AIM Fearmongers About Obama Executive Order Topic: Accuracy in Media
Alan Caruba joins in the fearmongering over an executive order by President Obama in his March 19 Accuracy in Media column:
The President of the United States of America, Barack Hussein Obama, has generated so much fear that the most common theme of posted comments and private communications is that he will refuse to relinquish power if defeated in November or that, under some pretext, he will declare a state of martial law.
[...]
The new EO evokes fear because it is occurring in peacetime and, more specifically, when the United States remains the strongest military power on Earth. There is no indication that an attack by any other nation is anticipated, so the implementation of the EO raises concerns that its purpose is not what it says.
In effect, the EO allows the federal government, directed by the President, to commandeer and control all aspects of the economy and the lives of all Americans. It centralizes control to an astonishing and frightening degree.
[...]
The obvious question is why should the President of the United States, in the run-up to a national election, feel that this is the time to issue such an EO?
As we noted, even the normally paranoid WorldNetDaily has pointed out that this executive order is nothing but an update of earlier executive orders delineating emergency powers dating back to Dwight Eisenhower, done to refect changes in government agency structure.
CNS Article on Fluke Omits Limbaugh's Denigration of Her Topic: CNSNews.com
A March 21 CNSNews.com article by Elizabeth Harrington details part of an ambush interview CNS did with Sandra Fluke, in which she "declined to comment on Bill Maher's used of vulgar terms to describe former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin."
Missing from Harrington's article: Any mention of the vulgar terms Rush Limbaugh used to describe Fluke. That's a crucial context for Harrington's question, yet Harrington didn't feel the need to include it in her article.
This seems to be yet another example of how CNS' parent organzation, the Media Research Center, is giving Limbaugh a pass on his three-day tirade of misogyny against Fluke, to the point ofessentially denying that Limbaugh calling Fluke a "slut" and a "prostitute" is in any way offensive.
NEW ARTICLE -- Birther Bribery, Part 2: Joe Arpaio's WorldNetDaily Posse Topic: WorldNetDaily
Sheriff Joe Arpaio's cold case posse "investigation" of President Obama's "eligibility" may as well have been written by WND. Jerome Corsi's unusually close relationship with Arpaio and the posse and WND's financial ties to them seem to prove it was. Read more >>
CNS Still Pushing Baseless Suggestion That Obama's Grandmother Was Never Discriminated Against Topic: CNSNews.com
A March 20 CNSNews.com article by Fred Lucas essentially calls Michelle Obama a liar for claiming that Barack Obama's grandmother suffered discrimination while working in the banking industry. Lucas' evidence to back this up? The grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, "was the first female vice president of the Bank of Hawaii," and the Obamas "inherited almost $500,000 worth of the bank’s stock from the president’s grandmother."
As we pointed out last October when CNS editor in chief Terry Jeffrey made this exact same argument, Dunham's ultimate success in the banking industry does not disprove the claim that she was discriminated against earlier in her career.
This bogus talking point appears to be something CNS won't let go, further indicating that Jeffrey and Co. care only about attacking Obama at every opportunity, not actual journalism.
Bozell Ramps Up Dishonesty in War Against MSNBC Topic: Media Research Center
Can Brent Bozell get more dishonest in his attacks on MSNBC hosts and defense of Rush Limbaugh? Yes, he can.
In a March 16 NewsBusters post, Bozell responds to Bill O'Reilly's criticism of his Media Research Center demanding that MSNBC fire Ed Schultz and other hosts whose existence offends him. In doing so, Bozell references only his plans to target MSNBC advertisers and not his demands for firings, something his despised liberal rival, Media Matters, has not even called for. (Media Matters has publicized Limbaugh advertisers; the only targeting the MRC has done to date, meanwhile, is to advertisers who dropped Limbaugh's show in reaction to his three-day tirade of sleaze against Sandra Fluke.)
Meanwhile, in a March 19 letter to MSNBC president Phil Griffin making the additional demand that the network fire Al Sharpton, Bozell makes this statement:
I have also made known the fact that your network is the mouthpiece for the George Soros funded Media Matters, a radical group whose mission is to slander everyone who disagrees with its fringe leftwing ideology. I also pointed out these assaults by MSNBC have nothing to do with what Rush Limbaugh said about Sandra Fluke, and everything to do with censoring prominent voices on the right. Instead of reporting on the woeful state of our economy and the catastrophic debt crisis, MSNBC goes after Limbaugh with entirely unmerited and phony moral righteousness.
