Nobody was expecting WorldNetDaily's Jim Fletcher to write anything but a positive review of fellow WND employee Aaron Klein's new Obama-bashing book, but this is ridiculous.

Fletcher's Sept. 25 WND review of Klein's "Fool Me Twice"  is not only the fawning fluff-job you'd expect from someone who declared that Klein's previous Obama hatchet job "will reduce the Obama myth to a mere shadow as it blasts the political landscape upon release" -- it proves that Fletcher has fully imbibed the WND Kool-Aid that turns any WND writer into a sputtering anti-Obama conspiracy-monger.

Fletcher brings no critical credulty whatsoever to his "review" and is fully on board with Klein's ranting:

A few years ago, when I read “The Manchurian President,” by investigative writers Aaron Klein and Brenda Elliott, I was quite alarmed. It was clear from their groundbreaking research that the man elected president of the United States was a shadowy character wholly unlike the feel-good image crafted by his campaign.

Now, in the run-up to the possibility of a catastrophic second term for Barack Obama, Klein and Elliott have done it again. In “Fool Me Twice: Obama’s Shocking Plans for the Next Four Years Exposed”, the writers show conclusively that this change agent in the Oval Office fully intends to “finish off” America if given the chance.

[...]

Frankly, there are so many devious initiatives put forth by Obama that the average American doesn’t have time to digest the implications (which is why “Fool Me Twice” is so valuable, with its brief but densely packed guide to this president’s plan to bring down the country.

[...]

The authors of “Fool Me Twice” leave us with perhaps the most disturbing bit of information yet: that the 2012 elections could be “hijacked” by an imperial-minded Obama. This very discussion has been on the lips of millions of Americans since it became obvious that Obama was the kind of change agent we don’t need.

Klein and Elliott trace the multiple ways that voter fraud and even tampering with the Electoral College could transform America overnight. Their spotlight on a foreign-based company, Scytl, and its manipulation of new, online U.S. voting systems is alone worth the price of this book.

Fletcher concludes: "Educate yourselves, dear Americans, and internalize the message of 'Fool Me Twice': If the country is foolish enough to elect this man a second time, there will be no more country."

Of course, if Fletcher actually offered genuine criticism instead of mindless parroting, he wouldn't be writing for WND.

Posted by Terry K. at 2:01 PM EDT

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The Media Research Center's Brent Bozell has released a letter signed by more than 20 "prominent conservative leaders" in which they engage in the usual ant-media ranting and declare that they are "publicly urging our members to seek out alternative sources of political news in order to make an intelligent, well-informed decision on November 6."

It's not news that they despise the so-called "liberal media," and they have likely been poisoning their followers against it for years. So there's nothing new in their urging people to seek other sources because they've been doing that for a long time.

Bozell's letter is the usual evidence-free right-wing ranting that the media won't credulously report right-wing talking points as news. Bozell also wrote:

A free and balanced media are crucial to the health of this country. It is your duty as journalists – as outlined in the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics – to “distinguish between advocacy and news reporting,” while simultaneously “seeking truth and providing a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues.”

But Bozell has demonstrated he does not follow these SPJ guidelines with his own "news" organization, CNSNews.com.  CNS editor in chief Terry Jeffrey has a clear anti-Obama bias that presents itself as advocacy, his reporters have similar right-wing biases, it does the bidding of MRC donors in its reporting, and it's so biased it presents right-wing talking points as "news."

Bozell could have made CNS a shining example of how a news organization should operate; instead, it's a mirror-image caricature of the purported bias he rages against.

If Bozell cannot  even run his own "news" organization without bias, what moral authority does he have to criticize alleged bias in others? None that we can see.

Posted by Terry K. at 12:51 PM EDT

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Mychal Massie's hatred of President Obama is already at derangement epidemic levels. It appears that his hypocrisy is too.

Massie rants in his Sept. 24 WorldNetDaily column:

Obama himself has sealed and/or fought to prevent release of significant portions of his past.

Those things sealed include his record with the Illinois State Bar Association, his files from his career as an Illinois state senator, his law client list, and his adoption and baptism records.

Records of his and his mother’s repatriation as U.S. citizens on return from Indonesia have not been found or released. His elementary school records, his private school financial aid records, have not been released – and while his Occidental College financial aid records were subpoenaed, his lawyers successfully had the subpoena quashed in court.

