John Fraud Kerry
North Viet Nam War Hero
American Traitor
Posted on 09/28/2004 5:38:16 AM PDT by OESY
Next Sunday, Kitty Kelley's anti-Bush book, "The Family," will knock John O'Neill's Kerry-bashing book, "Unfit for Command," off the top spot on the New York Times best-seller list. Perhaps that's good news for the Kerry campaign. But it's more bad news for political discourse.
Both books are unfit to read. (I've read them both.) Mr. O'Neill's hatred for John Kerry, nurtured over three decades, oozes out of every page of "Unfit for Command" and makes it difficult to take the book seriously. Perhaps his account of what happened on the Bay Hap River -- he says Mr. Kerry "fled the scene" like a coward -- is more accurate than the account of Jim Rassmann, who says Mr. Kerry risked enemy fire to pull him out of the river and save his life. But I'm inclined to go with the guy in the water.
Kitty Kelley comes from a different litter, but no less foul. She isn't out to get George W. Bush. She just wants to sell books. In at least two previous books, she claimed her subjects had slept with Frank Sinatra. The Sinatra line doesn't work with President Bush, so she had to dig up different dirt -- such as the claim that first lady Laura Bush sold drugs in college.
Here's what Ms. Kelley writes in her book....
U.S. law makes it almost impossible for public figures like the Bushes to win a libel suit against a writer like Ms. Kelley. She risks little by passing on loose gossip.
Recent screw-ups at the New York Times, USA Today and now CBS News have cast a cloud over the "mainstream" media and its ability to serve as an effective filter for consumers of news. But without such a filter, anything goes. Let the reader beware.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
I wouldn't ordinarily post an article by Alan Murray, but this went way over the top into Fairyland, as it pertained to the Swift boat vets (and Hanoi Hilton POWs). This article is almost on par with recent screw-ups at the New York Times, USA Today and now CBS News that Murray cites.
Murray's lament that the MSM is losing ground and not serving as effectively to screen out news considered harmful to Kerry and other Democrats is predictable but, with the MSM, "everything went" for too long. Finally, the MSM and Murray are coming under effective public scrutiny.
The reader, always wary, can now find alternative views, many of which are less distorting of reality than the personal biases of Murray, Al Hunt, John Harwood and Jeanne Cummings, just to name a few at the Washington Bureau of the Wall Street Journal, that serve to "filter" their reporting.
The interesting thing is that while Bush has been denouncing the Swiftboat group, Kerry has been embracing the nutcases who trash Bush, and has even engaged in some of that himself.
W denounced ALL 527 ads, sKerry only denounced the one - that may have been done just so he could come out against it.
Okay...which version would that be Alan?
So the JFKerry campaign and their 527 CBS plan to respond to the Swift Boats Vets, by faking documents about President Bush is working.
I have been watching Alan Murray and Gloria Borger on CNBC for years. They are both not wrapped too tight and are lock-step shrills for the "traitor" Democrat Party. Murray doesn't have a clue. Right now Kitty Kelley's book is flushing down the toilet on the Amazon.com best seller list. She had her fifteen minutes of fame and is now history. THE SBVs book held the number one title for Five weeks, is still selling srong and has sold over 400,000 copies. Mr. Murray, let me say, the American public sees through your little game. Get real!!!
Now---what is Kitty Litter's beef with the Bush's? To try to make a comparision between these two books is luldicrous!
The definition of "sheeple" is "people who trust the loudest voice to be the most reasonable."The writer's position is that "the truth lies in the middle" between Kitty Kelly's hit on Bush and O'Neil's criticism of Kerry. That is an idle assumption enabling the author to position himself as being above both of those two authors. But Kelly is well known for doing hit pieces on Republicans, and O'Neil isn't even a Republican.
But don't pay attention to the fact that O'Neil writes from personal experience and Kelly is just using anonymous sources; "the truth lies in the middle" allows you to be smugly superior to the man who has painful first-hand experience. </sarcasm>
John Fraud Kerry
North Viet Nam War Hero
American Traitor
Re. Alan Murray: He who does not open his eyes can not see.
If his grudge is three decades' old, then he can hardly be called a mere tool of the Bush campaign.
I'm sorry Murray, but I didn't see it that way. In fact, the book is extremely believable, as is Mr. O'Neill.
Who has the most situational awareness of the details of a military engagemet?
A. The boat commander on the bridge of his boat in the immediate area.
B. The man who, by his own account, spent as much time diving under water as his aerobic capacity would allow once he fell overboard.
C. The newspaper writer.
I'm inclined to go with A.
Clueless in D.C.
This piece by David Broder of the Washington Post, "The Media, Losing Their Way," couldn't be more clueless if Richard Cohen had written it. Broder starts off on solid ground. He observes that "the American news media have been clobbered" in this election cycle, and he admits his "shame and embarrassment at our performance." It is when he tries to analyze why the media has became such an embarrassment that Broder quickly loses the plot.
Broder thinks that the main culprits are (I kid you not) cable news networks, bloggers, and the influx of "political stars" into traditional television news organizations. With so much sensationalized information being doled out by people lacking credentials in journalism, it is no wonder that "old pros such as Dan Rather and former New York Times editor Howell Raines got caught up in this fevered atmosphere and let their standards slip." It never occurs to Broder that bias may have played at least a bit part in the MSM's self-destructive conduct. Or that the rise of cable news networks and serious blogs (none of whom seems to have up screwed up the way Rather did) is the effect of the MSM's lack of responsibility, rather than its cause. Yet these are easily the most plausible explanations for the phenomena Broder decries. Consider this passage:
"Time was when any outfit such as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that came around peddling an ad with implausible charges would have run into a hard-nosed reporter whose first questions -- before he or she ran with the story -- would have been, 'Who the hell are you guys? What's your angle? What's your proof?' Any Texan with a grudge against George Bush and the National Guard who suddenly produced a purported photocopy of an explosive 30-year-old order signed by a dead man would have been treated with the deep distrust he deserved by the reporters to whom he offered his wares. And no professional journalist would have made a call to the Kerry campaign encouraging a flack to contact this dubious source."
But the reason why no hard-nosed reporter challenged the Swiftvets was not the existence of cable news or bloggers. If the old media were really under great pressure to compete with these sources, their representatives would have been all over the Swiftvets. No, the reason why the MSM didn't jump on this story (as we predicted they wouldn't) is because they thought it was in John Kerry's interest to let the story die. Only when it became clear that this wouldn't happen did the Washington Post make a run at discrediting the Swiftvets allegations. The reason why the Post and others didn't get further in this endeavor is because most of the allegations have held up.
Broder's discussion of the CBS story also contains its own refutation of his broader thesis. Broder is horrified that the network called the Kerry campaign to encourage it to contact Rather's source. This clearly is not the fault of cable news organizations and bloggers. Nor does Broder provide any reason to believe that it had to do with the presence of "political stars" at CBS. How can Broder overlook the most obvious explanation for CBS's contact with the Kerry campaign -- that the two share a common objective?
Broder is an honest journalist -- one of the "adults" of the MSM. But when the adults are this clueless, they cannot serve their adult function. That's one of the reasons why school has been out at institutions like the Washington Post for years.
Posted by deacon (source: http://www.powerlineblog.com)
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