At NewsBusters, The Truth Is A 'Gratuitous Smear'
Topic: NewsBusters

Jack Coleman complains in a June 6 NewsBusters post that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in a radio interview, "gratuitously smeared Liddy as 'an admirer of Adolf Hitler.'"

Of course, it's not a smear if it's true, and indeed, Liddy was very much an admirer of Hitler, as documented by the British paper The Independent in 2004:

The Fuhrer was G Gordon Liddy's first political hero. Liddy was a sickly, asthmatic child when he grew up in Hoboken, New Jersey, in the 1930s. The town was full of ethnic Germans who idolized Hitler. Liddy was made to salute the Stars and Stripes Nazi-style by the nuns at his school; even now, he admits, "at assemblies where the national anthem is played, I must suppress the urge to snap out my right arm." His beloved German nanny taught him that Hitler had -- through sheer will-power -- "dragged Germany from weakness to strength."

This gave Liddy hope "for the first time in my life" that he too could overcome weakness. When he listened to Hitler on the radio, it "made me feel a strength inside I had never known before," he explains. "Hitler's sheer animal confidence and power of will [entranced me]. He sent an electric current through my body." He describes seeing the Nazis' doomed technological marvel the Hindenberg flying over New Jersey as an almost religious experience. "Ecstatic, I drank in its colossal power and felt myself grow. Fear evaporated and in its place came a sense of personal might and power."

While Coleman doesn't acknowledge this undisputed fact about Liddy -- remember, to him it's nothing but a gratuitous smear --  he does make sure you know that Kennedy's uncle, John F. Kennedy, was a "Nazi sympathizer." Well, no -- JFK wrote some contemporaneous praise of Germany after a 1937 visit and wrote in 1945 that Hitler was "the stuff of legends" (arguably true since he is the benchmark for genocide, warmongering and overall human depravity).

Coleman provides no evidence that JFK offered any such praise after 1937, a time when Nazi Germany still had a significant number of supporters in the U.S., and he certainly offers no evidence that JFK issued such gushing praise of Hitler on the level of Liddy's. 

Coleman then gets really pissy after RFK Jr. reminded people of why Liddy is a convicted felon, wuch as "an alleged plot involving G. Gordon Liddy to kill columnist and longtime Nixon nemesis Jack Anderson." Coleman then sneers, "And just out of curiosity, did that conspiracy against Anderson involve drowning him in a car?"

Well, no. Liddy was looking to do it the old-fashioned way -- poison:

The Nixon operative knew exactly who to contact to get the job done. He began with his sidekick G. Gordon Liddy, who had just been transferred to the Nixon campaign's intelligence operation and was “forever volunteering to rub people out,” as Hunt put it. Liddy wasted little time before expounding on the obvious solution to his latest White House assignment: “They charged us with the task: ‘Come up with ways of stopping Anderson.' We examined all of the alternatives and very quickly came to the conclusion [that] the only way you're going to be able to stop him is to kill him.”

To lay the groundwork, Hunt and Liddy conducted physical surveillance of Anderson, tailing the columnist in Liddy's green Jeep as Anderson drove from a parking garage in downtown Washington to his residence in the Maryland suburbs. “The purpose was to locate Anderson’s home and examine it from the outside for vulnerabilities,” Hunt recalled. It turned out to be “just an ordinary house” with “no pits around it,” so “if housebreakers wanted to get in they would have very little difficulty.” Hunt concluded that he and Liddy could easily sneak into Anderson's home and “get rid of the pesky journalist” by putting “a drug- laden pill” in whatever medicine bottles Anderson used.

But what kind of poison should be slipped to the muckraker? This was a question beyond the expertise of the White House operatives. After all, while Hunt had plotted at the CIA to overthrow leftist leaders in Central America, he had no personal hands- on experience in murder; and while Liddy boasted that he “could kill a man with a pencil in a matter of seconds” by jamming it into a victim's neck, he was not an expert in the toxicology of poisons. So Hunt reached out to a former intelligence colleague who had been part of a CIA team that tried to poison Fidel Castro a decade earlier with botulism toxin—a plot, ironically, that had recently been exposed by Jack Anderson.

This is Coleman's hero, the one who "gratuitously smeared" about his love for Hitler.

WND Channels The Dumbest Man on the Internet
Topic: WorldNetDaily

A June 4 WorldNetDaily article carries the headline "It begins: Major demand to impeach Obama."

