Topic: Newsmax
Another piece of ConWeb work we overlooked during the holidays: Lowell Ponte's Dec. 27 NewsMax column on Gerald Ford. It's entertainingly laden with all sorts of liberal-bashing and conspiracy-mongering, such as claiming that "Democrats had controlled the Congress by one-party rule, not unlike Mexico's authoritarian PRI, since the early 1950s."
Ponte then portrays Richard Nixon as the victim of a "relentless campaign of propaganda by smear and innuendo" by the "liberal media" as revenge for Nixon's 1972 landslide re-election victory:
For leftists who had spent decades infiltrating and taking control of America's mainstream media, this humiliation by an anti-communist president was intolerable. If Nixon and conservative Republicans could not be defeated at the ballot box, the media determined to remove him by coup d'etat.
The Watergate burglary, Ponte wrote, was "a genuine crime but the kind of lawbreaking that Democratic presidents had engaged in routinely since the reign of Franklin Delano Roosevelt." Allegations in the media, he added, were "typically trivial or mere hearsay." Yeah, 30 Nixon administration officials being convicted on Watergate-related crimes is so trivial.
From there, it's a quick hop, skip and jump to bashing Jimmy Carter: "But the disaster of the media coup against Nixon and the ascent of Carter continues to plague America today." Why? Because Carter "withdrew U.S. support from the shah of Iran"; as a result, "Carter is responsible for 9/11 and the nearly 3,000 Americans who died in the World Trade Center other terrorist attacks that day."
Ponte adds, without evidence: "Carter's record inflation stole half the life savings of every American family." He then brings his readers in for a gentle landing: "But the nightmare of Carter's presidency was replaced in 1980 by the glorious sunrise of President Ronald Reagan."
Ponte's column carries the headline "President Ford and the Media's Revisionist History," but by glossing over the numerous Watergate crimes, Ponte appears to be the one serving up the revisionist history.
UPDATE: Oh, and did we mention that Ponte called Carter an "anti-Semitic incompetent"?