His Harvard Law School records have never been released nor have his passport and medical records. The marriage license between his father and mother has never been released nor found. And these are just a few of the many things his lawyers have been paid millions to keep hidden.

Here again, I know his legions will point to liberal websites that claim none of this is true, but their arguments to the contrary are as laughable as the arguments that claim dead people didn’t swing the election for John Kennedy.

Of course, it isn't true that Obama's "lawyers have been paid millions" to keep his records hidden -- his records are protected by the same privacy laws that Massie's are.

Massie then writes:

Obama has been in the Oval Office for three and one-half years, and he is still a mystery. Romney (albeit stupidly) released additional tax records that were not necessary or legally required, because he had nothing to hide. Romney’s past is an open book, warts and all, just as George W. Bush’s was.

Massie seems to have missed the fact that Romney also has not released many of the same records he accuses Obama of hiding -- his elementary school or Harvard Law School records, his bar association records, his baptism records, or the records of his family's repatriation from Mexico. Yet, Massie describes Romney as an "open book" while he slams Obama as secretive.

Further, release of two years of tax forms and a brief, dishonest summary of his taxes from the previous 20 years hardly qualifies as an "open book" disclosure.

Massie also fails to explain why the records he demands from Obama are "necessary or legally required" while Romney's tax records are not.

But then, Massie's a depraved liar whose hatred of Obama is pathological, so nobody can expect logic or common sense from him.

Posted by Terry K. at 10:29 AM EDT

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It was just a month or so that Newsmax editor was praising President Obama's foreign policy, thus undermining one of the purposes of a conservative, which is to boost Mitt Romney's campaign. He followed that up with a column criticizing the way Romney's campaign was being run.

Ruddy, it seems, has seen the error of his bipartisan ways, for he's back to toeing the pro-Romney party line. Last week, Ruddy endorsed Romney, and now, in a Sept. 24 column, he's spinning Romney's bad poll numbers into peddling "game-changing ideas" on how he can defeat Obama:

What a day!

I took a look at Real Clear Politics and saw Obama now dominating every swing state with wide margins. He's even opened clear leads in North Carolina, Colorado, Iowa and Nevada!

Is there a silver lining here?  Can Mitt Romney still win come election day? The answer is YES and YES.

Rudgy goes on to advise Romney to "go negative," "stop 'splanin'" and to "do one nationally televised address each week for four weeks before election day on a key topic, giving specifics on how he will fix the problem" just like Ronald Reagan did.

Posted by Terry K. at 3:28 PM EDT

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WorldNetDaily's Aaron Klein has been desperately trying to climb aboard the bandwagon of old leaked videos of President Obama saying things that sound vaguely controversial. But they're not, no matter how much Klein tries to tart them up.

Klein first gave it a try in a Sept. 17 WND article:

A 1995 video depicts Barack Obama calling for “democracy with a small ‘d,’” while pushing a society based on collectivism and “common good.”

In the video unearthed by KleinOnline, Obama hails unions and collective bargaining as encapsulating the societal “common good” of which he speaks.

It's kinda cute how Klein suggests that KleinOnline -- the website WND created for him -- isn't actually his.

But "common good" is hardly a controversial concept. Klein labors to make something out of nothing by extrapolating Obama's reference to the "notion that we collectively can decide on our fate" into a reference to "the collective" comes across as a desperate attempt at language manipulation.

But nobody bit on Klein's video -- presumably because only obsessive Obama-haters and word-twisters like Klein can see anything sinister in what Obama said -- so he gave it another shot in a Sept. 23 article featuring a separate interview in which Obama basically said the same thing. But the lameness of Klein's lead paragraph demonstrates even more clearly how much Klein is trying to make a mountain of a molehill:

In a 1995 video interview, Barack Obama advocated using an economic agenda to achieve a “common ground” that would be “good for all people.”

While Obama does not define what he means by “common ground” during that one interview, in another video interview from the same year, first exposed by WND last week, Obama specifically defined “common ground” as a society built on collectivism, including unions and collective bargaining.

All Klein has is that Obama discussed the idea of "common ground" 18 years ago. That's it.This is even emptier than Klein's usual M.O. of guilt by association.

That's how desperate Klein is to smear Obama.

