New York Times Commits Journalism on 9/11, Newsbusters Vehemently Objects

MRCWatch Dept. - It started this morning, the 11th anniversary of the terror attack on the U.S., when, rather than following the general media trend of constant content-free wallowing in oh-so-solemn misery over the memory of those attacks, the New York Times actually decided to use the occasion for some serious journalism on the subject and ran an op-ed by former Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald.

It’s been a matter of public record for more than 8 years that then-“President” Bush was given a warning about a coming terrorist attack in a briefing by the CIA on 6 Aug., 2001. The content of that briefing was reflected in its title, “Bin Laden Determined To Strike in U.S.” It included information that a group of bin Laden operatives were in the U.S., that there may be preparation for a plane hijacking, that there had been surveillance of buildings in New York. Bush’s response was to take a long vacation and 36 days later, the terrorists struck. Eichenwald’s piece in today’s Times, "The Deafness Before the Storm," outlines how that 6 Aug. briefing was only one of many early warnings the Bush administration ignored. The intelligence community had, in fact, spent 3 months before that briefing repeatedly and vehemently warning the “President” about an impending strike, all to no avail.

The Newsbusters immediately recognized the explosive potential of the piece. Their response began early today, with an uber-short piece by Mark Finkelstein. His spin:

"For the New York Times, what better way to observe the 11th anniversary of 9-11 than by exploiting it for political purposes and seeking to blame George W. Bush?"

The reader will render whatever judgments he will about a writer from the resolutely Bush-supporting Newsbusters accusing anyone else of "exploiting" 9/11 "for political purposes." Of Eichenwald’s information, Finkelstein says

"Its gruel is thin when it comes to actually assembling a case of any real Bush-administration negligence.  And that is the best evidence that Eichenwald and the Times were not motivated by any sincere desire to review the historical record with the goal of preventing future lapses. Rather, this is cheap political exploitation and finger-pointing at its basest."

And that’s pretty much it. Finkelstein suggests its a slim case, then makes no case for it being so or for it being inaccurate in any particular. He simply attributes to it "low partisan purposes" without offering the first shred of evidence for this and leaves it at that.

That wasn’t enough, so Newsbusters returned to it a little later in an article by Matthew Balan, who wrote about Eichenwald's appearance on CBS This Morning. Balan's opening, echoing Finkelstein, says the morning show was hosting Eichenwald "eight weeks before the presidential election," an utterly gratuitous notation intended to suggest a political motive where none is in evidence. Balan called Eichenwald's article a "finger-pointing op-ed" and said Eichenwald was promoting a "new Bush-bashing book, where he hinted at the supposed religious extremism of the former President during the lead-up to the Iraq war." So the author is probably just some anti-Christian bigot trying to sell his book. Balan asserts that John Miller, a former assistant director of national intelligence, "tossed cold water on Eichenwald's accusations," which is a most curious characterization for what Miller actually said. In reality, Miller supported Eichenwald's "accusations":

"Well, I think what Kurt [Eichenwald] has stumbled into here is a bit of a well-worn path. We knew some of that. What he has added is the granularity of the actual memos and some of the actual words that were–that were there in front of the White House and the national security team. But, you know–and Richard Clark, who is the national security adviser for terrorism, in his book, 'Against All Enemies', he said all the lights were blinking red, and we were pushing this in front of Condi Rice every day and it was hard to get any priority on this. In George Tenet’s book, he details the briefings they were given. So, some of this we knew and… there’s some of it in terms of the level of detail we didn't know."

