Aaron Klein's Lame Attacks on Senate Candidate Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily's Aaron Klein -- nostranger to desperate smears of his political enemies -- goes the desperate route again in attacking Delaware Democratic Senate candidate Chris Coons as someone with "Marxist ties" in a Sept. 23 WND article.
Klein's big piece of evidence? Coons once took a class taught by Cornel West. No, really. That's it.
But Klein hates West, so this gives him yet another opportunity to pad a WND article with attacks on him.
Needless to say, the quality and veracity of Klein's flailing attacks declines quickly from there. Klein goes on to falsely claim that Coons "describing himself as a 'bearded Marxist'"; in fact, that was a joke by his college friends.
Klein also repeats a claim by The American Spectator's Jeffrey Lord that Coons "may have ties to Black Liberation Theology" because he volunteered to work at the South African Council of Churches during the 1980s. Both Lord and Klein ignore the fact that the SACC helped lead the fight against apartheid at that same time, and that was likely the real reason for Coons' involvement.
The MRC Suddenly Loves Bob Woodward Topic: Media Research Center
Newsmax's Ronald Kessler isn't the only ConWeb resident to have a change of heart about Bob Woodward now that he's writing about a Democratic president. The Media Research Center regularly lambasted Woodward's claims about President Bush, but now that he's making similar claims about President Obama, they're being touted as "devastating."
AIM Brings Back Blogger Whose Post It Had to Retract Topic: Accuracy in Media
Last December, we detailed how Accuracy in Media intern Allie Duzett wrote a blog post libelously calling "safe schools czar" Kevin Jennings a "pedophile," forcing AIM to delete the post and issue a retraction and quasi-apology, and that's the last we heard from Duzett at AIM.
Until now.
Duzett is back, writing a Sept. 23 AIM blog post (under the expanded name "Allie Winegar Duzett") about media bias. She manages to avoid libeling anyone this time, but the question must be asked: What is AIM thinking by allowing the return of someone who exposed it to legal jeopardy through her lies?
AIM isn't the only one who has suppressed the normal reaction to shun someone who was caught telling lies. Duzett's LinkedIn profile states that she is currently working for the Heritage Foundation; among her listed duties is "Blog on the Foundry about United States domestic policy." (UPDATE: That part seems to be a tad overblown; she has written only four posts.)
Heritage too might want to ask itself why it hired a blogger who got her previous employer in trouble with a blog post.
UPDATE: Duzett has another post up at AIM, this one attacking the New York Times as "highly biased" while ludicrously suggesting that Fox News is not.
When Bob Woodward wrote about President Bush, Newsmax's Ronald Kessler was quick to attack. In an October 2006 article, Kessler highlighted how former Bush White House chief of staff Andrew Card told him that claims regarding him in Woodward's 2007 book "State of Denial" were "not true." (Though Kessler did approvingly quote Woodward when he expressed views about Gerald Ford that presumably mirror Kessler's own.)
Woodward is back to being a hero in Kessler's eyes after the release of Woodward's book on the Obama presidency, even defending Woodward's veracity:
Some will question the credibility of Woodward’s reporting, as they did when he wrote in his book “Veil” that Director of Central Intelligence William Casey spoke to him while hospitalized.
When the book came out in 1987, CIA officials and Casey’s widow Sophia denied that Woodward could have gotten past CIA security at the hospital or that Casey could speak after having undergone surgery for a malignant brain tumor.
But as related in my book “The CIA at War: Inside the Secret Campaign Against Terror,” William Donnelly, who was in charge of CIA administration, including supervision of CIA security officers, admitted, "Woodward probably found a way to sneak in."
Kessler also joins the right-wing freak-out over Obama's statement that America can "absorb" another terrorist attack, huffing that the statement means "the rest of Obama’s policies dealing with national defense make perfect sense" and that it "should help put an end to his aspirations for a second term." Kessler conveniently ignores that President Bush said similar things.
Erik Rush's Latest Obama Derangement Topic: WorldNetDaily
Erik Rush begins his Sept. 23 WorldNetDaily column by highlighting how angry people have become:
Even the reader who is new to this column will have observed the increased intensity of political rhetoric over the last two years. Prior to the 2008 election, voices warning against a Barack Hussein Obama presidency may have been background noise to the casual news consumer; after all, every candidate has their detractors.
Over the last 20 months, between the actions and policies of the Obama administration and developments that have taken place as a result of same, the background has become very much foreground. The machinations and designs of the administration have carried more urgency, and their words have become shrill. Likewise, terms like "progressive" and "socialist" have increasingly been replaced with "Marxist," "communist" and "totalitarian" by their opposition.
