarks on Steve Malzberg's radio that President Obama grew up in Kenya delighted WorldNetDaily, where Joe Kovacs devoted a March 1 article to repeating the remarks and how Huckabee thinks growing up in Kenya "has helped form the president's worldview."
One thing Kovacs curiously doesn't do: explicitly state that the claim is false.
While Kovacs does note that Huckabee's spokesman later said that he "meant to say the president grew up in Indonesia," at no point does he state that there's truth to Huckabee's statement that Obama grew up in Kenya. Even WND has not made that claim.
Instead, Kovacs launches into standard WND birther boilerplate. But he's hiding facts here too; Huckabee himself later issued a statement saying that "I don't believe there is an issue with Barack Obama's birth certificate."
While WND is trying to claim Huckabee as a birther, NewsBusters' Noel Sheppard is furiously spinning to deny any such link, howling in a March 2 post that MSNBC hosts "cherry-picked" Huckabee "in order to depict the possible Republican presidential candidate as a birther."
But Sheppard doesn't explain how Huckabee's statement about Obama growing up in Kenya -- which, unlike WND's Kovacs, he concedes is "100 percent wrong" -- is not linked to Huckabee's statement about how Obama "probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather."
That, of course, is the main thesis of Dinesh D'Souza's discredited book "The Roots of Obama's Rage." As Salon's Steve Kornacki writes:
The problem here is that Huckabee didn't just say that Obama was raised in Kenya -- he made specific reference to the Mau Mau Revolution, claiming that Obama, by virtue of his upbringing, would have a very different understanding of it than Westerners. That's much different than accidentally saying "Kenya" when you meant to say "Indonesia."
And the birther issue is a red herring. This story isn't about whether Huckabee specifically subscribes to the view that Obama wasn't born in the United States; maybe he does, maybe he doesn't. The issue here is that Huckabee has just demonstrated that his main critique of President Obama's foreign policy is rooted in a belief that is demonstrably and laughably false. What other objections to Obama's policymaking does Huckabee have that are based on beliefs like this?
Indonesia used to be a Dutch colony, known as the Dutch East Indies. The British controlled Malaysia, which is kind of close to Indonesia, but the Mau Mau uprising took place in Kenya in the 1950s. Churchill, the British prime minister when the uprising erupted in 1952, put it down and Obama's grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was detained during the conflict.
[...]
So Huckabee's whole statement kind of falls apart, especially when Kenya is replaced by Indonesia. What was he really thinking?
Sheppard should explain why Huckabee's embrace of the Mau-Mau theory is a reasonable thing for a potential presidential candidate to believe.
WND's Kinsolving Tries His Imperial Attitude On New Press Secretary Topic: WorldNetDaily
We've detailed the history of WorldNetDaily's Les Kinsolving's whining that recently departed White House press secretary Robert Gibbs wouldn't call on him to his satisfaction -- as if he had some kind of noblesse oblige from merely being old and hanging out in the White House briefing room a lot. Kinsolving showed no apparent awareness that his frivolous questions had demonstrated beyond a doubt that he had not earned the right to be taken seriously as anything other than a right-wing partisan hack.
The arrival of new press secretary, Jay Carney, has brought renewed whining from Kinsolving.
A Feb. 25 WND article complains that Carney "allowed NBC and Fox to ask six questions each, CBS to ask four and AP, ABC and CNN to have three each" while Kinsolving, "the second-most senior correspondent" on "the White House beat," wasn't called on at all.
As he has before, WND presented the question Kinsolving would have asked had he been called on:
Kinsolving had come prepared to ask for the president's perspective on a public situation developing over New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's lifestyle.
According to reports in the New York Times Cuomo, when he's not staying in the governor's mansion, lives with Sandra Lee.
And that, according to the Times' report of comments from Prof. Edward Peters, a consultant to the Vatican court, is a "violation of the fundamental moral expectation of the church." He warned that Cuomo taking communion in a Catholic church "is sacreligious."
"Does the president believe this is right or wrong," Kinsolving had prepared to ask Carney.
Of course, Carney could not know what Kinsolving was going to ask, yet the banality and irrelevence of Kinsolving's questions, which justifies the decision not to call on him every time.