Posted by Terry K. at 2:38 PM EDT

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NewsBusters regularly engages in what we call Heathering -- sniping at media conservatives for even the slightest deviation from the right-wing party line, which demand absolute fealty to the case and tolerates no criticism whatsoever.

Jeffrey Meyer provides a fine example of Heathering in a Sept. 20 NewsBusters post, snarking at MSNBC's Joe Scarborough for calling himself a conservative, adding, "well at least the sort of 'conservative' that MSNBC can stomach to sign to a multi-million dollar contract."

What was the source of Meyer's hostility? Scarborough had the temerity to point out that "Republicans spent us into debt when they were in charge of Washington over the past ten years," which Meyer sniffed was a "typical MSNBC talking point." Meyer doesn't disprove Scarborough's assertion, presumably because there is a sizable amount of truth to it.

Meyer also dismissed Scarborough's criticism of Mitt Romney's performance as a candidate as nothing but an "anti-Republican rant," then demonstrated the proper way to spin facts to demonstrate total loyalty (while also engaging in more Heathering):

Conservatives would readily agree that Romney is no Reagan or Thatcher, but that he is the alternative in this election to a president whose spending binge would make FDR and LBJ blush with shame. Scarborough's too-cool-for-school bad-mouthing of the GOP only proves he prefers self-righteous smugness over being a strong conservative voice on an otherwise liberal network yelling STOP! at the Obama agenda.

So, to sum up: Meyer thinks Scarborough shouldn't tell the truth and should suck it up and defend Romney no matter what while portraying Obama as nothing but evil.

You know, the kind of blind loyalty to ideology Brent Bozell is paying Meyer to spout.

Posted by Terry K. at 11:41 AM EDT

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Ellis Washington invokes his imaginary, non-reality-based Socrates once again in his Sept. 21 WorldNetDaily column:

And now the most famous art museum in the world, the Louvre, after spending a decade and over $130 million dollars has just opened up a Muslim wing. If Socrates were alive today to see the last pathetic shreds of Western civilization his beloved Athens birthed 2,500 years ago blow in the wind like chaff, I like to think he would ask the following dialectical questions:

• France, do you think that closing 20 embassies in the Middle East and closing every French school in Africa in fear of Muslim reprisals over a cartoon mocking Muhammad will save your servile nation, or will your cowardice only embolden Islamic radicals to even more acts of international savagery?
• France, do you think that spending $130 million dollars on a Muslim wing to the famous Louvre Museum will turn the hearts of religious fanatics toward France, when Muslims are commanded by their scriptures in the Quran to “kill the infidels where you find them”?
• President Obama, why do you continuously and falsely blame a movie trailer allegedly mocking the prophet Muhammad for the vicious attacks on America’s embassies throughout the world when you knew these attacks were pre-planned by al-Qaida and the Muslim Brotherhood to coincide with America’s commemorations of mourning on 9/11?
• America, why do you continue to pay tens of billions of dollars to Muslim countries who only hate and despise you as a weak and decadent nation of infidels?
• America, why does your president use communist campaign slogans on his official campaign flag?
• Why does Obama constantly promote Marxist policies and appeasement to Muslims, yet not one of the 535 members of Congress has the stones to consistently call President Obama a Marxist, a socialist and a Muslim sympathizer?
• Does freedom of expression for Muslims exceed that of 320 million Americans?

Given that the real Socrates was not -- unlike Washington -- a right-wing nutjob, it's highly unlikely that he would have used his formidable intellectual and philosophical skills in an attempt to score cheap political points and engage in hateful trash-talking.

Washington has never explained what, if any, evidence exists to support his contention that a modern-day Socrates would be a far-right ranter and hater just like him.

Posted by Terry K. at 9:28 AM EDT

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The lack of self-awareness NewsBusters associate editor Noel Sheppard has is nothing short of comical.

Sheppard devotes a Sept. 17 post to lamenting how the media have been "misrepresenting" Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's remark that "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president" and touting how the Washington Post's Bob Woodward "proved that the media have been misrepresenting this quote since it was made."

But just eight days earlier, Sheppard himself was misrepresenting a statement by Al Gore, falsely claiming that Gore said he "invented the internet."

Why is OK for Sheppard to misrepresent the words of other people, but not anyone else? He doesn't explain.

It seems that Sheppard would have us do as he says, not as he does.