Newsbusters' third bite of the apple came a little over an hour later in the form of a Clay Waters article about the original Times op-ed. Waters cites Eichenwald's conclusion that Bush’s reaction to what he was being told, for months, by the intelligence community "reflected significantly more negligence than has been disclosed" and counters:

"Eichenwald's evidence of Bush's 'negligence'? Well, just trust him. The information is not public, and what he offers from his perusal of classified briefings is pretty thin"

The information "is not public," of course, because the Bush administration intentionally concealed it. Eichenwald did what journalists are supposed to do, what they should have been doing 11 years ago: he dug  it up and put it before the public. Real journalism of this sort is a rare thing in "journalism" today and, being absolutely essential to the sound functioning of a democratic society, merits praise. But because, in this case, it makes a significant right-wing public figure look significantly bad on a significant issue, Waters greets it with that snide remark, "Well, just trust him." Later, he notes that "Eichenwald is making the liberal media rounds," by which he means CBS This Morning, not any part of the actual liberal media--this, in Newsbusters-speak, is meant to impugn Eichenwald's integrity.

Waters' most remarkable moment comes when he quotes heavily from Eichenwald's piece, showing that the intel community had, indeed, been warning Bush about an attack for months, then, astonishingly, writes:

"As demonstrated, Eichenwald is suspiciously low on specifics to back his hyped-up accusation of Bush 'negligence.'"

I suppose one could call that the "don’t believe your lying eyes" defense. With "suspiciously," he manages to smear Eichenwald and, one supposes, he hopes no one notices the absurdity of berating the reporter for failing to provide extensive details in a brief op-ed. The article was based on research conducted for a book--those details will be forthcoming.

Waters writes that eight years earlier, when the memo of that damning 6 Aug. briefing was released, "several Times stories hit President Bush for allegedly missing clues to 9-11, despite the memo's distinct lack of detail." The notion that the memo lacked detail is tendentious, at best. As subsequent information--including today’s Times op-ed--has made abundantly clear, that briefing, to the extent that it was generalized, was so only because of Bush’s complete failure to demand investigation of the warnings he was being repeatedly given for a period of months. Bush, when faced with these warnings, didn’t try to get to the bottom of them. He didn’t put the government on high alert. He chose, time and time again, to do nothing.

No one could deny this is a remarkable story. It’s an important historical story. It’s a story that raises all sorts of questions. For political reasons, though, the Newsbusters gang is not only completely uininterested but thinks it proper to repeatedly attack, without any real basis, the integrity of both the reporter who has gone through the trouble to dig it up and inform we, the people, of it and the news outlets who have given him the space to do so.[*] All three Newsbusters articles suggested it was particularly inappropriate to carry the story on the anniversary of 9/11; all three made it plain their authors thought it was inappropriate to cover it at all. Newsbusters, the spirit of Anti-Journalism.

--j.

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A personal note: I’m probably among the most vehement of the sane critics of the Bush administration (excluding, by "sane," nutty conspiracists or those who treat facts as optional) but I’ve always been quite critical of those who wanted to assign what I considered to be an inordinate amount of blame to the Bush administration for failing to prevent the terror attacks on the U.S. A terror plot happens between a few people sitting in a room somewhere in the world and there's simply no reasonable expectation that any government will be able to prevent all the mayhem that can ensue from that. Insisting on the expectation that it do so merely creates a rationale for an increasingly repressive government. In the end, that can't make anyone any safer but it can make everyone a lot less free. Bush’s actions prior to 9/11 were idiotic, totally irresponsible and negligent on a scale the subsequent carnage suggests was absolutely criminal and it is an important matter that should be documented. But ultimately, Bush is only human and the government he ran only a government.

Ken Shepherd Inadvertently Exposes the Myth of a "Liberal Media"

MRCWatch Dept. - In a bumbling effort to outline his latest right-wing persecution fantasy, Newsbuster Ken Shepherd inadvertently makes the case against Newsbusters’ central premise of a “liberal media”:

"Suppose there were a Republican state legislator in Georgia, who also happens to also be an ordained Baptist minister, who sent a letter to the owner of the Atlanta Falcons–on official state legislature letterhead no less–demanding he keep his players from speaking out in favor of same-sex marriage. The media firestorm would be predictable."