Obviously, if only a few fringe types were employing such potent terminology, it could be easily dismissed. With hundreds of thousands of Americans mobilized, millions blogging and organizing, an emergent arm of the press dedicating itself to stifling the momentum of this government and even some conservative Hollywood celebrities coming "out of the arsenal" to join their voices with these, however, the gravity of these expressions cannot be ignored.
Rush, of course, has been among the shrillest of the lot. However, likening Obama to a prison rapist is not exactly an "expression" that can be said to have gravitas.
Rush then freaks out that Obama signed an executive order that " officially adopted the Codex Alimentarius, a policy against which business interests have been fighting for decades? This one – a stealth proviso of Obamacare, by the by – is intended to bring access to all vitamins, minerals and natural health remedies and technologies under government control. This means that Washington can now classify all of these as 'controlled' – like prescription drugs."
The "Codex Alimentarius" is not some secret Vatican document referenced in "The DaVinci Code," as Rush seems to want you to think; it's a set of internationally recognized standards for food safety. Apparently, Rush thinks food safety is a bad thing.
Besides, the Obama executive order doesn't actually adopt the Codex Alimentarius. As the National Health Foundation points out, the executive order merely parallels standards established in the health care reform and "is not imposing Codex rules on the United States." The NHF notes that one section of the executive order references "science-based initiatives," which, according to the NHF, "could allow a smoother interface between domestic and international food guidelines at a small contact point that they might possibly have in the future." In fact, "It would be akin to saying that panty-hose manufacturing techniques are related to food because the nylon fabric might someday be used in straining soup."
But never mind, Rush is still in freak-out mode:
When what we eat, drink, drive, say, do for a living, how much money we make and where we live is dictated by our government, those who were dedicated liberal voters will grit their teeth because they're too arrogant to ever admit they were wrong. When pockets of the stunned, deluded variety of liberal voters finally put down their bongs and declare "Hey, man – you can't, like, do this to us! We have rights …" – they're going to catch a bullet in the head.
Small consolation this will be to patriotic Americans, since we'll already be dead or in a gulag by then.
To put it succinctly, our government is occupied by malevolent, treasonous slime, and it's going to take years to extricate all of them, even with a majority of Americans dedicated to the wholesale eradication of progressivism – which is an absolute imperative. This societal infection is so profoundly and fundamentally destructive that if I had my way, anyone willing to accept it would be stripped of their citizenship.
Yes, Rush has essentially said that anyone he disagrees with should be stripped of their citizenship. And how does he intend to achieve "the wholesale eradication of progressivism"? Bullets in the head, perhaps?
Another Fox News Personality Will Help Newsmax Make A Buck Topic: Newsmax
Newsmax sent out an email today to its mailing list touting the presence of Sarah Palin in “a special pre-election webcast series we will be airing exclusively online” starting October 12. According to the email, the webcast, to be called “Make America Great Again,” will be hosted by Michael Reagan and feature Palin as well as “other opinion leaders such as Dick Morris.”
Morris, of course, has been a longtime marquee participant in shilling for Newsmax’s money-making schemes. Like Palin, Morris is a Fox News contributor, making her at least the third Fox News employee to team up with Newsmax; the other is Bill O’Reilly, who did an interview featured in an informercial for yet another financial product (though Fox News denied that it knew O’Reilly would be used in that way). Palin has also previously touted Newsmax as one of the news sources she reads.
It wouldn’t be Newsmax, though, if it wasn’t using people like Palin to try and sell you something.
If you sign up for this webcast, you are directed to a web page (PDF) that gives you the opportunity to upgrade your Palin experience -- for a price, of course. You can continue to pay nothing and receive only “Brief Clips of the Exclusive Interviews With Governor Palin, Dick Morris, Mike Reagan, and the Entire Lineup of Important Guests” and “Limited Access to the ‘Make America Great Again’ Attendee Website.” Or you could pay $9.95 to be a “VIP Member” and receive “Unlimited Access to the Make America Great Again Campaign, PLUS” a copy of Palin’s forthcoming book. You also get trial subscriptions to Newsmax’s magazine and one of its financial reports, which has the usual caveat that you must cancel before the trial period ends to avoid being automatically charged for a year’s subscription to them.
Or you can pay Newsmax an extra $20 not to send you the magazine and newsletter; a $29.95 “Book Membership” gives you “all of the benefits of VIP access as noted above, as well as Sarah Palin’s upcoming new book, but you will NOT receive free trial subscriptions to Newsmax magazine and The Franklin Prosperity Report.” Seeking payment for not doing something is an interesting money-making strategy, and it’s a big clue as to how much the profitability of Newsmax’s promotion depends on people forgetting to cancel their trial subscriptions.