MRC Still Whining Media Isn't Covering Planned Parenthood Sting Hoax Topic: Media Research Center
Matt Philbin takes a stab at trying to revive a non-scandal in a Feb. 24 MRC Culture & Media Institute article complaining that Lila Rose's entrapment videos at Planned Parenthood offices involving "a man posing as a pimp about obtaining abortions and birth control for the underage foreign prostitutes he traffics" still haven't been reported in the media to his satisfaction. "NBC news has yet to even mention the subject," he groused.
unmentioned by Philbin is the fact that there really is no scandal since -- as we noted the last time the MRC complained about this -- Planned Parenthood contacted the Justice Department after visits from Rose's activist group warning of possible sex trafficking, the very offense Rose's hired actors were trying to convince Planned Parenthood they were engaging in.
However, the charge made by some (including myself) that the president is intent upon "destroying America" has invited ridicule, since the left and the press in particular typically paint all Obama detractors with a very wide brush. Logically, of course, it doesn't make any sense that a world leader of any political persuasion would intentionally destroy his country.
Well, this would depend upon what the meaning of the word "destroy" is.
If the meaning of "destroy" is turning America into a barren, smoldering, toxic moonscape from coast to coast, something out of "The Road Warrior" or "Resident Evil," then Obama almost certainly does not wish to destroy America. This paradigm of destruction would be dismissed by Americans as ludicrous – at least as far as someone wanting to bring it about intentionally.
But there are other kinds of destruction. A family can be destroyed without its members being slaughtered and their house burned down. Varying brands of calamity and/or dysfunction have served to consign family units to a state of non-being. It happens all the time. Similarly, nations throughout history have been destroyed without the wholesale annihilation of their people, their farms being burned and their cities razed to the ground.
We all know where the "mullah in chief," President Barack Hussein Obama, stands on Israel and the Middle East – four square with the previous "idiot in chief," former President Jimmy Carter. Like Carter, who believes in the "innocence of strangers" like the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Hezbollah – terror groups that in Jimmy's senile anti-Semitic mind he thinks are fellow "democrats" – Obama's pro-Muslim inclinations lead him to ignore the freedom movement in Iran, which is largely secular, and work against the Jewish state, Israel, the only true democracy in the Middle East.
Indeed, while quick to push Egypt's former President Hosni Mubarak out the door and open it up for the Muslim Brotherhood, Obama and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, made scant mention of the demonstrations in Iran this week, saying only that they wished the mullahs – who are executing the opposition at a rate of one every nine hours – would honor universal concepts of freedom of speech. Nothing was said about so-called "regime change," which they were quick to advocate with Egypt. And when, in the last days, the neo-Nazi Islamic Iranian regime expressed its intention to send warships into the Suez Canal zone at Israel's doorstep – which is more than even a provocation, but a virtual act of war – what did Obama and Ms. Hillary say about that? Nada, rien, zero, nothing! And, to top it all off, there is the administration's desire, for the first time in U.S. history, to soon support a new but retooled United Nations resolution condemning Israeli settlements on its West Bank – land God gave to the Jewish people and which they reclaimed at the cost of Hebrew blood in the 1967 war.
[...]
Shame on you, Republicans! You may not be pro-Islam like the mullah in chief, but, with your inaction, you are certainly furthering his anti-Judeo-Christian designs and endangering Israel, the United States and the entire Western world in the process.
If ever you needed an illustration of the idiocy, naïveté and downright selfishness of too many Americans, these spreading disruptions are perfect. You have supposedly educated people who threaten to "tear it all down" because they can't get what they want when they want it.
Of course, that there's no money to fund their expectations doesn't matter to them. Their rhetoric is illustrative of Marxist ideology in play, and it all should make one man particularly happy.
That man is Barack Obama, the man who is the president of the United States. It's too bad that he's out of his league in that job and totally removed from the havoc he's instigated, although I don't for a minute believe he isn't fully aware of the damage he has, and is, causing.
[...]
While the Middle East spins into chaos, our allies are deserted, our economy teeters on the rocks of bankruptcy, the dollar fragile and the threat of domestic violence over economic issues is too real, Barack Obama continues like the Wizard of Oz – existing behind the curtain of lies, pretending all is well with the world.
Following the meticulously laid out agenda of Saul Alinsky, the Chicago Communist who wrote his infamous "Rules for Radicals," our leaders (including unconstitutionally appointed "czars" who only answer to the president, not to Congress), have rammed through a 2,200-page health-care bill, with an $800 billion price tag, over the strenuous objections of the people. Mr. Obama wants to "freeze" discretionary (his discretion) spending at current levels (the highest in history) for five years – telling us it will save $40 billion a year – when he knows the "savings" will be the billions that would otherwise be added over that period.