First, the WND petition calling for Obama's impeachment that the article promotes is not a "major demand" -- it's a desperate bid for relevance on the part of an Obama-hating website whose four-year jihad to personally destroy the president by raising discredited claims about his "eligibility" utterly failed to the point that nobody believes anything WND says.

Second, there's nothing new about this -- WND launched the petition in February and has been promoting calls for impeachment since 2009.

Third, the "It Begins" construct is most notoriously associated with Gateway Pundit blogger Jim Hoft, who is best known as the Dumbest Man on the Internet for a plethora of legitimate reasons.

So far, WND's bid to appear credible remains firmly in the "failure" column.

NewsBusters' Double Standard on Demanding That People Be Fired
Topic: NewsBusters

In a June 4 NewsBusters post, Nathan Roush is appalled that a feminist group would call for the firing of a few male Fox News personalities for making retrograde comments about single mothers:

The Constitution of our country protects the freedom of expression of ideas and opinions, and these men were simply expressing their opinions on a historically contested issue. It is actually expected that some people would be in opposition to the statements that were made; however, to claim that someone should be terminated from their employment for merely expressing their opinions is detestable.

Roush is just an intern at the Media Research Center so he may not know this, but the MRC calls for people to be fired all the time. For instance, last year MRC chief Brent Bozell demanded that MSNBC fire Ed Schultz and Al Sharpton for doing what Roush was defending: expressing opinions. Bozell also demanded that MSNBC president Phil Griffin fire himself for hiring them.

We suspect Roush won't be calling out Bozell for doing the same thing he has criticized others for doing.

Erik Rush Is Just Asking
Topic: WorldNetDaily

It has already been established that there are jihadi training camps within our borders and that the Boston Marathon bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were members of a radical mosque in Boston. Yet not only does this administration fail to put an end to such things, it empowers them through their insinuation into government and with deferential policies.

Are Muslims intended to be Obama’s cutthroat foot soldiers, those who will be mobilized to rise up, paralyze America with widespread terror attacks, and incite the chaos that will necessitate martial law and an end to our free society?

-- Erik Rush, June 5 WorldNetDaily column

NEW ARTICLE: The Sheffield Shuffle
Topic: NewsBusters
NewsBusters creator Matthew Sheffield gets a few things right about new media, but it's overshadowed by his retrograde, knee-jerk bashing of the old, "liberal" media. Read more >>

WND Columnist Cites Scientology Front Group To Attack DSM
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Dear Gina Loudon:

Your June 4 WorldNeDaily column fretting that the new American Psychiatric Association’s new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual fretting that its new definitions mental disorders "ould be insidiously used by government to label certain Americans with mental disorders as a pretext for curbing rights of all kinds" might have a little more credibility if it didn't appear at a website that sells a book proclaiming all liberals to be mentally ill merely for holding liberal views.

And if, the same day your column appeared, WND hadn't also run a column by Walter Williams with the headline "Insane liberals in their own words."

And if hadn't prominently cited the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International -- a Scientology front group that has long bashed psychatry -- to back up your claims.

Sincerely,
ConWebWatch

CNS Can't Stop Portraying Money Spent on LGBT Issues as Wasteful
Topic: CNSNews.com

CNSNews.com's obsession with portraying federal money spent on LGBT issues as wasteful continues in in a June 5 article by Elizabeth Harrington:

President Barack Obama's 2009 economic stimulus law financed a $431,363 grant in Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco-based congressional district to study the “psychological distress” of homosexual fathers. The study took three years to publish its results and created no jobs. 

The study concluded that homosexual men likely reduce their chances of contracting HIV after becoming fathers because they have less time for sex.

Harrington doesn't explain whether job creation was promised from this grant; if not, the fact that it "created no jobs" is irrelevant.

By our count, this is the seventh CNS article published since March portraying federal money spent on LGBT issues as wasteful.

WND's Farah Slouches Toward Mendacity (Again)
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Joseph Farah is a documented liar, so nothing he says can be trusted since it's usually so easily debunked. Farah's June 3 WorldNetDaily column provides yet another example. 

Farah spends most of the column freaking out over a Department of Defense instruction establishing policies and procedures for how the DoD can support local and state law enforcement agencies. It's a 42-page document, but Farah cherry-picks a tiny section to declare that the Pentagon "altered U.S. law to allow the U.S. military to quell domestic 'civil disturbances' without so much as presidential authorization."