As the astute reader can guess, this is exactly what did happen, but in Maryland, not in Georgia, and with a Democratic legislator, not a Republican one. Maryland Democratic delegate Emmet C. Burns, the Baptist minister in question, sent an outrageous letter to Baltimore Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti complaining that Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo is campaigning against a ballot initiative aimed at overturning a Maryland law that allows for same-sex marriage:

"I find it inconceivable that one of your players, Mr. Brendon Ayanbadejo would publicly endorse Same-Sex marriage, specifically as a Raven Football player. Many of my constituents and your football supporters are appalled and aghast that a member of the Ravens Football Team would step into this controversial divide and try to sway public opinion one way or the other.

"Many of your fans are opposed to such a view and feel it has no place in a sport that is strictly for pride, entertainment and excitement. I believe Mr. Ayanbadejo should concentrate on football and steer clear of dividing the fan base.

"I am requesting that you take the necessary action, as a National Football League Owner, to inhibit such expressions from your employees and that he be ordered to cease and desist such injurious actions. I know of no other NFL player who has done what Mr. Ayanbadejo is doing.

"Please give me your immediate response."

Burns, who has a long and ugly anti-gay record, is on the state’s Economic Matters committee, charged with regulating, among other things, the Baltimore Ravens, which makes his tirade particularly sinister.

So an anti-gay pol tries to silence a supporter of gay marriage using utterly inappropriate strong-arm tactics. And where is the "media firestorm"? Shepherd is so lost in the usual right-wing persecution fantasy--he’s trying to insist there would be outrage if this was a Republican legislator--that he accidentally makes a significant point:

"...while there has been media coverage since the story broke in the middle of last week, it’s mostly been in print and online sources. A search of Nexis found no reporting by the broadcast network newscasts on this controversy."

So much for the "liberal media."

--j.

“Step right up, folks! For only the click of a mouse, see the amazing Bozell the Seer!”

MRCWatch Dept. - In a spectacularly point-missing column devoted to whining that characters in the upcoming season of a horror series are behaving horribly, MRC ringmaster Brent Bozell regales us with his E.S.P. abilities. His target is AMERICAN HORROR STORY, a title that rather conclusively refutes any pleading that he didn’t know it was a horror story. This season, the FX series is presenting a tale of a “terrifying nun” who "dominates the inmates of a mental asylum named Briarcliff" and, in general, behaves badly.

Bozell doesn’t like that the series "will portray nuns as creepy villains." He describes series co-creator Ryan Murphy as a "fallen Irish Catholic homosexual (surprise)" and gratuitously quotes Brad Falchuk, the series’ other creator, as noting: "I’m a Jew." Then, he gazes into his crystal ball and, for his audience of assembled rubes, conclusively refutes Murphy’s contention about the series:

"Murphy told Entertainment Weekly he 'wants Catholic groups just waiting to be outraged by his show to know' that 'We show people who are really devoted to Catholicism and believe in its power. For the most part, the religious people in the show are making an attempt to do their best in a very difficult world.'

"Baloney. It is patently untrue."

All without having ever seen a frame of it! Now that’s media criticism!

Bozell will have his first chance to actually see AMERICAN HORROR STORY: ASYLUM when it premiers on FX on Wednesday, Oct. 17 at 10/9c.

--j.

Chris Matthews Gets Something Halfway Right For A Change, Matt Vespa Objects

MRCWatch Dept. - Anyone of any prominence threatening the nut-right’s caricature of President Obama as a far-left socialist kinda' guy in an election year can certainly be expected to get kicked around a bit by Newsbusters. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews said President Obama's speech last night to the Democratic National Convention demonstrated that the Democrats "are not a left-wing party" but are, instead, a "center-left" one and that Obama is "something of a moderate, not a lefty here--certainly not a socialist..." For Matt Vespa, them's fightin' words but his attempted take-down of Matthews today doesn’t have a lot of fight in it.

"Chris Matthews must be living in an alternate reality. The stimulus, ObamaCare, the autoworkers union bailout, the green energy executive order, the watered-down Dream Act enacted by presidential fiat weren't actions of limited government."