The web page also gives previews of the webcast series, which looks like it will be mostly about attacking Obama, reinforcing right-wing talking points, and encouraging conservatives to vote in November. It also sycophantically calls Morris “the top political strategist and the man Time magazine referred to as ‘the most influential private citizen in America’ ” – which, as we’ve previously noted, it did just before Morris resigned in disgrace from Bill Clinton's 1996 re-election campaign.
Newsmax may not be selling financial schemes for once, but it sure has a connection with Fox News that it has no problem exploiting.
That Word Does Not Mean What WND Thinks It Means Topic: WorldNetDaily
Under the headling "Shut down! Question about back taxes stifled," a Sept. 22 WorldNetDaily article begins:
The White House shut down questions about the back taxes owed by President Obama's staff members, as well as a question about an investigation of his Department of Justice, by not recognizing for questions a WND reporter at yesterday's daily news briefing.
There were some 60 reporters at the briefing with Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, who recognized 22 for questions. But some outlets, such as CBS and CNN, were allowed six or seven questions, while others were not recognized.
Les Kinsolving, WND's correspondent at the White House and the second-most senior reporter on the White House beat, had planned to ask about taxes and investigations.
He was prepared to ask, "The Los Angeles Times reported at the end of 2009, 41 Obama White House aides owed $831,000 in back taxes. What is the White House reaction to this Times report?"
Not taking questions from an obviouslybiased reporter does not mean a particular line of questioning was "shut down." especially since WND offers no evidence that Gibbs knew Kinsolving would ask that particular question. You can't "shut down" something you didn't open up in the first place.
Does WND's and Kinsolving's belligerance toward Gibbs mean another temper tantrum is forthcoming?
WND's Unruh Alleges 'Lies,' Doesn't Name Any Topic: WorldNetDaily
A Sept. 21 WorldNetDaily article by Bob Unruh promotes a claim by anti-abortion activists in Colorado that election officials there have told "lies" about a "personhood" initiative on the ballot. Unruh repeatedly quotes the anti-abortion activists claiming that the proposed ballot description as "falsehoods and out-and-out lies."
What Unruh curiously didn't report, however, is an example of the alleged "lies" being told, beyond a claim that the bill would mean woman could be "denied health care for miscarriages." (The description being contested is in here.) Unruh also offers no explanation of why this or any other claim are "lies,"nor does he make any apparent effort to contact Colorado officials for a response to the criticism.
It seems the activists are complaining that tyhe state of Colorado won't propagandize for them. Unruh, on the other hand, has no problem pushing propaganda.
In a Sept. 15 Newsmax column, Ronald Kessler attacks Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who wants to build "a mosque two blocks from ground zero," as a maker of "nonsensical, contradictory and arrogant statements" and among Muslim leaders who "speak out of both sides of their mouths" and "continue to generate suspicion of Muslims in general."
Kessler also mischaracterizes Rauf's words. Citing an interview Rauf did on CNN, Kessler writes:
Asked if he still believes that the U.S. was an “accessory” to the 9/11 attacks and that Osama bin Laden was “made in the USA,” Rauf waffled. He said that while his comments were not “compassionate,” the U.S. had cooperated with bin Laden in fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
A widespread Internet rumor, that claim is untrue, not to mention irrelevant. In the end, Rauf never retracted his claim that the U.S. was in part responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
RAUF: I was describing the fact that the United States had actually worked with the Taliban, cooperated with the mujahadeen. The mujahadeen were VIPs in the Reagan White House -- administration, and Osama bin Laden was something the United States cooperated with in fighting the Soviet Union. However, looking back on it now, I realize it was not a very compassionate thing to say, and I regret having used those words.
In fact, it's indisputable that bin Laden fought with the mujahadeen in Afghanistan during the 1980s, and that the CIA covertly supported the mujahadeen. The question is whether bin Laden himself had any dealings with CIA operatives in Afghanistan. Despite Kessler's dismissal of it as "untrue" and a "widespread Internet rumor," it appears to be an open question. Wikipedia cites claims that bin Laden received training from the CIA in Afghanistan, as well as denials that there were any such contacts.
It seems the question is much more open than Kessler would have you believe. But he's too busy attacking Rauf to tell you that.
Farah: 'Creator' Omission 'Was An Attempt at Deicide by Obama' Topic: WorldNetDaily
Hanging out in St. Maarten has not mellowed Joseph Farah out.