Posted by Terry K. at 3:28 PM EDT

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A Sept. 21 WorldNetDaily article by Jack Minor portrays Democrats as hostile to religion because, he claims, "a Democratic candidate for state office in Colorado worked to exclude a member of the clergy from moderating a local debate because his supporters were 'uncomfortable' with a church leader asking questions."

But Minor's article is incredibly dishonest.

Minor presented only the side of the pastor and the Republican candidate in the Colorado state house race, and makes no effort to contact any Democratic officials for their side of the story. It seems Minor is hiding something -- and he is.

As Richard Bartholomew details, Minor failed to tell his readers that the churchoperated by the pastor in question, Steve Grant, sells a book on its website, written by the pastor's brother -- who also pastors at the church -- arguing that President Obama is the Antichrist.

Further, Bartholomew also notes that Minor regularly quotes Grant for his articles on a right-wing website called the Greeley Gazette. For instance, here's an article by Minor featuring Grant opining on the Vatican calling for "the establishment of a 'global public authority' and 'central world bank' to preside over all financial institutions."

As one would suspect given the fact that he's writing for WND, Minor is also a rabid birther; here's a video of him interviewing none other than Jerome Corsi.

Minor also engages in some sniping at his local competition because the pastor was replaced at the debate by an editor at the real local paper, the Greeley Tribune:

The paper has come out in support of same-sex marriage and written a scathing editorial during the court martial of Lt. Col. Terrence Lakin, the Army doctor who was dismissed from the military and sentenced to prison after he refused to deploy because he questioned Barack Obama’s eligibility for office.

Lakin, who is from Greeley, was compared by the paper to another local resident who murdered transvestite Angie Zapata. The editorial board also recently criticized the Colorado secretary of state for looking into allegations of voter fraud, saying it “wasn’t an issue.”

Minor provides no links or relevant direct quotes to back up his attacks on a business rival.

Needless to say, Minor did not disclose his relationship with Grant or his status as a writer for a competitor to the Tribune -- this violating journalistic ethics regarding conflicts of interest.

In other words, Jack Minor is a sad joke as a reporter. And since WND published his article without fact-checking his claims or ensuring that he provided a fair treatement of the issue, that make WND a sad joke as well.

Posted by Terry K. at 2:44 PM EDT

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We've detailed how the Media Research Center is not particularly interested in doing research, especially when it conflicts with its right-wing, pro-Romney agenda. The MRC does it again with attacking President Obama over taped comments, ignoring their full context and bashing anyone who tries to point that context out.

A Sept. 19 NewsBusters post by Jeffrey Meyer highlighted "audio of  then-State Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.) speaking at Loyola University talking about his support for wealth redistribution, complaining that MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell wouldn't play the tape becuase it hadn't been "authenticated."

That caution was justified. The full version of the 1998 Obama video -- the edited version of which had been promoted by the Drudge Report in a clear attempt to distract from a leaked video of Mitt Romney denigrating the 47 percent of Americans who Obama supporters as freeloaders -- shows that Obama was referring to "redistribution" as a way to "decentralize delivery systems in ways that both foster competition, can work in the marketplace, and can foster innovation at the local level and can be tailored to particular communities." In other words, Obama was not talking about advocating socialism at all.

Nevertheless, the MRC continued to push Obama's "redistribution" comment while not lifting a finger to verify, let alone mention, its proper context:

• Brent Baker referenced "video of Barack Obama in 1998 advocating redistribution of wealth," calling it a "display of Obama’s far-left economic philosophy."
• Clay Waters complained that a New York Times writer "took pains to point out that the old Obama segment was 'carefully clipped,' implying it was misleading." Which, of course, was entirely true.
• Geoffrey Dickens huffed that "when tape emerged of Barack Obama stating he was in favor of “redistribution” of wealth," the Bit Three networks (no mention of Fox News, of course) devoted "just six and a half minutes" to it, compared with 88 minutes to the Romney tape.  
• In his weekly appearance on Fox News' "Hannity," MRC chief Brent Bozell ranted that Obama's comment "confirms ... that he's a socialist who believes in the redistribution of wealth."
• Matt Hadro grumbled that "NBC failed to press Obama adviser David Axelrod over the President's remarks about redistribution" but "did find time, however, to cover the 'Honey Boo Boo' nickname generator."
• In an MRC press release, Bozell touted how "the Romney campaign exposed a 1998 video showing then-State Sen. Barack Obama espousing his far-left philosophy of wealth redistribution." Bozell also referred to when "Obama disparaged small business" -- which the MRC also deliberately took out of context.
  