In this reality, it's true that every Republican in the U.S. House and all but three Republicans in the U.S. Senate voted against the Obama stimulus package. It’s also true that immediately after the vote, most of those same conservative Republicans began demanding a piece of the pie go to their states and districts and, having voted "no," returned home to take credit for all the money the stimulus was bringing in. Of 219 Republican members of congress at the time, 114 of them--over half the delegation--did this little dance. Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan was among them; in a story that received virtually no coverage in the corporate press that so regularly fawns over him, he lobbied the government for millions of dollars for a pair of companies in his home state.[1] Obama's support for the stimulus only makes him some uber-leftist in a world in which conservative Republicans are as well.

Similarly, "Obamacare" was a Republican health care plan created in the 1990s as an alternative to the Clinton health plan (itself derived from a Republican original). Republicans had intermittently advocated it for 15 years before Obama adopted it as his own and one of the "mitts" in that "intermittently" was Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who, as governor of Massachusetts, implemented that very plan in his state. Obama chose it--a conservative plan aimed at propping up the failed insurance industry--in preference to the single-payer approach favored by the liberals. One of the only major progressive elements he included in his own was the "public option," which, in a back-room deal he cut with industry lobbyists, he then agreed, at the beginning of the health care debate, to abandon.

Vespa's "autoworkers union bailout" is what is known, in the real world, as the bailout of the auto industry. That wasn’t an invention of Barack "Kenyan socialist" Obama but of George Bush Jr., the most conservative Republican to ever occupy the U.S. presidency. It was before congress in Dec. 2008, before Obama had even become president, and again, Republican vp candidate Ryan voted for it.

The original Dream Act was authored way back in 2001 by left-wing nutjob Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT)--in the real world, one of the most conservative members of the U.S. Senate. It has been introduced repeatedly over the last 11 years and the Bolshevist Bush administration incorporated major elements of it into its own comprehensive immigration reform package in 2007 (which failed).

Vespa complains about "$5 trillion added to the national debt" but $1.2 trillion of that was actually signed into law by Bush and as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has documented, policies initiated by Bush, rather than Obama, have been responsible for nearly all of the present and projected U.S. annual deficits. Obama certainly earns abuse for what has happened on his watch but his sin was in continuing to follow the policies of his conservative Republican predecessor, not in being, himself, any sort of big spender. Contrary to the Tax-And-Spend caricature Vespa seeks to invoke by raising this issue, around 70% of the present U.S. debt was incurred under Republican, rather than Democratic, administrations.

Vespa mentions elements of the poor economic performance of the Obama administration but none that touch on the Matthews assertions he's trying to refute. No one disputes the Bush-era economic collapse has been hard on the U.S. The Bush administration itself was hard on it.

That’s pretty much Vespa's case. If anything, it suggests that Matthews only erred by calling the Obama administration "center-left," when "center-right" would be more accurate.

--j.

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[1] Ryan did this in writing then lied about it on at least two separate occasions before finally having to fess up.

Kyle Drennen on the Liberal Bias of Joe Scarborough

MRCWatch Dept. - Last year, over on my own blog, I wrote a series of articles called "Newsbusters & Me" wherein I outlined parts of the MRC gang’s modus operandi. In one, I noted that, in their usage, the word “liberal” is

"the default designation for anyone who isn’t identifiably of the far right on every conceivable issue–those so tagged are often, in reality, conservatives whom outlets like the MRC just decided aren’t conservative enough, or aren’t conservative in the right ways."

In another, I noted that

"Of the articles that appear on the Center’s Newsbusters blog, a large portion are devoted to simply complaining about the fact that someone somewhere offered a “liberal” (as they use the word) point of view, the implication being that this shouldn’t happen."

When I just punched up Newsbusters, the first article to appear was an example of both: Kyle Drennen devoting an article to throwing a spotlight on MSNBC host Joe Scarborough’s comparative analysis of the Repulican and Democratic conventions. Scarborough, appearing on NBC’s Today, was asked by host Savannah Guthrie, "Pound for pound, speech for speech, night for night, make a call, who had the better convention and who the most riding on it?" He replied:

"Oh, good lord, if we’re going pound for pound, round for round, this wasn’t Ali versus Frasier, this was Muhammed Ali versus Chuck Wepner. It was ugly."

