NewsMax's Ronald Kessler revved up his fluffingskills for a pair of Aug. 13 articles.
The first weighs in on Karl Rove's resignation. Kessler does a fair bit of Rove-fluffing -- delcaring him "perhaps the greatest political tactician in American history" -- with a bit of his usual Bush-fluffing on the side:
Besides getting a huge advance in a book deal, Rove will be contributing to President Bush's legacy by writing a book that will be more widely read if it comes out when Bush is still president.
As part of shaping Bush's legacy, he is going to be one of the key planners of the Bush library, where he will have a prominent position. Rove is a brilliant student of American history, surpassing the most erudite history professors. He will relish comparing Bush with other presidents.
The other article details a crucial issue of utmost importance: what rich people are reading while vacationing on Nantucket:
In a sign that Americans may be tiring of unremitting negative portrayals of their country, the hottest book this summer on the largely liberal island of Nantucket is "Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10."
In featuring the owner of Nantucket bookstore owner Mary "Mimi" Havemeyer Beman, Kessler engages in some serious name-dropping: "Beman's customers range from billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife and Tommy Hilfiger to Teresa Heinz, Bob Wright of NBC, Chris Matthews, Tim Russert, and Brian Williams. Over the years, Princess Grace and Jacqueline Onassis have been customers as well."
Kessler goes on to add:
On the other side of the political spectrum, "Richard Mellon Scaife likes best sellers, fiction and nonfiction best sellers," Beman says. When Ann Coulter's books come out, they are always snapped up.
Nowhere does Kessler disclose that Scaife, as part-owner of NewsMax, is essentially his boss.
-- Oops! WorldNetDaily's Chuck Norris inadvertently reveals the secret agenda of evangelical-promoted Bible-as-history classes in public schools -- to "get God back into your public school." Bartholomew and Ed Brayton catch Norris in the act of walking back that goal changing it to "get the Bible back into your public school" without telling readers. (The National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, in reproducing Norris' column, deleted the reference entirely after Brayton called them on it.)
-- Not only did Melanie Morgan overlook an unsubstantiated Clinton smear uttered by her Move America Forward compadre "Buzz" Patterson in her Aug. 10 WND column, she invented a couple new military regulations as well, as Media Matters documents.
Baker Doesn't Think Rove Leaked Plame's Identity Topic: Media Research Center
In an Aug. 14 NewsBusters post and CyberAlert item, Brent Baker was upset that news reports on Karl Rove's resignation "highlighted his 'leaking' of Valerie Plame's name":
On the Plame case, once again, none of the network stories noted that while Rove may have mentioned her employer to reporters, it was Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage's leak to columnist Robert Novak which got her name and CIA employment into the news media.
Got that? As far as Baker is concerned, Rove didn't leak Plame's identity; he merely "mentioned her employer to reporters."
And, like numerousMRCwriters before him, Baker apparently believes the absurd notion that because Armitage leaked Plame's name to Robert Novak, and Novak was the first to report it ahead of the reporters to whom Rove leaked, that Rove's leak -- er, mentioning of Plame's employment -- somehow magically didn't happen.
UPDATE: As Media Matters reminds us, Rove didn't merely "mention her employer to reporters" -- he served as confirmation of what Armitage told Novak, something Baker fails to mention.
Massie Repeats Bogus Stats on Illegals Topic: WorldNetDaily
In the course of defending Michael Savage from a San Francisco City Council resolution condemning him for using "defamatory language" against immigrants, Mychal Massie writes in his Aug. 14 WorldNetDaily column:
InFoWars.com notes: "Since illegal aliens are unlikely to be committing white-collar crimes, that figure likely underestimates the amount of violent crime committed by illegal aliens." Using said report, Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, pointed out that 25 Americans are killed by illegals every day (about evenly split between motor vehicle accidents and outright murder). That's more than 9,000 murdered a year, or about 36,000 in the past four years. That is roughly 10 times more than the total number of Americans killed in Iraq.
