Topic: NewsBusters
Tim Graham, in a July 15 NewsBusters post attacking a Bill Moyers program on PBS, wrote of guest and lawyer Bruce Fein: "Moyers labeled [him] a 'conservative,' but he compared Bush to King George III, to Adolf Hitler, to the communist autocrats of the Gulag, and to, well, FDR, in suggesting the post 9-11 era could see a mistake like our interning of Japanese Americans." In a later July 15 post, Graham went after Fein himself, putting "conservative" in scare quotes in the headline and claiming that "Fein was a member of the Reagan Administration, but during the Dubya years, Fein sounds a lot like your typical 'Bush hater,' comparing the president to a long list of historical villains."
Graham really doesn't disprove anything Fein says, instead pretending that Fein really isn't a conservative:
How "conservative" are the conservatives that PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers interviews? Sadly, when Moyers puts you on his show, every conservative in America should suspect you’re either (a) no longer conservative or (b) your conservatism/libertarianism at least somehow landed you in strange-bedfellows agreement with Moyers. In this case, if anything, Fein was not only fiercer in his denunciation of Bush-Cheney than Bill Moyers, he was harsher than the guy from The Nation magazine. Calling Fein a conservative is a little like trying to call Zell Miller a liberal. Would Democrats accept that?
Of course, Fein has conservative cred to spare, from writing a column for the Washington Times to scholar posts at the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation to penning one of the articles of impeachment against President Clinton.
Graham never explains why no conservative is permitted to criticize President Bush; he seems to believe that one hallmark of a conservative is unquestioning fealty to all Republican officials no matter what, and to Bush in particular. Then again, unquestioning fealty to Bush is what the MRC does. It looks like the MRC will be as much a dead-ender with Bush as it is with Ann Coulter.