Of course, for Bozell, his crusade against MSNBC has everything to do with "what Rush Limbaugh said about Sandra Fluke" -- specifically, his increasingly desperate efforts to get people talking about anything else. It's become all too clear that Bozell is not offended by the denigration of a woman when a conservative is doing the denigrating. And it's laughable that Bozell insists that any criticism of Limbaugh's blatant misogyny is about "censoring prominent voices on the right" while he tries to keep up the charade that he's not trying to censor prominent voices on the left. He has demanded that people be fired from appearing on TV over things he refuses to criticize Limbaugh for -- it's hard to be more censorious than that!
(Plus, he seems more than a little jealous that Media Matters is a much more effective organization than the MRC. No wonder he tries to pretend they don't exist.)
If Bozell wants to see "entirely unmerited and phony moral righteousness," all he needs to do is look in the mirror.
P.S. In his letter demanding Sharpton be fired, Bozell cites as one of his offenses "denigrating homosexuals." Really? One of the main reasons for existence for Bozell's own organization is to denigrate homosexuals, so it's hard to imagine he's genuinely upset at all by Sharpton doing it.
Newsmax Peddles Bogus Obama 'Martial Law' Conspiracy -- And WND Is the Voice of Reason Topic: Newsmax
Well, here's a switch -- Newsmax goes into paranoid fearmongering mode about President Obama wanting to establish martial law, and WorldNetDaily is the voice of reason on the issue.
Paul Scicchitano writes in a March 19 Newsmax article:
Some conservatives fear that a mysterious executive order from President Barack Obama regarding disaster preparedness is a troubling hint at the possibility of martial law in advance of a war with Iran.
White House press secretary Jay Carney dismisses the notion, saying at a press briefing on Monday: “Well, I cannot explain that reaction to it. I think it was a fairly standard and routine piece of business. The president's approach to our dealings with Iran, I think, has been made clear. He has made it clear, most recently, when he discussed it at length a couple of weeks ago.”
Some conservative groups are concerned that the order, which Obama signed on Friday, gives the president absolute control over all the country’s natural resources in case of a natural disaster or during a time of war, fueling speculation that the Obama administration is making preparations for war with Iran.
That's normally the kind of thing you expect from WND, which has promoted the idea that Obama will round up his conservative critics and detain them in FEMA concentration camps. But a March 18 WND article by Drew Zahn, despite opening with its usual paranoia, shockingly puts things into perspective:
But are the cries of martial law and expanding executive power justified?
No, says William A. Jacobson, associate clinical professor at Cornell Law School.
“If someone wants to make the argument that this is an expansion of presidential powers, then do so based on actual language,” warns Jacobson. “There is enough that Obama actually does wrong without creating claims which do not hold up to scrutiny.”
As it turns out, Obama’s executive order is nearly identical to EO 12919, issued by President Clinton on June 7, 1994, which itself was an amendment to EO 10789, issued in 1958 by President Eisenhower, and which in fact, was later amended by EO 13286, issued in 2003 by George W. Bush.
[...]
A side-by-side analysis of Obama’s order compared to Clinton’s, conducted by Ed Morrissey of HotAir.com, reveals Obama’s order is essentially just an update to reflect changes in government agency structure.
In other words, nothing to see here -- which must have been a bitter pill for WND to swallow, given its seething hatred of everything Obama. Scicchitano, meanwhile, waited until the end of his article to mention Morrissey's debunking.
Fox's Muslim Defense Not As Good As Noel Sheppard Thinks It Is Topic: NewsBusters
In a March 20 NewsBusters post, Noel Sheppard touts how Fox News' Bret Baier "struck back" at a statement in a new book by David Corn that President Obama complained that Fox News pushes the idea that "Obama is a Muslim 24/7" by stating, "we found no examples of a host saying President Obama is a Muslim."
Sheppard apparently thinks this was a brilliant response:
Yeah, but that doesn't matter, Bret.
Corn wrote it, Politico cited it, and now it's going to be blast all over the Obama-loving media until large portions of the nation believe it.
Makes you proud to be an American, doesn't it?
In fact, Baier's response is very specific and parsed. It may be factually accurate that no Fox host specifically stated that Obama is a Muslim, but as Media matters details, Fox has clearly and repeatedly questioned and promoted falsehoods about Obama's faith, including pushing the false claim that Obama attended a madrassa. And as Corn himself points out, Fox has made little effort to shoot down claims by others that Obama is a Muslim.
Is anybody proud that Sheppard is such a mindless shill for Fox News? We can't imagine how.
