America's Smearing Pot
"But I will not accept the superior claim to patriotism of some other state or some self-righteous organization or some neighborhood bully. My loyalty is to the nation and to the principle for which it stands, and I will not sacrifice those principles under a threat of having my reputation smeared."
Senator Gaylord Nelson
on why he wouldn't sign a loyalty oath
4 comments:
Is that a cartoon of Dan Rather and the faked National Guard Memo's from a few years back?
I agree, THAT was a smear job!
Rather's "Memogate" resulted in the firing of the CBS producer who obtained the docements. If I recall correctly, the actual pieces of paper that contained the imformation were copies, but the information contained in the memo wasn't. Frauds and smears have been a long tradition in American politics.
Sunny,
Yes, fake but accurate. I forgot.
The fact is, the "copies" were of documents that were typed with a word processing font that did not even exist at the time they memo's were allegedly written.
Moreover, the man cited in the 1973 memo as pushing to "sugarcoat" Bush's record, Col. Walter B. "Buck" Staudt, had been honorably discharged a year and a half earlier.
Finally, CBS's own investigation found such blatant journalistic malpractice (is that an oxymoron?) that both Dan Rather and Mary Mapes (the producer) got canned.
The fact is, "Rathergate" was a textbook case of a smear job, perpetrated by CBS, once a respectable news organization.
And while I agree that frauds and smears have long been with us in American politics, "Rathergate" is distictive in that our self-described "objective" mainstream media was the purveyor of such bunk.
Of course, when 90% of "journalists" admit to Democrat leanings, its not hard to understand that they tend to be harder on Republicans. That is one of the reasons that right wing radio is so popular, and that newspapers in general are going the way of the horsedrawn carriage.
Gee,
Just think Roadkill. If Dan Rather's
"Smear Job" had succeeded America would have been spared the world of pain the Bush Admin. has heaped upon us.
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