We appear to be living in George Orwell's "1984," in which the government says the exact reverse of the truth – and the poor brainwashed public has to accept it.
It's as though Obama is following Nero's playbook: Party down and have fun while ignoring the local/domestic problems, avoiding the pressures of outsiders and ruling with autocratic aplomb – or maybe I should say, chutzpah.
What do you say about a president and his family who seem to take a vacation every chance they get while simultaneously preaching piously to "the people" that we all have to cut back, to sacrifice?
Just as with Nero, our leaders don't set a good example.
[...]
But there's an aspect of Nero's story you might not know. The early view was that the fire was accidental. Later, scholars amended that, believing Nero set the fire to create the chaos that gave him the utter control he wanted.
What about Obama's actions and inactions? Intentional?
People often ask me, "What would Obama do differently if he intended to destroy this country?"
It's a tough question, but remember the Emperor Nero. To get total control, he burned Rome.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has posted a profile of Accuracy in Media's Cliff Kincaid, detailing how in his 30-plus years at AIM he has "cranked out reams of material — rife with innuendo and speculation but light on facts — aimed at buttressing his far-right, xenophobic and homophobic views."
WND Launches Unsubstantiated Attack On Charter School Funder Topic: WorldNetDaily
A Feb. 27 WorldNetDaily article by Michael Carl is one long attack on Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish billionaire who lives a reclusive life in exile in the United States. Carl asserts that Gulen is helping to fund "a large network of jihad-preaching schools" across "the American landscape"; the headline of Carl's article states, "Islamic indoctrination on U.S. taxpayers' tab."
But there's one thing missing from Carl's article: any actual evidence there is any "jihad-preaching" or "Islamic indoctrination" going on in any U.S. charter school connected to Gulen. Carl serves up no examples of that happening.
In fact, evidence not tied to WND's fantasies appears to back that up: An August 2010 USA Today article notes that while there have been issues at some Gulen-linked schools regarding preferences for hiring faculty of Turkish descent and other issues in individual schools, "there's no evidence the schools teach Islam."
Carl's main source for his attacks on Gulen is Paul Williams, who we last saw suing WND and its previous book-publishing partner over a retraction it issued for a claim in a WND-published book by Williams that resulted in a lawsuit against Williams by a Canadian university. So perhaps he's not the most credible source Carl could have chosen.
Indeed, Carl quotes Williams as claiming that Gulen has "created a network of Islamic charter schools in Turkey," suggesting that maybe "jihad-preaching" is going on there. But Wikipedia notes that Gulen schools in Turkey were among the first schools there to insist that female students not wear headscarves. And the New York Times reported that Gulen-linked schools in Pakistan have a heavy emphasis on a Western curriculum and a moderate approach toward Islam that offers an alternative to Islamic extremists.
With such a reliance on Williams -- a source with an apparent anti-Muslim ax to grind -- and opposing views all but ignored, Carl has servedup the severe bias that is apparently a requirement to be a WorldNetDaily reporter.
CNS Misleads Again on Planned Parenthood, Abortion Topic: CNSNews.com
As it is wont to do, CNSNews.com misled about Planned Parenthood, falsely implying yet again that federal money given to Planned Parenthood pays for abortions.
Edwin Mora writes in a Feb. 28 CNS article: "In its most recent annual report, Planned Parenthood said it took in $349.6 million in government funds in fiscal 2008. That same year, the organization says, it performed 324,008 abortions."
In fact, as we've previously noted, the federal Hyde Amendment prohibits federal funding for abortion except in cases of rape, incest or to preserve the life of the mother. The federal funding given to Planned Parenthood goes toward reproductive health services. Mora made no mention of this fact.
WND's Kupelian, Boone Whitewash The Past Topic: WorldNetDaily
In a Feb. 17 WorldNetDaily column, WND managing editor David Kupelian spins a whitewashed version of mid-century America that was ruined by British music and long hair and ultimately destroyed by Barack Obama:
I grew up in suburban Washington, D.C., during the 1950s. It was an innocent time. Kennedy hadn't been assassinated, there wasn't much divorce, and everyone loved Christmas. I didn't know what abortion or homosexuality were, and I had never even heard of people taking illegal drugs except in far-off ghettos. My school taught the three "Rs" and didn't teach about condoms. After school I got a snack and watched "Leave It to Beaver" and "Father Knows Best."
