Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily wasted no time in taking credit for Van Jones quitting as President Obama 's green jobs czar, throwing up an article and column to that effect on a Saturday night of a holiday weekend to do so.
A Sept. 6 article credited Jones' resignation on "pressure mounted over his extremist history first exposed in WND." Joseph Farah's column was even less modest, carrying the headline "WND brings down the 'red czar'." He demanded: "Do you expect those so ferociously attacking WND as a 'conspiracy site' to recognize it was this news agency that first broke the Van Jones story in April and relentlessly pursued it for five months to the bitter end?"
But WND's reporting on Jones was conspiratorial and littered with guilt-by-association accusations, such as an Aug. 13 article claiming that Jones "served on the board of an environmental activist group at which a founder of the Weather Underground terrorist organization is a top director." This kind of reporting smacks of McCarthyism, pure and simple.
Plus, there's the fact that WND's reporting is so unreliable and discredited that the first reaction any sensible reader should have is to dismiss it out of hand. Farah has no one to blame for that but himself, due to his longtime pattern of putting his hatred of Democrats before the truth.
Farah seems to think that because WND's inflammatory actually had real-life consequences, WND is therefore not a "conspiracy site." He couldn't be further from the truth, given the fact that his website is claiming that Obama was to put his political enemies in concentration camps and kill Americans by forcibly giving them swine flu shots -- fearmongering that could have the effect of WND being responsible for the deaths of Americans.
It wouldn't be a Farah column if he wasn't self-aggrandizing and self-pitying. The former comes when he conflates the questionable ties of an obscure government official to a presidential sex scandal: "Once there was a story of a blue dress. Now there's the story of a red czar."
The latter comes when -- after denying that WND is a "conspiracy site" -- Farah asserts a conspiracy against WND:
I strongly suspect that the recent fusillade of attacks on WND – from the left and the right – over our unrelenting coverage of the missing birth certificate and other Obama papers was actually orchestrated as much by those who saw us closing in on Van Jones as over our pursuit of the eligibility story.
Of course, if you know me and WND, the relentless pursuit of the truth and our focus on all government waste, fraud, abuse and corruption won't end here. This is what we do. This is what we have always done. This is what we will continue to do no matter from which direction the brickbats fly.
But for WND, "unrelenting coverage" of the birth certificate equates to frequently false coverage. And as we have pointed out, that is not what WND has "always done," unless you append "when a Democrat is in the White House" to it.
