Topic: WorldNetDaily
In an April 10 WorldNetDaily commentary, David Kupelian becomes a shill for the Bush administration under the guise of telling why politicians lie. And the "Marketing of Evil" author does a fair bit of selective citing and makes at least one false claim to show his Bush love.
Even though all of the evidence has not been released surrounding President Bush's declassification of information that was leaked by ex-vice presidential chief of staff Scooter Libby to a New York Times reporter, Kupelian nevertheless claims that "[i]n reality, as everyone knows, Bush did nothing whatsoever wrong." While, as Kupelian wrote, "the president of the United States has the power and the right to declassify U.S. government information," we still lack information as to whether Bush followed proper procedures in declassifying that particular information, especially given that its release was part of a "concerted action" by the Bush White House to "discredit, punish or seek revenge against" Joseph Wilson, who had criticized the administration's rationale for war.
Kupelian also falsely claimed that "The Democrats who are now claiming Bush lied had access to essentially the same intelligence the president did," and they are involved in "a flagrant attempt at rewriting history. That involves lying." That is not true; in several instances, Democratic congressmen did not have access to same full range of intelligence that the White House did.
Kupelian also quoted a column by Michael Barone that falsely suggested that the Robb-Silberman commission cleared the Bush administration of the charged that it "cherry-picked" intelligence to make its case for war. In fact, the commission never examined the issue of how the administration used prewar intelligence.
If Kupelian is so interested in exposing the "big lie" technique, he might want to start closer to home -- like his WorldNetDaily offices, where his boss, Joseph Farah, claims that WND has the "highest ethical standards" (which include plagiarism, false articles, biased reporting and association with untrustworthy convicted felons) and "a commitment to exposing corruption, fraud, waste and abuse wherever it is found – no matter who the perpetrator" despite the fact that it has essentially ignored corruption by Republicans.
Posted by Terry K.
at 1:01 PM EDT