America was prosperous, strong and unified, and its culture was unapologetically Judeo-Christian. Despite all its flaws, America was simply the greatest nation on earth.
And the rest of the world knew it. People flocked here from all over, including my father who, as a little boy, barely escaped along with his mother from the Armenian Genocide. His father was murdered by the Turks, and his baby sister succumbed as well. In all, I lost dozens of family members, perhaps as many as 100, in the jihadist genocide of one and a half million Christian Armenians – the predecessor to the Nazi Holocaust 30 years later. For people like my father and grandmother, America was what the Promised Land was to the ancient Hebrews. They were inexpressibly grateful to be welcomed here. Though they came with nothing, they somehow thrived, got an education, became successful and prosperous and had families – all because of the generosity of America and the freedom and opportunity this country gave them.
This is the America that was imprinted on me – and on you, if you're old enough. This is the America you love.
However, ever since the 1960s we've lived in a blur. Although we remember the long hair, the "British invasion" and the obsession with psychedelic drugs, the really important, consequential things were happening on America's college campuses. Unbeknownst to almost everyone at the time, our nation was being assaulted by radical revolutionary movements: women's liberation, black liberation, sexual liberation, gay liberation, animal liberation, multiculturalism, political correctness and so on. But it was like a blur – we didn't really know what we were looking at, where it was coming from, and where it was taking us.
For decades, we blurred along like this. Even though our knowledge and technology were growing and transforming our world, giving us the illusion of constant progress, something was wrong. Crazy things kept happening. There were scandalous Supreme Court decisions no one could understand – banning prayer and Bible reading, but legalizing the killing of beautiful little babies. There was also a rapid upsurge in cults, atheists, New Agers and witches, not to mention hordes of angry homosexuals demanding special rights and denouncing anyone who disagreed with them.
Alongside all this developed an ever-increasing contempt – even demonization – toward Christianity, the religion that formed the basis for America and Western Civilization. It seemed that as a people we were in a pitched battle with ourselves – literally at war with our own core founding values.
But again, all this was a blur. It was hard to pin down what was happening, where it was all coming from and where it was heading.
Then finally, in late 2008, something broke the spell: We elected Barack Hussein Obama as president.
This same whitewashed version of history pops up in Pat Boone's Feb. 26 WND column:
Is it just me? Am I dreaming something that never was? Or do you remember the same things I do?
Wasn't there a "once upon a time" when families all consisted of a mom, a dad and a kid or two? When most people went to a worship service every Saturday or Sunday, and many even enjoyed a midweek prayer meeting as well?
Do you remember a time when families – Mom and Dad and all the kids – actually went to the neighborhood theater on Friday night, bought some 25-cent popcorn and all watched the same movie, together?
I really seem to recollect watching TV, on one of the three networks, with my brother and sisters and parents, all laughing at the same things and enjoying the same dramas, and feeling closer to my family for the experience. There were no other options even thought of, alternative channels that continually featured things I didn't want anybody else to know I was watching.
When you were growing up, was abortion or homosexuality or even sex outside of marriage ever discussed, or much even considered? Weren't such activities just considered "wrong," taboo, not to be discussed in polite company, and never, never to be condoned?
Weren't most elected officials and representatives, from the president on down, respected and looked up to, even if your folks hadn't voted for them? Didn't it seem that almost all of them were trying to do the right thing, and didn't it seem that America would always come out on top? And even if Daddy had to work very hard; and Mama, too, seemed to work nonstop from early morning till after your bedtime – didn't it seem there was always enough, with maybe a little to spare for a neighbor who needed help?
Who's getting richer under the Obama regime? Find out in "Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses"
Listen, as far back as most of us can remember, the house – the home – was the best investment a family could make. Combined with whatever savings and stock purchases a man could put together, his Social Security and the equity in his home would surely provide for his retirement. Real estate values always rose, right?
Didn't "liberty" and "freedom" seem real, tangible and just natural in this country? And even when the nation was at war, didn't it seem inevitable that we and our way of life would win out?
Am I crazy, or wasn't there the general, widespread and shared feeling that we were blessed by God and that He was pleased with us and our efforts to live life as He ordained it? Not that any of us was perfect, but that we expected the best behavior from ourselves and each other? That there are proven and accepted moral standards to live by?
If this wasn't all a dream, if you remember most of this like I do, what happened? How do we find ourselves in this nightmare of contemporary America? And how has it changed so radically, so fast?
As I reach back into this horrible nightmare, I seem to hear a loud, almost fanatic threat echoing in the night … "We are just five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America!"