It's telling that Farah did not provide a link to the full instruction -- which, again, is 42 pages long --  because that would have negated his full frothing mode. The document explains how such military actions are regulated by the Posse Comitatus Act, and nowhere does Farah explain how this new instruction goes any farther than any previous DoD orders, or even if there is a rollback.

Indeed, Kevin Govern of the Ave Maria School of Law (not exactly a liberal institution) explains that DoD Instruction 3025.21 replaces several older directives on military assistance to civilian law enforcement and civil disturbances and permits nothing that wasn't already permitted before:

These policy changes must be read in light of an evolution, rather than revolution, involving over a century of federal troop deployments and 200-plus years of legal precedent. The Insurrection Act of 1807 [PDF] was one of the first and most important US laws on this subject, and was followed some 71 years later by the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which further limited executive authority to conduct military law enforcement on US soil. Each of those laws has evolved over time — consistent with the times and the popular will expressed through Congress.

But Farah's frothing must not be interrupted by facts:

Did Americans notice what happened in the wake of the marathon bombings? Did they see how a city was shut down by a military-style occupation? Did they care how difficult it was to distinguish between U.S. soldiers and civilian police forces? Was there any difference?

And before that came Barack Obama’s campaign pledge to create a “civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded” as the U.S. military.

Apparently no one else in the national press found that promise newsworthy, because I was the first to call it to the attention of the public days later. Interestingly, the pledge had been stricken from transcripts of the speech handed out to media.

What ever happened to the “civilian national security force” initiative? No one in the press has dared to ask that question.

As we've repeatedly documented, Obama's reference to a "civilian national security force" refers to an expansion of the foreign service, which Obama himself explained in 2008.

The fact that Farah has chosen to perpetuate his lies about the "civilian national security force" demonstrates his capacity for soulless mendacity.

Farah's column is headlined "Slouching toward a military junta," but Farah slouched his way to the Land of Mendacity a long time ago.

Alan Caruba Lies About U.N. Gun Treaty
Topic: Accuracy in Media

Alan Caruba writes in his June 4 Accuracy in Media column:

It’s what you do not know about what the government is up to that can get a lot of people killed. For example, on June 3^rd, President Obama will sign off on a UN treaty which, if ratified by the Senate, would override the Second Amendment and deprive Americans of the right to own guns.

In fact, the  proposed United Nations Arms Trade Treaty does not override the Second Amendment; it specifically states that it "reaffirm[s] the sovereign right of any State to regulate and control conventional arms exclusively within its territory, pursuant to its own legal or constitutional systems." Further, the American Bar Association investigated the treaty and found that "the proposed [treaty] is consistent with the Second Amendment."

Apparently, that whole "accuracy in media" thing doesn't apply if you write for Accuracy in Media.

Larry Klayman's Newest Client Sounds Just Like Him
Topic: WorldNetDaily

How does Larry Klayman continue to attract legal clients despite his history of shoddy lawyering? We have no idea, but Klayman has attracted another one.

An unbylined June 1 WorldNetDaily article uncritically and lovingly depicts Klayman 's newest escapade, suing Iran and its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is seeking $387 million in damages on behalf of relatives of an Iranian pro-democracy activist the regime allegedly tortured and killed.

The article quotes Nasrin Mohammadi, sister of the dead activist as saying:

“We were expecting Mr. Obama to help the Iranian people. … but he hasn’t,” she said. “Mr. Obama, are you with us or are you with the mullahs? Yes. Mr. Obama is with the mullahs…”

Funny, that sounds a lot like Klayman himself. Part of Klayman's Obama derangement is denigrating him as the "mullah-in-chief," and he thinks that putting it in quotes somehow makes it less libelous.

It appears that Klayman has been coaching his client to spew the same anti-Obama hatred he does. That doesn't seem like ethical behavior for a lawyer to engage in -- which makes him dishonest as well as incompetent.

All of which serves as a sign that Nasrin Mohammadi, if she actually wants to win this case, should find herself a different attorney.

MRC Still Bashing Fact-Checkers Who Correct Republicans
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center's multimillion-dollar "Tell the Truth!" campaign last year was mostly about keeping media outlets from reporting unflattering truths about conservatives. Part of that campaign involved attacking fact-checkers who rated claims by Republicans and conservatives to be false as having a liberal bias.