Filing his September 22 WorldNetDaily column from the Caribbean island paradise, where he’s leading like-minded folks on a "Tea Party at Sea" following last weekend’s "Taking America Back" convention, Farah goes into freak-out mode about President Obama’s paraphrasing of the Declaration of Independence’s section about “unalienable rights” without mentioning the part about those rights being “endowed by their Creator”:
This was not an accident.
It was not a slip of the tongue.
It was not an oversight.
It was not an innocent mistake.
This was an attempt at deicide by Obama.
This was an effort to strip from America's national heritage a direct connection with God Almighty.
Even worse, this was Obama's way of stripping from America's consciousness the notion that liberty's underpinnings require direct accountability and responsibility to the Creator, not man-made government.
Our rights do not descend from Obama, much as he might like.
Our rights do not descend from government, much as he might like.
Our rights are not endowed by evolution, much as he might like.
They are endowed by our Creator.
That's a key word that the Obama mentality would like us all to forget.
He clearly doesn't want Americans to be thankful and responsible to their Creator. He would like Americans to be indebted as subjects to him and the power structure he represents. In other words, we would like us to forget the sacrifices of our forefathers over the last 234 years, shirk our pledge to independence and freedom and be like the other nations of the world where the ultimate authority about right and wrong, law and lawlessness, liberty and servitude is defined by an elite class of mortal men.
Obama let it all hang out there with that simple act of omission.
But it wasn't merely an omission.
It was omission by commission.
Don't think for one minute that speech wasn't written in advance with an express purpose.
The purpose was to take America one more step away from God the Creator.
[...]
Obama reached a new height of subversion with his bastardization of these keywords from the Declaration of Independence. That betrayal of the founding document of our country – America's birth certificate, if you will – shows him not only unworthy of the office of the presidency, but unworthy of U.S. citizenship as well.
Farah thus wins the freak-out competition the right-wing media over Obama’s omission. Such outrage, needless to say, ignores all the times Obama got the quote right and less-than-exact renditions of the phrase by conservatives.
Perhaps the next port of call on his Caribbean cruise will find Farah in a less vicious and hateful mood.
It seems Joseph Farah is not the only WorldNetDaily employee who's overly sensitive to criticism.
A review of Aaron Klein's Obama smear book "The Manchurian President" at the left-wing website In These Times put Klein and WND into such a paroxysm of rage thatWND has devoted not one but two articles to attacking it.
The first article attacks In These Times as a "socialist journal whose editorial board includes Weatherman terrorist group founders William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn" and heavily mines David Horowitz's Discover the Networks database to go after "extremist activist" Marilyn Katz, who is quoted in the review as debunking Klein's portrayal of Obama as "as some kind of robotic guy run by a nest of vipers."
The second article, published a day later, targets the review's author, Chip Berlet, as "an extremist who has long been associated with socialism, Marxism and the founders of the Weather Underground domestic terrorist organization" who also has "a long history of equating conservatives with fascists." It goes on to insist that the book "is the result of years of investigative reporting by Klein and Elliott" and "contains dozens of meticulously documented but previously unreported scandals about Obama and other White House officials, including top czars and senior advisers Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod."
Curiously, neither of these articles offers a link to Berlet's review so WND readers can see it for themselves. That's a behavior we're all too familiar with; when we were permitted to respond to Joseph Farah's attack on us, WND stripped all links to ConWebWatch from the response it posted.
Meanwhile, WND, Klein, and co-author Brenda J. Elliott have studiously ignored the detailedanalyses we wrote of the book -- presumably because we're right, and we can't be easily demonized (though Farah has tried).
New Article: CNS' Anti-Immigration Bias Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com repeatedly describes comprehensive immigration reform as "amnesty" -- even as it concedes it's a term used only by critics of reform. Read more >>
Obama-Hate, Birtherism Rampant At WND's Convention Topic: WorldNetDaily
Media Matters' Zachary Pleat attended last weekend's WorldNetDaily-sponsored Taking America Back conference, and he lived to tell the tale of the rampant birtherism and bigotry exhibited therein. He also brought back audio of the conference speakers. Since WND has not seen fit to post any footage of its convention speakers, here are some choice cuts:
NewsReal Upset It Can't Tell Lies With Impunity Topic: Horowitz
In a Sept. 22 NewsReal post, unapologetic gay-basher Kathy Shaidle purports to detail "George Soros’ 8 Most Despicable Acts." Her rant, however, has been interrupted by the facts, and NewsReal isn't happy about it.