Did Boone crib from Kupelian's column, or are they both in thrall to a past that didn't really exist except in their imaginations? Where minorities didn't exist or were conveniently out of sight -- and gays simply didn't exist at all? And funny how it all culminates with the election of a black president.
What are Kupelian and Boone really saying here? We report, you decide.
Vox Day Details 'The New White Man's Burden' Topic: WorldNetDaily
Last year, WorldNetDaily columnist Vox Day declared that Americans needed to "reclaim their traditional white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture." Now, he is once again standing up for white culture by throwing his support for that historically maligned figure, the white male.
The decline of America can be traced to three fundamental factors: debt, demographics and democracy. Of those three factors, it is demographics that is the most vital. Since the 1965 Immigration Act, the American political elite has been electing a new people by encouraging immigration from a wide variety of societies that are vastly different in ethnic and cultural terms than American society. In combination with this vast invasion of the, shall we say, unconventionally civilized, the traditional male-female dynamic that had proven successful for centuries was altered through a transformation of the legal and judicial systems. This confluence of factors has created a tremendous challenge for the white male population, as young white American men now have every material incentive to opt out of activities which tend to foster societal survival and very little incentive to opt in.
This challenge does not exist because Roissy and the other apostles of Game are incorrect about the deck being grotesquely stacked against the delta (or, if you prefer, beta) males upon whom the continued survival of civilization ultimately rests. It exists precisely because they are correct. They are absolutely right. No society that has been reorganized and restructured to provide such a perverse system of incentives deserves to survive, indeed, no such civilized society ever has survived. And therein lies the awesome challenge present to the men of the West, to the young men of America, today.
The education system is stacked against them. The media are stacked against them. The law is stacked against them. The family courts are stacked against them. The church will cheerfully lecture them on their failures while uniformly giving women a pass on everything from abortion and gluttony to a failure to honor and submit to their husbands. Society has provided every possible excuse for a young, white Christian man to give up, opt out and become the videogame-addicted, marriage-avoidant, slut-shagging degenerate that the entertainment industry portrays him to be.
[...]
There is no reason for despair. The collapse of American empire is precisely what will bring about the end of the current system in which the unproductive prosper on the efforts of the productive, and it is certain because it is mathematically unsustainable. The old White Man's Burden was to bring Christian civilization to the savage. The new White Man's Burden is to plant seeds of Christian civilization that are capable of surviving the coming descent into savagery.
CNS Gives Platform to Anti-Gay Hate Group Topic: CNSNews.com
A Feb. 24 CNSNews.com article by Pete Winn gave voice to the head of an anti-gay hate group to attack executive orders in Massachusetts banning discrimination against transgendered people.
Winn gives copious space in his article to Brian Camenker, head of the group MassResistance -- which Winn identifies only as among "conservatives" who oppose the designation -- to denounce the executive orders as a stunt "to promote this transgender rights and hate crimes bill that the homosexual lobby has concocted again this year to try to pass statewide," adding: "We’re talking gender identity disorder, we’re talking something that the mental health profession terms as a disorder, basically men who mutilate themselves and ingest hormone altering drugs and women who do similar things."
As we've detailed, MassResistance is a virulently anti-gay group particularly popular at WorldNetDaily, which has used the group to fuel anti-gay sentiment there. MassResistance has no problem spreading falsehoods and making misleading claims to advance its homophobic agenda. The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated MassResistance as a hate group.
Such a designation and even an explanation of MassResistance's anti-gay agenda would be of interest to CNS' readers, but Winn apparently disagrees.
Newsmax, Gingrich Wrangle Over Interview Suggesting Obama Impeachment Topic: Newsmax
Newsmax got a bit of a blockbuster in a Feb. 25 article: an interview with Newt Gingrich in which he forwards the idea that President Obama could be impeached over his administration's decision to no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act. Gingrich said in the interview:
He swore an oath on the Bible to become president that he would uphold the Constitution and enforce the laws of the United States. He's not a one-person Supreme Court. The idea that we now have the rule of Obama instead of the rule of law should frighten everybody.
Imagine that Governor [Sarah] Palin had become president. Imagine that she had announced that Roe versus Wade in her judgment was unconstitutional and therefore the United States government would no longer protect anyone's right to have an abortion because she personally had decided it should be changed. The news media would have gone crazy. The New York Times would have demanded her impeachment.