The MRC's Tim Graham does just that in a May 29 NewsBusters post:

The Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University has a new study noticing that the "fact-checking" site Politifact.com over the first four months of Obama's second term found Republicans were cited as dishonest three times as often as Democrats.

Even in the first three weeks in May, while the Obama scandals piled up -- from Benghazi to the IRS to the DOJ phone-records scandals --  Republicans are still being flagged as worse than Democrats, with 60 percent of the website's selective claims rated as false so far this month (May 1 – May 22), compared to 29 percent of their Democratic statements – a 2 to 1 margin.

As for the entire four months, CMPA found PolitiFact rated 32 percent of Republican claims as “false” or “pants on fire,” compared to 11 percent of Democratic claims – a 3 to 1 margin. Conversely, Politifact rated 22 percent of Democratic claims as “entirely true” compared to 11 percent  of Republican claims – a 2 to 1 margin.

Graham doesn't mention that the CMPA has a conservative tilt making its findings somewhat suspect -- the work of CMPA chief Robert Lichter forms part of the philosophical foundation for the MRC's work.

Graham also doesn't really dispute any of PolitiFact's findings, only that they exist. He does whine that "The pants-checkers at Politifact can even select vague philosophical statements as lies, such as Mitt Romney asserting redistribution" has "never been a characteristic of America." Apparently, subsidies for transcontinental railroads were 'redistribution' in the 1800s." But what else would you call the federal government giving millions of acres of land to railroad companies so they can sell it to finance the building of transcontinental railroads?

Graham then laughably claims: 

No one should assume that a fact-checking organization can only be assumed to be fair if it tries to employ a 50-50 partisan quota on who's mangling the facts. However, "independent" fact-checking groups run by "mainstream" media companies can easily be questioned about a liberal tilt.

But a partisan quote is exactly what Graham appears to be calling for. It's part of his employer's political agenda to disabuse people of the idea that Republicans lie more than Democrats, even when the facts back it up.

Meanwhile, the CMPA "study" Graham is using to back up his attack really isn't much of a study at all -- it's a quick shot seemingly crafted to advance the CMPA's conservative agenda. As a CMPA spokesperson told Poynter, the press release announcing the study “is the study and announcement combined.” Poynter also quotes a researcher who points out that such press-release studies are “frowned upon in academic circles.”

PolitiFact editor Bill Adair also responded at Poynter to the CMPA "study," saying that "The authors of this press release seem to have counted up a small number of our Truth-O-Meter ratings over a few months, and then drew their own conclusions."

Of course, at the MRC, such things that challenge its cherished view of the world are merely inconvenient facts. Jeffrey Meyer followed up in a May 30 NewsBusters post by bashing "the liberally-skewed PolitiFact website" for pointing out the numerous falsehoods spouted by Michele Bachmann during her congressional career. Like Graham, Meyer doesn't challenge PolitiFact's findings, he only complains that they exist.

Lying Liar Bradlee Dean Lies About Someone Else Being A Liar
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Bradlee Dean's lying is so endemic, he can't even accuse someone else of being a liar without lying himself.

Dean's May 25 WorldNetDaily column begins with a quote, "ADHD is a prime example of a fictitious disease," followed by an attack on a medical researcher:

These were the words of Leon Eisenberg, the “scientific father of ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder),” in his last interview before his death.

Leon Eisenberg made a luxurious living off of his “fictitious disease,” thanks to pharmaceutical sales. Coincidentally, he received the “Ruane Prize for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Research. He has been a leader in child psychiatry for more than 40 years through his work in pharmacological trials, research, teaching, and social policy and for his theories of autism and social medicine,” according to Psychiatric News.

Yes, it was even admitted that they are his THEORIES. The medical industry is using the guise of helping children to depersonalize and disconnect our children from a healthy, normal upbringing. Parents are placing their children on these drugs and subjecting them to what the world has to offer, when in fact all these children are looking for is their parents in hopes of being the blessing that God intended them to be.

But Dean is taking Eisenberg's words out of context -- as Snopes details, he was actually agreeing somewhat with Dean in that he thinks ADHD is overdiagnosed and that doctors will simply "prescribe a pill for it" instead of working to determine the root case of behavioral problems.