Drennen didn’t like that very much.[1] He said Scarborough was "gushing over Democrats," noted that "the liberal crowd assembled around Scarborough at a bar in Charlotte all cheered and applauded" his words, and compared Sarborough’s analysis to Newsbusters "liberal" hate-figure Chuck Todd.

In the real world, Joe Scarborough is an extremely conservative former congressman from Florida. In his time in the House of Representatives, he racked up a career rating of 95% by the American Conservative Union.[2] That for offering his honest opinion he’s targeted by Newsbusters and held up as an example of liberal bias in the press says nothing about him and everything about Newsbusters.

--j.

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[1] For the younglings out there who may not get the references, Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier were very evenly matched and fought one another in three incredibly brutal contests in the ’70s; by contrast, Ali fought Chuck Wepner in 1975 and, for the most part, beat the stuffings out of him, winning by a TKO in the final round. Though mostly a one-sided massacre, Wepner did at least manage to put Ali on the canvass once, so perhaps Scarborugh is overstating the Republicans’ effectiveness.

[2] Interest-group ratings can be a tricky business--such groups typically only rate candidates on a handful of issues, and, being aligned with one or the other party, stack the deck in order to make their team come out on top but Scarborough’s very high rating--it puts him among those rated the most conservative--is enough to dispel any notion he is to be regarded as a "liberal."

Washington Post Presents Democrats, Republicans As They Are, Tim Graham Objects

MRCWatch Dept. - Tim Graham, today, makes an effort at taking issue with a pair of Washington Post articles detailing the evolution of the respective platforms of the Democratic and Republican parties over the last 52 years but though he puts on the standard Newsbusters show of being Angry And Offended by them, he doesn’t offer any real basis for this reaction.

The core of his complaint is that Marc Fisher, who authored both articles, gave disparate treatment to the evolution of the two platforms:

"But last Wednesday’s piece on the GOP was headlined 'Over the past half-century, a strong shift to to the right.' And for the Democrats, a strong shift to the left since 1960? The headline today was 'In search of a balance between ideals and realities.'" (bolding by Graham)

Has there been any "strong shift to the left" by the Democrats though? The idea forms the core of Graham’s objection, but Fisher's article on the Democrats does a fairly solid job of debunking this notion, showing how the party has shifted back and forth between liberal and more conservative language on issues over the years. By contrast, Fisher writes, Republicans "moved in fairly linear fashion to ever-more conservative stances" on a broad range of issues. Both the Fisher articles offer a broad overview of the evolution of the two parties but to support his own premise about a sharp Democratic turn to he left, Graham singles out only a few right-wing hot-button issues: abortion, gay marriage, "bringing 'undocumented immigrants out of the shadows.'"

After mentioning that last one, Graham doesn’t touch it again, from which we can assume Newsbusters readers are simply supposed to understand that brown-looking foreigners with funny accents but without proper paperwork are supposed to be regarded with contempt by anyone except extremist liberals.

Fisher detailed the Democratic evolution on the issue of abortion rights; the party has always supported them but, consistent with the back-and-forth evolution Fisher documents (and that Graham is challenging), has sometimes included language acknowledging it's a difficult ethical issue for some and at other times hasn't. The present party platform's position on the issue isn't a majority one in the U.S. but it's much closer to the view of most Americans than the Republican platform, which calls for a "human life" amendment to the constitution itself, one that would ban all abortions under every circumstance, along with in vitro procedures for the infertile, embryonic stem-cell research, most contraceptives (if given the reading the reactionaries behind the proposal prefer) and would, in effect, require a federal murder investigation of every reported miscarriage.. A view so extreme that even Republicans reject it by overwhelmingly margins,[1] yet it has been included in the party platform for 28 years.[2]

Graham singles out "gay issues" as an area where, he complains, Fisher’s "contrast is especially egregious." He asserts the Democrats, this year, "lurch left" on such issues and quotes Fisher’s handling of this:

"This year’s plank breaks little new ground, although for the first time, its support for legalizing same-sex marriage is definitive and clear, and it commits to combating anti-gay activity around the world."

