Topic: NewsBusters
Many NewsBusters bloggers have their own blogs, and it's interesting to see what appears there that doesn't make the NewsBusters cut.
Over at the National Center for Public Policy Research, Amy Ridenour does the unusual for a "name" conservative: defend Michael Savage. In making "an appeal for calm" over Savage's trashing of people with autism, Ridenour merely regurgitates Savage's spin:
In response, Savage says his comments were taken out of context by Media Matters. ... He added that his comments were actually in support of truly autistic children, who, he said, lose out on services and funding they need because money is "pilfered by those who are not autistic." "The truly autistic child needs as much help as he or she can get," he said; what he opposes is "fakery."
Except that's not true at all. Savage has falsely recast his original remarks to claim they were taken out of context, and he's also on the record calling autism a "phony disease." Nevertheless, Ridenour continued:
My sense of this is that those who are calling for Savage's firing should calm down. Savage clearly has sympathy for children disabled by autism. His greatest offense was that his disgust over what he believes is people using autism for financial gain encouraged him to exaggerate the extent to which autism is overdiagnosed and the ease with which genuine autism (which presently is incurable) can be cured. The hyperbole was not helpful, but it should not be confused with an attack on the genuinely disabled.
Except Savage has never offered any evidence (that we've seen, anyway) of anyone "using autism for financial gain." Giving Savage a pass for mere "hyperbole" runs counter to the evidence, as opposed to what Savage wants people like Ridenour to think.
Meanwhile, at Stop the ACLU, NewsBusters' John "Jay" Stephenson is singing the praises of the upcoming book by Walid Shoebat and Joel Richardson (who helped gather stories from Shoebat and others for the WorldNetDaily-published book "Why We Left Islam"), which purports that "the Anti-Christ of Christianity is the Mahdi of Islam." Unsurprisingly, there's no mention of Shoebat's credibility problems.
Meanwhile, the the entire basis of Shoebat and Richardson's book is fundamentally flawed. As Richard Bartholomew details:
[P]art of their thesis is the claim that the Greek letters for “666″ in the Bible are actually the Arabic for “In the name of Allah”. To reach this conclusion, they point to the Codex Vaticanus manuscript of the Bible, which was written in th Fourth Century. Unfortunately for them, they failed to understand that the original Codex does not contain the Book of Revelation; it was added centuries later using a different script which didn’t exist in the Fourth Century, and the nineteenth-century facsimile edition they consulted replaced this with a typeset version (there are also other objections, but this one highlights their incompetence the most dramatically).
It's usually a good idea to see if a book is based in fact before one endorses it.