In fact, as Colorado Media Matters has detailed (and as we've previously noted), King has no hard numbers to back that up; King merely misleadingly "extrapolated" figures from an April 2005 Government Accountability Office study, which found that 27 percent of the federal prison population is made up of "criminal aliens," to formulate the questionable statistic regarding the number of deaths caused by illegal immigrants. But the federal prison population is only about 7.5 percent of the total U.S. prison population, which makes King's extrapolation wildly overblown.
This, unsurprisingly, gives Massie a platform to rant against illegal immigrants, claiming that "liberal Democrats and Republicans ... view illegal aliens that are breaking our laws, potentially undermining elections, bleeding the middle-class dry, raping and murdering as just the model citizenry we need more of" and railing against "innocent, clean living black students" who are "brutally assaulted and murdered, by animalistic, illegal aliens."
AIM Buys Into Morano's Bogus Stats Topic: Accuracy in Media
We've previously noted that NewsBusters' Noel Sheppard bought into Marc Morano's bogus statistics about funding of the various sides of the global warming issue. Now, Accuracy in Media's Roger Aronoff joins the fun in an Aug. 10 article attacking the Newsweek article on global warming skeptics:
The Newsweek story is misleading, even false, in another key aspect. Senate staffer Marc Morano, a long-time conservative journalist and activist, points out that while those skeptical of the man-made global warming theory have received some $19 million, the forces favored by Newsweek have taken in closer to $50 billion, much of it from American taxpayers and channeled through federal and global agencies. This figure, of course, doesn't include the dollar value of all of the media coverage in support of the theory.
Aronoff gets a little credit for admitting that Morano is "a long-time conservative journalist and activist" (but doesn't being an activist preclude one from being a real journalist?), but he still swallowed Morano's bogus stats without question.
What is wrong with Morano's numbers? Let's recap and expand:
-- Morano's $19 million is not an analysis of all expenditures by "hose skeptical of the man-made global warming theory" but, rather, is just a single statistic: the amount ExxonMobil has given to conservative organizations over the past two decades.
-- Given that Morano is citing only a single statistic, he's clearly lowballing the money spent by "skeptics." As we've noted, a single conservative activist organization spent a half-million bucks on newspaper ads alone -- more than 5 percent of Morano's claimed total.
-- Morano's source for the $50 billion number is denier Bob Carter. The article to which Morano links in which Carter makes this claim offers no evidence to support it.
-- Morano offered an alternate link to a similar claim -- an article by denier Steven Milloy, a maker of dubious claims who asserts that "The Bush administration, after all, is by far the largest funder of global warming alarmism, pouring about $30 billion of federal dollars into climate- and alternative energy-related research over the last six years." But like Carter, Milloy offers no evidence to substantiate his claim; further, Milloy lumps "alternative energy-related research" into the category of "global warming alarmism" without any explanation or justification for doing so.
-- Morano seems to be playing the same game as Milloy. As part of the "money ... the climate alarmists have at their disposal," Morano cites "a $3 billion donation to the global warming cause from Virgin Air’s Richard Branson." In fact, Branson said that money is going toward developing clean technologies, such as wind turbines and cleaner-burning aviation fuel, with a heavy emphasis on developing "cellulosic" ethanol. Morano, like Milloy, offered no support for his contention that development of alternative fuels equals a donation to "climate alarmists."
-- Morano states that "The Sierra Club Foundation 2004 budget was $91 million and the Natural Resources Defense Council had a $57 million budget for the same year," but he offers no evidence to support his assumption that all $148 million -- let alone any of it -- went toward fighting global warming.
Is such deceit the best Morano can do? It appears so.
UPDATE: Welcome, Oliver Willis and APJ readers. Read more about Marc Morano here.
CNS Article on Beauchamp Controversy Incomplete Topic: CNSNews.com
An Aug. 10 CNSNews.com article by Nathan Burchfiel on the Scott Thomas Beauchamp controversy gets some things right but takes unverified criticism of Beauchamp on faith and ignores related issues.
Burchfiel accurately notes that it is "conservative media" that is promoting the Beauchamp controversy -- in which Beauchamp, writing anonymously for The New Republic, issued several columns making claims whose veracity has been questioned. But he lists The New Repubic among "news outlets" that have been "embroiled in a fabrication controversy"; The New Republic is an opinion journal.