This burns Graham’s eyes! "When the Democrats embrace a new extreme, it's 'definitive and clear,'" he whines. The Democrats were hardly embracing any "new extreme" on this issue though, or any extreme at all. Polling has shown majority public support for gay marriage for a couple years now; for at least eight, overwhelming majorities--including overwhelming majorities of Republicans--have supported some form of legal recognition for homosexual relationships. The Democrats' position isn’t some strong turn to the left; it reflects the mainstream view within the U.S. It isn’t "extreme" but Graham complains that while Fisher doesn’t falsely present it as such, Fisher notes that the Republican platform position against gay marriage "grows longer and more strident every four years" after 1992. If there's any way in which this is unfair, Graham makes no case for it.

Graham, in fact, makes absolutely no case for any strong Democratic turn to the left and in essence, his complaint seems to be that Fisher presented the Democratic party as it is, rather than as the extremist caricature Graham wants it to be. The handful of issues he mentions support Fisher's thesis that Republicans have more-or-less consistently become more conservative while Democrats have evolved much less evenly. Though Graham doesn't seem to realize it, his last objection to Fisher also reinforces that thesis. Fisher had noted that the 2008 Democratic platform had "the strongest statement on civil liberties since the ’70s." Graham interjects:

"Fisher ignores that Democrats promised to close Guantanamo in 2008, and walked back from that in the 2012 platform, and doesn’t notice, as leftists have, that there’s no explicit reference in the new platform to Obama’s use of drone strikes to kill suspected terrorists. We don’t torture terror suspects, we kill them without interrogation? Fisher, like the rest of the media, doesn't notice Obama has been very forceful in using 'inherent' presidential power."

Even if Fisher ignores it, what this shows is, once again, that Democrats moved to the left then moved to the right. Just as Fisher said they do.

--j.

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[1] An effort to implement such an amendment via a ballot initiative in one of the most conservative states in the U.S. (Mississippi) went down in flames by double-digits earlier this year.

[2] Update (Thurs., 6 Sept.) – And consistent with Fisher's narrative about the GOP moving ever further rightward, this year's platform includes, for the first time, language about abortion being bad for women's "health and well-being." This is an allusion to well-circulated--and patently false--right-wing claims about abortion causing cancer, infertility and mental illness.

Ryan Invents New Janesville Narrative, Newsbusters’ Kyle Drennen Fails To Keep Up

MRCWatch Dept. - Kyle Drennen continued Newsbusters' defense of the indefensible Paul Ryan today, falsely claiming that NBC’s “Today” falsely claimed the Republican candidate had “played fast and loose with the truth” in his speech to the RNC.

Drennen’s subject was an interview of Ryan conducted on the morning program by Matt Lauer. The host’s first question:

"There are some people who are claiming that you played a little fast and loose with the truth on certain key elements. And I’m not just talking about Democratic analysts, I’m talking about some independent fact checkers. Would you concede that while many of the things you said were effective, some were not completely accurate?"

Ryan replied:

"No, not in the least, actually. What they're trying to suggest is that I said that Barack Obama was responsible for our plant shutdown in Janesville. That is not what I was saying. Read the speech. What I was saying is the President ought to be held to account for his broken promises. After our plant was shut down he said that he would lead an effort to retool plants like the Janesville plant to get people back to work. It’s still idle, people are still not working there... So my point was not to lay blame on the plant shutdown, it was, this is yet another example of the President's broken promises. In 2008, he traveled all around the country making promises that he broke, just like the one in Janesville."

Lauer said that, in his opinion, “it seemed like you were unmistakably trying to link the President's promise with the closing of that plant, which you know obviously, closed before he became president.” Ryan was having none of that:

"The promise was that he was going to open the plant. The promise was he was going to lead an effort to retool the plant so that people go back to work and it would be open for another hundred years, he said. So the point is, he filled people with all this hope as he traveled around the country running for president, making grandiose statements and promises, which are just not true... I know they don't like the fact that we point these facts out that they made a lot of promises that did not materialize. Janesville was just yet one more example of that."