When Washington Post political fact-checker Glenn Kessler dared to put Obama's words in their proper context, the MRC attacked him -- never mind that no Bozell employee could be bothered to do so.

In a Sept. 21 Newsbusters post, Ryan Robertson began by ranting about how Obama and Vice President Biden "are given the benefit of the doubt by the supposedly non-partisan media" because "we're told by liberal media 'fact checkers' that Republicans end up using them out of proper 'context.'" Of course, Robertson is really whining that conservatives get busted taking their opponents' words out of context on such a regular basis that he must regurgitate the right-wing attack line of trying to discredit all fact-checking.

Robertson went on to claim that Kessler "furiously spun" Obama' statement and that the edited clip has just "one missing sentence, one that somehow redeems Obama for his previous statement." Robertson then nit-picked that Kessler's Pinocchio rating was too severe:

By excluding the last sentence, Kessler thought this was a "whopper" of a lie. Yet according to his own scale, this doesn't make any sense. "One Pinnocchio" statements are marked by "some shading of the facts and selective telling of the truth. Some omissions and exaggerations, but no outright falsehoods." Two Pinocchio-defined statements are said to be "significant omissions and/or exaggerations. Some factual error may be involved, but not necessarily." Three Pinocchios, as Kessler notes, are merited when there is "significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions."

By his own rating system, at worst this only deserved  two. What's more, keep in mind that this has not yet been made into a campaign ad, and yet Kessler and his staff eagerly set to excoriating the Romney camp, giving them the worst-possible score on their Pinocchio scale.

At no point does Robertson explain why the full context doesn't redeem Obama. And he falsely claims that Kessler did not "quote anything Romney or a Romney surrogate said about it per se." But Kessler did:

Nevertheless, the Romney campaign had seized on the remark as evidence of Obama’s apparently socialist tendencies. “You know, President Obama said he believes in redistribution,” GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan said Tuesday. “Mitt Romney and I are not running to redistribute the wealth. Mitt Romney and I are running to help Americans create wealth.”

Apparently, if we are to believe Robertson, Paul Ryan is not part of Romney's campaign.

That's the level of self-deception the MRC must practice in order to justify its laziness in trading what little "research" it actually does for mindlessly repeating anti-Obama partisan attacks.

Bozell claimed in his press release: "Like an overeager Labrador retriever, the liberal media will do anything to please their master, even if it means biting his opponent every day between now and the election." And Bozell is desperate to please his master, Mitt Romney, by using his multimillion-dollar organization to dishonestly attack Obama. 

Posted by Terry K. at 9:25 AM EDT

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We've noted how WorldNetDaily's Jerome Corsi was too lazy and/or incompetent to ask Joel Gilbert who was paying him to mail millions of copies of his factually suspicious anti-Obama film "Dreams From My Real Father" to voters in swing states. Well, an actual journalist did ask Gilbert the question, and he arrogantly responded that it was nobody's damn business.

From Buzzfeed:

Gilbert declined to say how much his company, Highway 61 Entertainment, is spending to distribute the film for free, but said that the film was making a profit through online orders. He also wouldn't say how the company is funded and how they come up with the money to distribute so many free disks.

"We’re a private media company, a journalistic company that’s privately held and we don’t disclose the nature or makeup of our finances," he said.

He said "We’ve made 12 successful films and we are also making current revenue on the current film" and compared the company to Citizens United, but said that it wasn't a political group and didn't have donors.

Such a simple question, and Corsi couldn't be bothered to ask. Then again, since Corsi hates Obama as much as Gilbert does, they have a vested interest in working together to make sure the source of their funding stays concealed, and Corsi may have been just playing dumb -- which is an unethical things for him to do as a self-proclaimed journalist.

Meanwhile, Josh Marshall uncovers Gilbert's obsession with Bob Dylan:

The guy who made the documentary is named Joel Gilbert and aside from a couple other whacky rightwing docs what he mainly does is churn out an endless series of documentaries about Bob Dylan. And hagiographic would be something of an understatement.

In fact, he has his own Dylan tribute band and seems to model his hair-care to emulate mid-1970s Dylan.

[...]