Burchfiel repeated the claim that "a military investigation found no evidence to support many of [Beauchamp's] claims," but didn't mention that, as we've noted, the alleged military investigation -- anonymously reported by the Weekly Standard -- has not been released to the public.
The headline on Burchfiel's article -- "New Republic Scandal Further Damages 'Mainstream' Media Credibility" -- weirdly puts the word "mainstream" in scare quotes. Unsaid anywhere in the article, of course, is the fact that conservative media have similar credibility problems:
WorldNetDaily treated an April fool's joke as a real story and was forced to retract an article falsely linking an Islamic relief group to terrorism and accused it of making a fraudulent appeal for money for orphans that don't exist.
NewsMax falsely claimed that the rock band U2 was doing a fundraiser for Sen. Rick Santorum, then altered the article without telling its readers.
CNS itself put words into Democratic strategist Paul Begala's mouth, falsely claiming that he said that Republicans want to kill him and his family -- a falsehood CNS amazingly stood behind.
Michelle Malkin's false and misleading assertions during the Jamil Hussein non-controversy and her false claim that troops were snubbing John Kerry during a visit to Iraq.
Burchfiel concludes the article by quoting an attack on the "liberal media" by conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group commentator Mark Hyman -- a guy with his own longhistory of dubious and false claims.
Sheppard Silent on Real Reason 'Skeptical Environmentalist' Is Treated Skeptically Topic: NewsBusters
In an Aug. 11 NewsBusters post touting author Michael Crichton's glowing Amazon review of global warming denier Bjorn Lomborg's book "Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming," Noel Sheppard writes of Lomborg: "It is plain to see why Lomborg is such a controversial figure, as he is not afraid to call a spade a spade regardless of who might find such straight talk inconvenient."
Actually, the real reason -- which Sheppard fails to mention -- is that Lomborg is a lousy researcher. An earlier book he wrote concluded that the concerns of scientists regarding the world's environmental problems -- including global warming -- were overblown. But Scientific American magazine ran a series of articles from four well-known environmental specialists that lambasted Lomborg's book for "egregious distortions," "elementary blunders of quantitative manipulation and presentation that no self-respecting statistician ought to commit," and sections that were "poorly researched and ... rife with careless mistakes."
By ignoring any criticism of Lomborg, it seems that Sheppard is the one who finds "straight talk" inconvenient.
Clinton Derangement Syndrome Watch Topic: WorldNetDaily
Clinton Derangement Syndrome still runs rampant in the ConWeb (as we've detailed), and the latest to exhibit its symptoms is WorldNetDaily's Joseph Farah, who spent his Aug. 10 column bashing her for something she did nearly 40 years ago -- and, of course, getting the details wrong in the process.
Farah claims to have read Hillary Clinton's Wellesley College senior thesis on activist Saul Alinsky: "It's sheer torture, believe me. I did the heavy lifting for you. If there was anything in here worth your time, I would tell you." Well, unless Farah has been to the archive room on the Wellesley campus, the only place one can read the thesis -- a trip he has not mentioned in his columns -- he has not read it.
Another sign Farah has not actually read the thesis: he misportrays it. Farah asserted that Clinton wrote "in a most reverential way" about Alinsky, asserting that she and Alinsky share a similar lust for power:
Power, power, power, power, power. That is the essence of Hillary's thesis. And it is still what she is chasing today.
She's in love with power – and so was her mentor, Alinsky.
In fact, Clinton concluded her thesis by rejecting Alinsky's model. As MSNBC -- who, unlike Farah, did read her thesis -- reported:
In the end, she judged that Alinsky's “power/conflict model is rendered inapplicable by existing social conflicts” — overriding national issues such as racial tension and segregation. Alinsky had no success in forming an effective national movement, she said, referring dismissively to “the anachronistic nature of small autonomous conflict.”
[...]
“I agreed with some of Alinsky's ideas,” she explained in “Living History,” her 2003 biography, “particularly the value of empowering people to help themselves. But we had a fundamental disagreement. He believed you could change the system only from the outside. I didn't.”