Some facts: In his RNC speech, Ryan was discussing a campaign visit Obama, as a presidential candidate, made to the Janesville plant in February 2008. Contrary to Ryan's present assertion--which is a new claim--that was not "after our plant was shut down." It was, in fact, before GM had even decided to close the plant. That decision came months later, in June, with the plant-closing following in December. Obama made no "promise" that "he was going to open the plant"; at the time of his visit, the plant was open for business. Obama did, indeed, say that as president, he "would lead an effort to retool" plants like Janesville to produce the more fuel-efficient cars of the future but far from being a "broken promise," he has, in fact, done so. Paul Ryan knows this--while he trashes Obama for "broken promises" on this issue, his own now-infamous budget eliminates all funding for the largest program aimed at assisting this retooling. And while it's true, as Ryan said, that he didn't, in his RNC speech, claim Obama "was responsible for our plant shutdown," he did, in fact, make that charge two weeks prior to the Republican convention at a campaign stop in Ohio, as I detailed, here, last week. In that earlier piece, I noted that Ryan, in his convention remarks, was essentially walking back his earlier false charges; on "Today," this morning, he made this explicit.

In short, Ryan was questioned about his dishonesty and, in reply, simply lied some more.

Drennen offers a very different "interpretation." He quotes portions of this part of the exchange with Lauer, and characterizes Ryan's remarks thusly: "Ryan dismantled Lauer’s baseless claim."

Speaks volumes, doesn’t it?

Expanding those volumes to an encyclopedia, Drennen asserts that the fact-checkers who had challenged Ryan "actually left out several key facts, and yet, the media continues to run with the dishonest attack on Ryan’s accurate statements." To support this, he links to an editorial in the Washington Examiner but though this editorial misrepresents the Janesville issue in its own way,[1] it actually refutes the all-new narrative Ryan offered the Today audience. While Ryan’s new tale is that Obama visited the plant after it closed and promised to open it, the editorial correctly notes that both GM’s decision to close the plant and the actual plant closure happened long after Obama's campaign visit.

Since Drennen is asserting that Lauer made false attacks on Ryan in the context of Newsbusters' larger thesis--the false notion that the national corporate press is "liberal"--it's worth noting that Lauer allowed Ryan to get away with this, to sit before a national television audience of millions and weave a narrative that was fundamentally false in every respect.

Continuing, Drennen recounts:

"Lauer again tried to portray Ryan as dishonest in another part of the speech: 'Let’s talk about the example using the Simpson-Bowles recommendations… you voted against sending those recommendations to the Senate, basically killing any further action on them. Didn't you owe it to the people in that room to say that as well?'

"Ryan refuted: 'But if you read the next paragraph, I said Republicans offered alternatives... The President didn't do that. The President didn't offer a budget to fix the problem. The Senate hasn’t passed a budget in three years.'"

This is Ryan blatantly misrepresenting his own speech. Here, from it, are his remarks on the debt commission:

“He [Obama] created a bipartisan debt commission. They came back with an urgent report. He thanked them, sent them on their way, and then did exactly nothing.”

As Lauer suggested, the degree to which Ryan, in real time, regarded this report as "urgent" is made rather plain by the fact that he, himself, opposed it and voted against it. These remarks, in context, weren't a preface to comments about Republican "alternatives," either; they were a charge in a list of charges.[2] Lauer had, in his question, quoted Ryan's exact remark from the speech but Drennen, in his article, removed the quote, leaving only ellipses. I’ll leave it to the reader to speculate as to why.

--j.

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[1] Actually, in the way in which the righty blogosphere has misrepresented it.

[2] As had been Ryan’s previous paragraph and as was his next: "Republicans stepped up with good-faith reforms and solutions equal to the problems.  How did the president respond?  By doing nothing--nothing except to dodge and demagogue the issue."