WND Pushes New Evidence-Free Obama-Ayers Claim Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily is continuing to milk its unusually close relationship with Joe Arpaio's birther posse with a March 19 article by de facto posse member Jerome Corsi detailing how "A retired U.S. Postal Service carrier who delivered mail to Tom and Mary Ayers in a Chicago suburb in the late 1980s and early 1990s [who] claims to have met Obama in front of the Ayers home."
From this, Corsi goes on to extrapolate that "the parents of former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers help[ed] finance Barack Obama’s Harvard education," that "Ayers’ mother believe[d] Obama was a foreign student," and that "the young Obama [was] convinced at the time – long before he even entered politics – that he was going to become president of the United States."
Corsi downplays the fact that the postal carrier has no actual evidence whatsoever to back up his claim -- he can't even prove that the man in question was actually Obama. As Dr. Conspiracy sums up: "Whether the elderly mail character is trying to save his country with a lie, or more likely just telling a true story embellished to be interesting, the details don’t hang together and there is no corroboration."
Nevertheless, Corsi's boss, Joseph Farah, thinks this is something like the biggest story ever despite the fact that there's no there there, and he can't imagine why nobody else is covering it:
Why didn’t they touch it?
We have more insight than ever before.
It’s not that the facts aren’t compelling. It’s not that the story is not of interest. It’s not that the story is not being talked about at water coolers across America.
So what is it?
Very simple. This isn’t just your average Bill Ayers story. This one touches on a raw nerve for the media. It touches on the increasing possibility that Obama is not really constitutionally eligible for the presidency after all – a story pooh-poohed by virtually everyone in the media establishment for the last four years.
Actually, this story has nothing to do with eligibility. There is no "insight" here -- just the ramblings of an elderly man trying to remember what he saw 20 years ago, things for which he has absolutely no proof and which wouldn't even pass for hearsay evidence in a court of law.
If the media is ignoring this, as Farah claims it "ignored the first report by the first law-enforcement investigation into the eligibility issue," it's doing sojustifiably. It looks more and more that the Arpaio posse did nothing more than crib from WND's birther conspiracies and conducted no independent research of its own, so the posse has no credibility.
Still, WND plans to flog this story. A follow-up article complained that "Media Matters and other pro-Obama outlets such as the Democratic Underground are reacting in full mock-and-ridicule mode" to the story, positively giddy over the Drudge Report link and how "At one point today, the Web information company Alexa ranked the story as the fifth hottest page on the Internet." But WND will never admit that it's nothing but unproven hearsay.
Farah harrumphed in his column: "We’re watching the Big Media implode like the old Soviet Union – becoming less relevant by the day." As long as WND stays silent about its backroom dealings with Arpaio and the posse, the only person heading for an implosion is Farah.
Bozell Takes Kochs' Side on Cato, Doesn't Disclose MRC's Koch Money Topic: Media Research Center
Brent Bozell has weighed in on the epic battle going on over control of the libertarian Cato Institute, between Cato's current establishment and the Koch brothers.
IN a March 19 CNSNews.com post, Bozell notes that he has "great appreciation and admiration for the Koch family and all it has done over the decades to champion liberty, free enterprise and a free society. They have invested their money in causes they believe in and every day take hits for having the courage and conviction to stand up for freedom and liberty." But he states that the Kochs are in the right over the establishment led by Ed Crane:
Anyone who reviews the complaint filed on behalf of the Kochs, which also includes copies of the shareholder agreement, can plainly see that the Kochs are unequivocally in the right. This is not a debate about who has the best vision for the libertarian movement. If libertarians and conservatives have any regard for the law and for shareholder agreements, there is just no way you take up sides against the Kochs.
In fact, what is most ironic is that Mr. Crane and some of his allies are so heated in their opposition to the Kochs they seem to be suggesting they have some entitlement to Cato and the shareholder agreement be damned. In the end, the Kochs and Ed Crane signed an agreement. If we as conservatives or libertarians do not honor our word and commitments, we will cease to be a movement built upon the principles of law so necessary in a free society.
Bozell didn't mention that one of the Kochs' "causes they believe in" is his Media Research Center. Through Koch-controlled charities like the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundationand the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, the MRC has received at least $15,000.