We did a write up when the ‘Dreams From My Real Father’ was released. And afterwards some legal letters were exchanged over a short excerpt of the movie we published with the story. So one night I’m sitting here at my desk at home reviewing where we are in the dispute and deciding what we’re going to do when I think … Joel Gilbert. I know that name. And then, ‘Holy Crap, this is the guy who does those weird Dylan docs!!!’ It can’t be the same guy. But it is the same guy!

It took me a second to sort out the worlds collide moment. Because if you’re a big fan of an artist at some level you imagine (baselessly) that you’re a kindred spirit somehow with everyone else who is. And yet here I am (or there I was) realizing that I’m on the verge of a lawsuit with this dude over his completely loopy documentary about how Obama is some sort of Afro-Marxist Manchurian candidate.

Now, how these two things fit together I really have no idea. Dylan’s politics are largely inscrutable. As a devotee of Dylan’s lyrics I would suggest there’s an undernoted strain of cultural conservatism lurking in some of their recesses. And yet, well, c’mon, I got no idea.

But there you go, that’s the Dylan chapter of the Birther Conspiracy World.

Indeed, WND is selling one of Gilbert's Dylan videos, which it touts as "an insiders view into Bob Dylan's "Born Again" transformation, and its affect [sic] on his life and music."

Posted by Terry K. at 12:46 AM EDT

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It seems that Terry Jeffrey couldn't be prouder that nobody trusts the "news" website he runs.

A Sept. 21 CNS article by Jeffrey touts how "Only 8 percent of Americans say they have a 'great deal' of trust in the news media, according to a new Gallup poll," which is "a record low for the 40 years that Gallup has been polling on the question."

While the Gallup poll question Jeffrey features "the mass media--such as newspapers, T.V. and radio," a significant share of news consumption takes place on the Internet. CNS proclaims itself to be "a news source," which means it's part of the "news media" being rejected as untrustworthy. 

In other words, Jeffrey is touting now few people trust his own "news" organization. That's a strange thing for the head of a "news" organization to be proud of; if Jeffrey wasn't, he wouldn't have taken the time from whatever other duties he has as the editor in chief of CNS to summarize these poll findings.

Not only that, Jeffrey's article was promoted at the top of CNS' front page for much of this past weekend with a huge accompanying photo (albeit irrelevant since NBC is not referenced in his story):

Posted by Terry K. at 7:13 PM EDT

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David Kupelian begins his Sept. 16 WorldNetDaily column:

“Disinformation.” Just the crazy sound of the word evokes the shadowy machinations of the KGB, of propaganda campaigns and assassinations, of pinch-faced communist operatives rewriting history as in Orwell’s “1984,” and all the rest of the cloak-and-dagger intrigue of the Cold War era.

But this story is not about the past. It’s about here and now, in America, where a never-ending stream of hardcore disinformation continues to flow, poisoning our national dialogue, our culture and our very identity as a country and a people.

That's quite funny, because WND is one of America's biggest purveyors of disinformation, and Kupelian, as WND's managing editor, is responsible for it.

Take, for instance, WND's obsession with pushing the myth that President Obama's birth certificate is fake. It promotes the claims of so-called "experts" who claim the PDF is fraudulent while hiding their anti-Obama animus -- Mara Zebest, for instance, is a self-proclaimed "PUMA" who supported Hillary Clinton and opposed Obama's election -- while deliberately ignoring all evidence that discredits the birther narrative. Jerome Corsi won't report on the fact that Sheriff Joe Arpaio's birther posse, of which he is a de facto member, completely botched its examination of birth certificate codes, and is trying to distract from it by obsessing over Obama's sex life.

Like Corsi, Kupelian is trying to distract attention from WND's horrible record of journalism by bashing other journalists for "sell[ing] their souls for “access” to those at the pinnacle of power." But WND has done that too, publishing flattering stories about Arpaio in order to suck up to him and influence the birther posse. It worked, of course -- the posse mostly cribbed from Corsi and WND for its birther "investigation."

In other words, WND is the lie launderer that Kupelian is denouncing -- not that he'll admit it, of course.

Posted by Terry K. at 12:54 AM EDT

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Liz Thatcher uses a Sept. 20 Media Research Center Business & Media Institute article to portray enviromentalist Rachel Carson as a heartless killer, complaining that a children's books about her "teach children to idolize Carson and how to become liberal activists, but without telling them the lives that could have been saved by DDT."