As part of the first "despicable act" Soros purportedly did, Shaidle quoted from a column by Ezra Levant claiming that Soros "collaborated with the Nazis." That is a libelous distortion of what Soros actually did as a 14-year-old during World War II, which was pose as the godson of a Hungarian official who oversaw the confiscation of property from Hungarian Jews. The Canadian newspaper that first published Levant's column has retracted it because it "contained false statements about George Soros and his conduct as a young teenager in Nazi-occupied Hungary."
Shaidle claimed that Levant relied in part "upon research conducted by David Horowitz," but doesn't mentiont that Horowitz got it wrong too.
Soros, understandably, wanted to correct the record, which resulted in a fit of all-caps typing by NewsReal. The headline of Shaidle's post now parenthetically adds that it was "UPDATED AFTER THREAT BY SOROS’ LAWYERS", and the space where the Levant excerpt was located now states:
EDITOR'S NOTE: THIS EXCERPT FROM LEVANT'S COLUMN HAS BEEN REMOVED AFTER KATHY SHAIDLE RECEIVED CORRESPONDENCE FROM SOROS' LAWYERS. NO WORD YET ON IF SOROS' LAWYERS HAVE CONTACTED MEDIA MATTERS FOR REPRINTING THE EXCERPT TOO AT THEIR WEBSITE HERE.
The unnamed editor appears not to understand the difference between uncritically repeating a lie, which Shaidle did, and repeating a lie as part of correcting it, which is what Media Matters did.
Shaidle's post now begins with another editor's note:
Editor’s Note: This post has been revised since it was first published. Because its author, Kathy Shaidle, is Canadian she is not protected by the same first amendment and libel laws that Americans are. Thus despite the fact that the information she presented has floated around the American blogosphere for years and was published in David Horowitz and Richard Poe’s The Shadow Party, because of where she lives Soros’ goons were able to target her with legal threats. That is the nature of the totalitarian personality we’re dealing with here.
Really? It's "totalitarian" for someone to respond to lies being told about them and to try and correct the record?
It seems Shaidle and NewsReal are upset that they aren't allowed to tell lies with impunity about people they don't like. The right to be above the law that they seem to be asserting is much more "totalitarian" than Soros' actions.
It’s been a long-establishedfact that there are no “death panels” in the health care reform law. But that doesn’t keep conservatives from continuingtoclaim there are.
The latest to push this bogus claim is Andrew Longman, who began his September 21 WorldNetDaily column by referencing his own previous (false) “death panels” claim – which he insisted was true –asserting that “we are sick of listening to smug leftists dismiss [Sarah] Palin as ‘wrong’ or ‘falsely’ asserting that there are death panels in Obamacare.” Longman then moved on to his new false claim, which involves cherry-picking a section of the bill regarding counseling services available to those under the “CLASS Independence Benefit Plan."
First, Longman demonstrates a lack of reading comprehension by declaring a provision that says eligible beneficiaries under the CLASS program “shall receive ... benefits” including “advocacy” and “assistance” counseling means those beneficiaries are “required under Obamacare” to receive that counseling. In fact, it’s clear that this section of the bill mandates that this counseling be made available, not that the counseling itself is mandatory. Nevertheless, Longman continues:
So if Sebulius [sic] wanted you to be counseled about Dr. Kevorkian services, or counseled on Smurfs in Ancient Russia, she just tells your counselor to make you sit through that. But while giving arbitrary and mandatory "counseling" powers to the secretary of HHS is weird and sinister, it's a minor item compared to Page 723.
The government mandates an "advice and assistance counselor," who shall provide to CLASS recipients, among other things:
(5) available assistance with decision making concerning medical care, including the right to accept or refuse medical or surgical treatment and the right to formulate advance directives or other written instructions recognized under state law, such as a living will or durable power of attorney for health care, in the case that an injury or illness causes the individual to be unable to make health care decisions; and
(6) such other services as the Secretary, by regulation, may require.
So, for the weakest in society, Obamacare pressurizes them to jump off a cliff.
But Longman overlooks an important part of this section. Here’s how the section outlining these benefits begins (emphasis added):
(e) ADVICE AND ASSISTANCE COUNSELING.--An agreement entered into under subsection (a)(2)(A)(iii) shall require the entity to assign, as requested by an eligible beneficiary that is covered by such agreement, an advice and assistance counselor who shall provide an eligible beneficiary with information regarding--
In other words, the section clearly states that such counseling is made available at the request of the beneficiary -- not mandatory.
After getting repeatedly shot down, you’d think right-wingers would give up on pushing this bogus claim. But given the zombie lie that “death panels” has become, that, sadly, appears unlikely.