WND's Vox Day Still Has Issues With Women Topic: WorldNetDaily
Vox Day uses his March 18 WorldNetDaily column to further expound upon his longtime issues with women:
In high school, we were repeatedly instructed by our mothers and female friends that girls only wanted nice guys, real gentlemen who would treat them well and put them on the pedestals they deserved by virtue of their sex. Then we watched them uniformly ignore those nice young gentlemen in favor of the socially dominant and the athletic. In college, we were told that women were just as interested in sex as men, but that having sex with them while they were drunk was rape, having sex with them when they regretted it the next day was rape and not having sex with them was also rape if they felt sufficiently spurned.
[...]
This is the new societal reality, and it is not only one that women created, it is one that women demanded. While our fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers made it possible, they only did so at the instigation of women who sought liberation from the oppression of patriarchy.
[...]
While it is not true that all women are sluts, in a recent anonymous survey, I found that 31 percent of women reported cheating on a serious boyfriend and 24 percent of married men reported that their wives had been unfaithful to them. Men have long understood that instinctual male behavior was barbaric at heart and needed to be suppressed in order for civilization to prevail. What was forgotten was that instinctual female behavior was even less civilized. What Noonan decries is little more than an abandonment of the philosophy of Wollstonecraft, Sanger and De Beauvoir in favor of a return to the recognized wisdom of vastly superior philosophers such as Aristotle, Aquinas and Schopenhauer.
Led by a small cadre of practical game theoreticians, most notoriously the brilliantly dour Roissy, more and more men are taking the red pill and rejecting the pretty lies they have been told throughout the entire course of their education and upbringing. Some are choosing to go their own way. Others are improving the quality of their marriages, and still others are using their new-found knowledge to plow through the opposite sex like Visigoths and Vandals sacking Rome. What Peggy Noonan does not realize is that whereas men once assumed that a woman was a lady until proven otherwise, increasing numbers of them assume women are shallow and superficial until they are provided with credible evidence to the contrary.
As we've noted, Day has previously argued against women being allowed to vote, considers women's rights "a disease that should be eradicated," and has advised men not to marry "career" women because they have a bad habit of thinking for themselves.
CNS' Jeffrey Twists Words To Suggest Obama Admin Wants to Coerce College Students Into Sterilization Topic: CNSNews.com
We've documented how the truth simply no longer matters to CNS editor-in-chief Terry Jeffrey -- which you'd think would be a hindrance in his job, which is to run a "news" website. Jeffrey's overlords at the Media Research Center, though, apparently have no problem with Jeffrey abandoning journalism and using CNS as a right-wing propaganda mill.
Jeffrey hones his propaganda skills again in a March 17 article carrying the inflammatory headline "Free Sterilizations Must be Offered to All College Women, Says HHS."
Jeffrey is twisting words here. Nobody is being "offered" sterilizations against their will, as Jeffrey's headline suggests; as the article itself concedes, sterilizations would be covered at no cost in student health care plans, under a plan announced by Department of Health and Human Services. Jeffrey's headline falsely implies coercion -- and a desire to generate traffic to his website put above getting things accurate.
A manufactured controversy -- which CNS likes to do -- is apparently what Jeffrey was going for here, and he appears to have suceeded to a certain extent. CNS pushed the misleading meme in a March 19 article by Elizabeth Harrington in which she apparently intruded on a conference call masquerading as a "reporter" and pushed the idea that Democrats were promoting sterilization, against which Democratic members of Congress caught on and pushed back:
During the conference call, CNSNews.com asked: “Do you support the HHS regulation that requires health insurance companies to provide free sterilizations to college-age women who want them?”
Rep. [Jan] Schakowsky said: “You know, this attack on women’s health care is--I think the compromise that the president has offered and that the rulemaking from HHS, I think, is a good one. This is not about, you know, college-age girls getting sterilization when they want it--no.”
“I mean, there may be situations where for medical reasons and in consultation with the doctor that sterilization procedures are warranted for the health of a young woman,” said Schakowsky.
“Contraception and related procedures, contraception was declared one of the top 10 preventive health services of the 20th century by the Centers for Disease Control," said Schakowsky, "and the reason for these regulations is to protect the health of women, women of all ages, so that they can afford to get the preventive care that they need.”
“This isn’t about promoting sterilization,” she said of the regulation that guarantees free sterilizations. “No one -- there aren’t college girls lining up to become sterilized because they feel like it. And we’re talking about medical procedures.”
[...]