Farah also weirdly fixates on on Clinton's thesis statement that "I have no 'loving wife' to thank for keeping the children away while I wrote": "What an odd comment, I thought. How many undergraduate students have a "loving wife" to help them write their thesis?"
Well, it could be argued that a not-insignificant number of college students were married at the time Clinton wrote her thesis in in the late 1960s. Perhaps Clinton was making a snarky feminist joke that Farah was too frothingly angry at her to find the humor in.
Farah also gratuitously slams Clinton's writing style as "uniquely laborious"; perhaps he should offer evidence that his own writing style as a college senior wasn't.
Farah is a CDS carrier, and his strain is particularly virulent, so look for a lot more of this in the future.
Will Buchanan Admit Racist-Eugenicist Origin of 1920s Immigration Law? Topic: WorldNetDaily
Pat Buchanan, in his Aug. 10 column (printed at WorldNetDaily), joins the chorus of conservatives who long for a return to restrictive 1920s-era immigration law:
[Aughor Robert] Putnam is an optimist about the long-term, but his optimism seems rooted less in his findings than in his hopes and America's experience with the Great Wave of immigration from 1890 to 1920.
But that Great Wave was followed by the Great Lull – little or no immigration from Coolidge through JFK to 1965, when LBJ opened the floodgates, though he probably had no idea what he was doing with the Immigration Act of 1965, which goes unmentioned in his memoirs.
[...]
Between 1924 and 1965, the Melting Pot worked. It converted the children of 15 million European immigrants into American citizens with shared traditions, values and culture.
Will Buchanan admit that the "Great Lull" was largely brought about by racists and eugenicists?
Gore Derangement Syndrome Watch Topic: WorldNetDaily
Or maybe it's a Godwin's Law watch. From Henry Lamb's Aug. 11 WorldNetDaily column:
[Al] Gore's global warming religion is reminiscent of the eugenics phenomenon in the 20th century. The elite of the scientific community, and well-to-do of the social set, embraced eugenics as the enlightened way to the perfect society. Skeptics were ridiculed, denounced and pointed to as the kind of scum that would be eliminated if eugenics became the official policy of government.
[...]
Gore's army of in-crowd zealots are in precisely the same position the pro-eugenics in-crowd occupied when they convinced Hitler's government to implement the policies necessary to advance their point of view.
Should Gore's army prevail, the consequences will take longer than Hitler's violence but the end result will be quite similar: The destruction of a significant portion of society.
[...]
Danger to the current generation lies with the hundreds, if not thousands, of misguided policy makers who have fallen under the spell of Gore's charismatic religion. The folks who hold positions in state legislatures and in Congress can inflict major damage on the economy and the lifestyle of America, all the while thinking they are doing something good.
Hitler – and his eugenics advocates – were absolutely convinced that they were doing something good.
In an Aug. 10 NewsBusters post, Dan Gainor criticized "anti-coal liberal Jeff Goodell" for, well, being an anti-coal liberal in Goodell's examination of Robert Murray, owner of the Utah mine where several miners were trapped:
Goodell also doubted Murray's claim that the collapse was caused by an earthquake.
"[T]hey're saying, look, this has all the indications of a mine collapse and we don't have much doubt about that," Goodell said. "I mean, they're reserving final word until they really look at this stuff. And, you know, Murray is going around saying that this was caused by an earthquake but really offering no evidence or there is no - he is not telling us why he believes that. He is just asserting that."
But Murray has indeed explained why he thought the mine collapse was caused by earthquake. Murray defended the earthquake claims on the August 9 CNN "American Morning."
But Gainor doesn't mention that there is evidence supporting Goodell and contradicting Murray's assertion that the mine collapse was caused by an earthquake. As we've noted, both the U.S. Geological Survey and seismologists at the University of Utah have stated that there was no earthquake in the area, and that the collapse itself caused the recorded seismic event. Seismologists at the University of California-Berkeley have made the same determination.
Klein Does More PR Work for Right-Wing Rabbis Topic: WorldNetDaily
How much does the Rabbinical Congress for Peace pay Aaron Klein to serve as its press agent?