Dean is also guilty of what Eisenberg accuses doctors of doing. In highlighting alleged "alarming studies linking antidepressants to mass murder," Dean isn't looking deeper for root causes. As we've documented, WND managing editor David Kupelian's favorite example of this -- blaming Andrea Yates killing her children on the antidepressants she was taking -- overlooks the fact that she and her husband were in thrall to a fundamentalist Christian preacher who preached austerity (the Yates family lived in a bus the preacher had sold them) and taught that it was better to kill oneself than to mislead a child in the way of Jesus.

Meanwhile, we're still waiting for Dean to publicly apologize and repent for the raft of lies he has told in the past.

CNS Promotes NRA's Publicity Stunt
Topic: CNSNews.com

Gregory Gwyn-Williams Jr. uses a May 30 CNSNews.com blog post to promote the National Rifle Association giving a lifetime membership to Josh Welch, an 8-year-old boy who was suspended from school for shaping a gun out of a Pop-Tart.

Gwyn-Williams, however, makes sure not to mention that Welch has no idea what the NRA is. From the Baltimore Sun article Gwyn-Williams links to:

Josh said he didn't know what the NRA was or what it meant to have a membership, but chimed in when his parents were asked whether anyone else in his family belonged to the NRA.

"Nope, only me," he said.

The Sun also notes that "Josh also received an autographed photo of himself with David Keene, the immediate past president of the NRA and the keynote speaker at the fundraiser" -- which probably means even less to Josh than the NRA membership.

The event might have been more meaningful if the NRA hadn't imposed its agenda on a clueless 8-year-old. But such logic apparently means nothing to Gwyn-Williams.

WND's Geller Falsely Criticizes 'Moderate Muslims'
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Pamela Geller writes in her June 2 WorldNetDaily column:

Muslims who cited the Quran to explain and justify their ritual slaughter have beheaded a young British soldier in broad daylight on a London street. “Moderate Muslim” groups have issued their usual vague and tepid condemnations, with their usual finger pointing and blaming of anything and everything except Islam’s violent teachings. Their leftist media propagandists have fallen into line. But what are the “moderate Muslims” really doing to stop jihad terror?

The kneejerk reaction from Muslim spokespeople and the “leaders” of various Muslim organizations after that bloody beheading in London and the copycat stabbing of a French soldier by a Muslim who is still at large in Paris, as well as the bloody bombing of women, children and families on a bright shiny Monday in Boston, has not been to start real work on reforming Islam. Instead, it has been a secondary attack on the kuffar. We are admonished and schooled on a mythical narrative of anti-Muslim backlash and “Islamophobia.” “Moderate Muslims” hold no protests against the jihad here or abroad.

As Little Green Footballs' Charles Johnson pointed out when she made a similar claimat Breitbart.com, "all of the major British Muslim organizations immediately spoke out against this murder, with no 'deflection of responsibility' or 'attacks on the kuffar.'"

Since Geller is too caught up in her anti-Muslim jihad to handle the truth, she attacked Johnson for correcting the record, stating in one tweet, "Cash that check, Chuckie!" Johnson responded to these attacks by Geller and her anti-Muslim compadre Robert Spencer:

I’m being paid with the peace of mind that comes from knowing I did the right thing by renouncing him and his divisive, hateful agenda, and knowing that I’m continuing to do the right thing by exposing him and Geller when they lie, smear, promote fascist groups and ideas, and encourage the ugliest forms of xenophobia.

WND won't tell you any of this, of course. Instead, it lets Geller peddle the fiction that the anti-Muslim thugs of the English Defence League -- with whom Geller has aligned her various "Stop Islamization" groups -- are really holding "freedom rallies."

Noel Sheppard: Eleanor Clift Comes From A Long Line of Morons
Topic: NewsBusters

It's probably difficult to top his claim that some actresses are too pretty to accurately portray Hillary Clinton in a biopic, but Noel Sheppard gives it a try by portraying commentator Eleanor Clift as coming from a long line of morons.

In a June 2 NewsBusters post, Sheppard claims that Clift's statement that “When my ancestors came in they were probably at the low end of the feeder of this also” might "explain a lot to conservatives" because "Maybe this explains some of Clift's really inane comments over the years."

In addition to being a sleazy, mean-spirited insult, Sheppard completely misunderstand the point Clift was trying to make. She was rebutting Pat Buchanan's claim that the U.S. is "moving towards Third World standards" because it's allegedly admitting too many low-skilled immigrants.

Apparently, Sheppard was too busy getting off on insulting another female liberal to understand that.