During the conference call, Rep. Xavier Becerra also offered his support for the regulation and responded to CNSNews.com's question by criticizing opponents of the regulation for advancing what he called “stereotypes” and “misinformation” about the president’s health care law. “Now when they [critics] talk about sterilization, you and I know that they’re trying to build this up into something that it isn’t,” said Becerra. “I think Jan clarified very well what the purpose of the HHS rulemaking is. It’s so a woman can, in consultation with her physician, can make a very serious decision. It’s not one of these fly-by-night activities that a woman would do without thinking long and hard.”
“So, I hope the press will help us avoid these types of stereotypes and this misrepresentation that’s occurring with regard to the actions and the legislation that’s out there,” said Becerra, “because it gives the American public this wrong perception that there, in fact, are death panels, or that the government did take over our health care, or that jobs were killed by the passage of the ACA.”
“That’s the farthest thing from the truth,” he said. “And I hope you all are out there trying to make sure that you’re passing along information -- truthful information -- and probing when folks start to make those kind of statements, which you and I know are intended to misrepresent and to deceive the American public.”
Becerra caught Harrington, Jeffrey and CNS red-handed. Their intent is to misrepresent the policy and deceive people. Because that's what propagandists do.
Newsmax's Wead Still Fawning Over Ron Paul Topic: Newsmax
We've documented how much Newsmax columnist Doug Wead has spent touting the presidential prospects of Ron Paul. Even as Paul's electoral chances dwindle, Wead is still at it.
In his March 13 column, Wead complains that "Ron Paul supporters are used to getting shortchanged by the media." He goes on to fawningly speculate why:
There are reasons why the pundits and the mainstream media exclude Paul. He is taking on the establishment. He is seeking to reform the monetary system, including changes that would make the Federal Reserve more transparent.
He wants us all to know how much money they are "printing" and to whom it is given.
Sounds reasonable.
[...]
Paul supporters come via the internet. That's why so many are young. They don't watch television news. They do their own research.
Paul doesn't convert them. The facts do. They simply match up the facts to the candidates. Many are even shocked to find that the old man has it right.
A Ron Paul presidency may be a lost cause at this point, but Wead is still enthusiastically plugging away.
Bozell No Longer Thinks Limbaugh's Attack of Fluke Is Offensive (If He Ever Did) Topic: Media Research Center
Over the past week, Brent Bozell has been shifting himself and his Media Research Center from occasionally conceding that Rush Limbaugh's three-day denigration of Sandra Fluke caused offense to aggressively pushing the idea that there was nothing offensive about it at all.
As we documented, Bozell waited five days to speak out on Limbaugh's attack on Fluke, waiting until Limbaugh was forced to apologize in the face of an advertiser exodus before he was spurred into action.
We started seeing this last week in Bozell's column, when he starting seriously pushing his pet distraction of highlighting offensive things others have said, declaring that these were "far nastier, far more insulting than Rush Limbaugh has ever said in his entire life." Bozell omitted exactly what Limbaugh said about Fluke or anybody else, preventing his readers from making a direct comparison.
Bozell repeated this dubious argument in his hypocritical letter to MSNBC demanding that Ed Schultz be fired, asserting that Schultz's "a history of insults a hundred-fold worse than anything Limbaugh has ever said." Needless to say, Bozell did not offer the algorithm he used to calculate that Schultz's insults were "a hundred-fold worse" than Limbaugh's.
This idea that Limbaugh is a lovable fuzzball (to use Limbaugh's own self-description) is spreading elsewhere in the MRC empire.
In a March 14 MRC TimesWatch item, Clay Waters was outraged that the New York Times described Limbaugh as an "offensive figure," going so far as to ludicrously defend Limbaugh by declaring that calling Fluke a "slut," unlike what Bill Maher said about Sarah Palin, can be printed ina family newspaper:
New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter wrote a column for Wednesday's Business section on the "offensive figure" Rush Limbaugh ("After Apology, National Advertisers Are Still Shunning Limbaugh") on the radio host losing advertisers after his "slut" comment on birth-control activist Sandra Fluke was inflamed by the left.
But the Times has thus far ignored the counterexample raised by conservatives of comedian and HBO "Real Time" host Bill Maher, who used a far more vile word to describe Republican Sarah Palin in March 2011. (The word's very offensiveness makes it unprintable, unlike Limbaugh's "slut," comment, a standard of obscenity that actually shields Maher.)
It's looking more and more like Bozell's initial, grudging criticism of Limbaugh was just for show. Like a loyal dittohead, Bozell probably really believes that Fluke is a slut and deserved Limbaugh's denigration.
The only problem with that, of course, is that his current war against liberal offenders makes him nothing less than a total hypocrite.