A significant sum, apparently, because Klein has written yet another article for WorldNetDaily detailing the group's latest pronouncement (read: attack on Ehud Olmert). Klein has written numerousarticles (we counted 13 in the WND archive) on whatever the group says -- which, coincicentally, mostly happen to attack non-conservative Israeli politicians and political views -- all of which neglect to detail the group's conservative views.
As an extra added bonus, Klein keeps up his whitewash of goings-on in Hebron, repeating once again his revisionist history of the Hebron market while curiously omitting right-wing extremist Baruch Goldstein's 1994 massacre of 29 Arabs at Hebron's Tomb of the Patriarchs.
MRC-Fox News Appearance Watch Topic: Media Research Center
Media Research Center employees garnered two appearances on Fox News in recent days -- one by CNSNews.com's Nathan Burchfiel discussing his Aug. 7 CNS article on firefighters who were allegedly taunted while appearing in a gay-pride parade, and the other an appearance by the Business & Media Institute's Dan Gainor on the Aug. 10 "Fox & Friends" to attack the New York Times for a blog post by "Freakonomics" co-author Steven Levitt asking, "If You Were a Terrorist, How Would You Attack?"
As is Fox News' standard practice, Gainor and Burchfiel appeared alone without other panelists, and their conservative political affiliations were not mentioned. Further, while Gainor repeatedly attacked the Times -- e.g., "It's another example of irresponsible activity by the New York Times," "this from the New York Times, that last year wasn't taking terrorism seriously when they revealed secret banking tracking for terrorist organizations," "The New York Times doesn't give a darn about ordinary Americans" -- and made unsubstantiated claims, such as that Levitt wrote the post "to get as much possible press, and The New York Times is loving it," nowhere did Gainor or any of his "Fox & Friends" interviewers note Levitt's reasoning behind his post:
Consider that posting them could be a form of public service: I presume that a lot more folks who oppose and fight terror read this blog than actual terrorists. So by getting these ideas out in the open, it gives terror fighters a chance to consider and plan for these scenarios before they occur.
Patterson's Dubious Clinton Attack Gets a Pass Topic: NewsBusters
An Aug. 9 NewsBusters post by Noel Sheppard repeated an exchange on MSNBC's "Hardball" between "anti-war activist Jon Soltz of VoteVets.org" and "Move America Forward Vice Chairman, and two-time New York Times bestselling author Buzz Patterson," in which Patterson asserted that Hillary Clinton "wanted to outlaw uniforms, military uniforms in the White House" during Bill Clinton's presidency. Sheppard did not mention, as Media Matters has detailed, that Patterson has never offered any evidence to support his assertion and has repeatedly changed his story on the background of the purported directive. One possible reason: Sheppard credited Move America Forward chief Melanie Morgan for his post.
And lookie here -- Morgan's Aug. 10 WorldNetDaily column similarly referenced the Patterson-Soltz dustup, also without referencing the factually dubious Clinton attack.
Huston Ignores That Giuliani, Romney Share Obama's Pakistan Position Topic: NewsBusters
An Aug. 10 NewsBusters post by Warner Todd Huston complains that a Los Angeles Times article's statement regarding "official and unofficial suggestions by U.S. politicians that American forces unilaterally strike Al Qaeda figures believed to be taking shelter in Pakistan's tribal lands if Musharraf's government fails to do so" doesn't single out Barack Obama by name:
Why no mention of Barack Obama and the scolding he has taken for his over-the-top rhetoric?
Does anyone doubt that if a Republican candidate had said something on the campaign trail that caused a foreign ally to react in such a visceral way that the L.A.Times would waste no time in linking that candidate's name to such a story, regardless if his rhetoric was "official" or not?
In fact, as we've noted, Republican candidates Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney do, in fact, endorse the substance of Obama's view on Pakistan. Why didn't Huston mention that, hmmm?
Huston goes on to assert: "But the L.A.Times knows better. They know that Obama does not represent at any time the official policy of either the Bush Administration or the United States. They know better than to classify Obama's comments as 'official and unofficial suggestions.'" How does Huston know that this is not "the official policy of either the Bush Administration or the United States"? As we've seen with Iraq, the Bush administration clearly has no problem invading a country when it serves U.S. interests.