Thatcher laments that if Carson hadn't written her book "Silent Spring," "DDT could have been used to help prevent millions of people from dying a miserable death from malaria." Thatcher then repeats attacks on Carson from her fellow right-wingers:

Henry Miller, scholar at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute, argued in a Sept. 5 op-ed for  Forbes.com called “Rachel Carson’s Deadly Fantasies” that Carson’s real legacy lie in her disingenuous claims that stopped a useful life saver around the world.

“DDT was used with dramatic effect to shorten and prevent typhus epidemics during and after WWII when people were dusted with large amounts of it but suffered no ill effects, which is perhaps the most persuasive evidence that the chemical is harmless to humans,” Miller wrote.

Another expert, Dennis Avery, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute, said Carson is indirectly responsible for millions of preventable deaths noting “The absence of DDT had led to the needless deaths of at least 30 million people from malaria and yellow fever in the tropics … Most of them were helpless African children.”

Just one problem with Thatcher's Carson-bashing: Carson never actually advocated banning DDT. William Souder writes at Slate:

Rachel Carson never called for the banning of pesticides. She made this clear in every public pronouncement, repeated it in an hourlong television documentary about Silent Spring, and even testified to that effect before the U.S. Senate. Carson never denied that there were beneficial uses of pesticides, notably in combatting human diseases transmitted by insects, where she said they had not only been proven effective but were morally “necessary.”

“It is not my contention,” Carson wrote in Silent Spring, “that chemical insecticides must never be used. I do contend that we have put poisonous and biologically potent chemicals indiscriminately into the hands of persons largely or wholly ignorant of their potentials for harm. We have subjected enormous numbers of people to contact with these poisons, without their consent and often without their knowledge.”

[...]

Carson did not seek to end the use of pesticides—only their heedless overuse at a time when it was all but impossible to escape exposure to them. Aerial insecticide spraying campaigns over forests, cities, and suburbs; the routine application of insecticides to crops by farmers at concentrations far above what was considered “safe;” and the residential use of insecticides in everything from shelf paper to aerosol “bombs” had contaminated the landscape in exactly the same manner as the fallout from the then-pervasive testing of nuclear weapons—a connection Carson made explicit in Silent Spring.

Thatcher's portrayal of DDT as the only possible way to eradicate malaria overlooks the facts that 1) it had been so overused that mosquitos had developed a resistance to it, reducing its effectiveness; 2) the U.S. ban on DDT didn't apply to the rest of the world, and 3) DDT is undenably destructive to the environment. Souder continues:

DDT had been effective against malaria in Europe, in Northern Africa, in parts of India and southern Asia, and even in the southern United States, where the disease was already being routed by other means. But these were mostly developed areas. Using DDT in places like sub-Saharan Africa, with its remote and hard-to-reach villages, had long been considered problematic. It was an old story and one still repeated: Africa was everybody’s lowest priority.

And in any case, the World Health Organization had begun to question its malaria-eradication program even before Silent Spring was published. One object lesson was that the heavy use of DDT in many parts of the world was producing new strains of mosquitoes resistant to the insecticide. Much as it can happen with antibiotics, the use of an environmental poison clears susceptible organisms from the ecosystem and allows those with immunity to take over. The WHO also faced declining interest in the disease among scientists and sharp reductions in funding from the international community.

When the recently created Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT for most domestic uses in 1972, this ruling had no force in other parts of the world and the insecticide remained part of the international anti-malaria arsenal. The United States continued to manufacture and export DDT until the mid-1980s, and it has always been available from pesticide makers in other countries.

One result is that DDT is still with us—globally adrift in the atmosphere from spraying operations in various parts of the world, and also from its continuing volatilization from soils in which it has lain dormant for decades. The threat of DDT to wildlife—as a deadly neurotoxin in many species and a destroyer of reproductive capabilities in others—has never been in doubt. Carson’s claims in Silent Spring about DDT’s connection to human cancer and other disorders have not been completely resolved. The National Toxicology Program lists DDT as “reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen.” The same holds for two of its common break-down products, DDD and DDE, which are also suspected of causing developmental problems in humans.

Funny that Thatcher doesn't blames those who indiscriminately overused DDT for causing "millions of deaths."

Posted by Terry K. at 9:30 AM EDT

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