AIM's Kincaid Still Can't Quite Admit Proposed Uganda Law Would Kill Gays Topic: Accuracy in Media
For the past two years, Accuracy in Media's Cliff Kincaid has championed a proposed draconian anti-gay law in Uganda while denying the fact that it would permit the death penalty for mere homosexuality. Now, Kincaid is pushing the law again in defense of an American anti-gay activist accused of helping to inspire the law.
In a March 15 AIM column, Kincaid writres that the proposed law "had a death penalty provision for certain homosexual acts, such as sex with children." In fact, as we've documented, the proposed law counts "aggravated homosexuality" -- which the law defines as, among other things, a previous conviction for homosexual behavior -- as an offense punishable by death.
Nevertheless, Kincaid insists that the U.S. media "falsely called" the propsed law the "Kill the Gays bill" -- even though that's exactly what it would do.
Kincaid spends most of his column defending anti-gay activist Scott Lively from a "frivolous lawsuit" filed by "the George Soros-funded Center for Constitutional Rights" accusing Lively of crimes against humanity for his role in advising Ugandan lawmakers on the anti-gay law. Kincaid claims that Lively is being target for merely "criticizing homosexuality during a trip to Uganda." In fact, the CCR accuses him of much deeper involvement:
Scott Lively has been working with anti-gay forces in Uganda since 2002. In March 2009, Lively, along with two other U.S. Evangelical leaders, headlined a three-day conference intended to expose the “gay movement” as an “evil institution” and a danger to children. Lively likened the effects of his advocacy to a “nuclear bomb” in Uganda and stated that he hopes it is replicated elsewhere. The Anti-Homosexuality Bill emerged one month later with provisions that reflected Lively’s input. As in Uganda, Lively aims to criminalize LGBT advocacy elsewhere and has worked with religious and political leaders in Russia, Moldova and Latvia to that end. He states he has spoken on the topic of homosexuality in almost 40 countries and advises that “the easiest way to discourage ‘gay pride’ parades and other homosexual advocacy is to make such activity illegal.”
Kincaid uncritically repeats Lively's defense that he opposes any death-penalty provisions in the proposed Uganda bill, but no documentation is offered to back up Lively's story.
Kincaid selectively quoted from an Open Society Institute blog post, writing that "the Open Society Institute acknowledged that its 'Initiative for Eastern Africa' had drawn 'scrutiny from conservative leaders' in Uganda 'for supporting sexual minority groups.'" The blog post details the OSI's effort to purchase a newspaper ad space for a tribute to murdered Ugandan gay activist David Kato, noting that one newspaper group demanded the OSI soften language stated the undisputed fact that gays in Uganda "are routinely subject to arbitrary arrests, hate speech, torture, vigilante violence, and persecution." Does Kincaid support this kind of censorship?
Kincaid also whined:
For simply reporting on Uganda’s efforts to save their nation from Soros and his international networks, this columnist was falsely attacked as someone supporting death for homosexuals. The obvious purpose of such attacks is to silence critics of homosexuality and the Soros agenda for the U.S. and Africa.
Well, if Kincaid is supporting this law -- and he gives no evidence he has changed his mind about it -- he is indeed supporting death for homosexuals. It's not anyone else's fault but his own that he can't deal honestly with the facts.
NewsBusters Hates the Comedy Defense -- Except for Limbaugh Topic: NewsBusters
Scott Whitlock uses a March 16 NewsBusters post to complain that Stephen colbert said that the Taliban "evidently have a better track record on women's issues" than Rush Limbaugh. Whitlock further complains:
Liberals, including Colbert and Jon Stewart themselves, will immediately jump to the "we're just comedians" defense. However, considering that outlets like MSNBC routinely promote their clips and portay them simply as cultural satirists, it's worth noting the extreme, often hateful tilt of their comedy.
Whitlock seems to have forgotten that his NewsBusters colleagues defended Rush Limbaugh's misogynistic attack on Sandra Fluke as a joke.
As we've documented, Whitlock's fellow MRC employee Brent Baker said of Limbaugh's hateful demand that he wantsvideo of Fluke having sex: "Obviously, a bit of humor which escaped the overly-sensitive left-wing/media axis always looking to be offended." And another MRC co-worker, Ken Shepherd, insisted that Limbaugh was speaking "facetiously" when he denigrated a female author by saying, "What is it with all these young, single white women, overeducated -- doesn't mean intelligent."
It's more than a bit hypocritical of Whitlock to denounce the comedian defense when his own co-workers used the exact same defense to try and protect Limbaugh.