The fact that the left likes the policy is allowing them to ignore the fact that this is a very unconstitutional act.
When interviewer Ashley Martella asked Gingrich when he would "recommend the House consider articles of impeachment for that," Gingrich responded: "I think first you'd ought -- you have to communicate. Look, I don't think these guys set out to cause a constitutional crisis. I think they set out to pay off their allies in the gay community and to do something that they thought was clever. I think that they didn't understand the implication that having a president personally suspend a law is clearly unconstitutional. This is an impossible precedent."
Gingrich's remarks prompted something of a walkback from Gingrich's people -- which began by going to Politico to complain that Newsmax “inaccurately” suggested impeachment.
Newsmax declined to back down, issuing astatement that "Newsmax stands by its story, which is based solely on the verbatim comments made by the Speaker during the video interview." But Politico also noted that Newsmax "conceded that, at the request of Gingrich's spokesman, it tweaked the published story to clarify his comments."
Indeed, the article now includes this parenthetical note as the new third paragraph: "A Gingrich spokesman stressed after the interview that we are not currently in a constitutional crisis, nor was Gingrich calling for the direct impeachment of the president. His statements were meant to illustrate the hypocrisy of the left and the mainstream media."
Meanwhile, over at U.S. News & World Report, Gingrich spokesman went further in defending the man who employs him: "Gingrich never raised impeachment nor did he say we were in a constitutional crisis. ... His remarks, as can be seen in the video, were to illustrate the hypocrisy of the media and the left. He explicitly says that Obama did not intend to spark a constitutional crisis but that the president is acting outside of his constitutional role, but that does not mean that there is a constitutional crisis."
Ellis Washington Derangement Syndrome Watch Topic: WorldNetDaily
Trillions spent on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, thousands of soldiers dying for nothing, genocide against Christians in those countries – and President Obama and the media ignore their deaths. Why wasn't this foreseeable by all of our Harvard, Yale and Princeton-educated experts, think tanks and intellectuals? Because they foolishly think that democracy to the Muslim mind is the same as democracy to the pseudo-Christian mind. Both are tragically flawed, and both always end in anarchy.
[...]
Imagine Muslim caliphates in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Libya; communism and state socialism in South America, China, Russia, Europe; Marxist unionism exploding in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, California, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey. While circumstances are different, the ends are inevitably the same: Absent a republic under Natural Law and the Bible, democracy = mobocracy = genocide.
Attack on Wisconsin Teachers Spreads Inside MRC Topic: Media Research Center
Other Media Research Center divisions are picking up on CNSNews.com's dishonest reporting falsely smearing Wisconsin teachers: A Feb. 23 MRC Business & Media Institute article by Julia Seymour asserts:
CNSNews.com reported on Feb. 22 that two-thirds of Wisconsin's eight [sic] graders (in public schools) cannot read proficiently. Only 32 percent of those eight graders earned a "proficient" grade on the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests. Forty-four percent earned a "basic" rating, while 22 percent received a "below basic" rating.
Seymour did not note that Wisconsin's proficiency levels on both reading and math are above the national average, a fact CNS buried in its articles in favor of smearing teachers as incompetent.
WorldNetDaily is not exactly known for its insightful coverage of racial issues, and that was never more obvious than in a Feb. 16 article by Joe Kovacs.
In it, Kovacs feigns offense that an NPR article would refer to Washington, D.C., as "Chocolate City," declaring it to be "similar terminology" to how "New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin came under fire for publicly saying he wanted to rebuild his city as a 'Chocolate New Orleans.'"
Contrary to Kovacs' suggestion, the description of Washington as "Chocolate City" was an expression of pride. As a Washington Post columnist wrote in 1998, "Chocolate City was a metaphorical utopia where black folks' majority status was translated into an assertion of self-consciousness, self-determination and self-confidence," going on to quote a black radio DJ who said, "Chocolate City for me was the expression of D.C.'s classy funk and confident blackness." The '70s funk band Parliament even named an album "Chocolate City," complete with images of Washington on the cover.
Kovacs goes on to cite a couple of bloggers complaining about the NPR story -- but about the story's treatment of demographic shifts in Washington, not the "Chocolate City" reference.
Perhaps Kovacs should school himself a bit on such things -- i.e., do a simple Google search -- before he writes about them.
This comes off as a particularly lame attempt to pile on NPR in an effort to support conservative efforts to cut off funding for it, even more so than WND's freakout over NPR doing a story on the existence of gay valentine's cards.
