Drennen Gets It Wrong on “Soros-Funded” Expert

MRC Watch Dept. - Kyle Drennen thinks a “Soros-Funded Expert Changes Tune: Clinton Foundation a ‘Slush Fund.'” Last week, Drennen and Curtis Houck followed a particularly dismal MRC practice in deploying the anti-Semitic Puppet Master trope, dismissing the Sunlight Foundation’s Bill Allison, the expert in question, as merely a mouthpiece for wealthy Jewish philanthropist George Soros.

Today, Drennen recounts that, in a soundbite aired Thursday and Friday on NBC, Allison was “dismissing the Clinton Foundation scandal: ‘There’s no smoking gun, there’s no evidence that she changed a policy based on the donations to the foundation.'”:

“However, as reported in Sunday’s New York Post, Allison seemed to change his mind, now describing the nonprofit as ‘a slush fund for the Clintons.'”

Drennen declines to outline how this brief quote can possibly be regarded as a change of tune–it’s obviously possible that both the Foundation is a slush-fund and the allegations now circulating around it lack any substantial evidentiary basis. As detailed here Saturday, the Sunlight Foundation is, contrary to the MRC writers’ comments, extremely critical of Hillary Clinton and of the apparent shadiness of some of the dealings surrounding the Clinton Foundation. That earlier article quoted a blog post written by Allison last month:

“A trio of super PACs — Priorities USA Action, American Bridge and Ready for Hillary — are promoting Hillary Clinton. One of them, Ready for Hillary, successfully fended off a complaint to the FEC last month over its purchase of the mailing list compiled by Clinton’s last presidential campaign. The FEC concluded that the sale by Clinton’s 2008 campaign, which comprised names of her donors and supporters, to a super PAC promoting her 2016 campaign did not require Clinton to register as a federal candidate.

“That decision has allowed Clinton — and the two floors’ worth of close associates she brought with her from the State Department — to continue her work with the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation undisturbed, an organization that takes funds, sometimes in multi-million dollar chunks, from foreign governments, foreign corporations and foreign individuals, among others.”

Allison was writing about the Clinton Foundation years ago. A blog post from 2009: “Digging down deep into the list of Clinton Foundation donors, the New York Times finds that a donor had gotten considerable help from Sen. Hillary Clinton.” It concludes by asking, “How many other donors to the foundation also had business before the junior senator from New York?” Two days later, Allison followed up, citing that earlier entry and a story in Forbes about donations to the Clinton Foundation from Iranian interests to argue in favor of a bill requiring more stringent disclosure of donors to presidential libraries. Months before that,

Bill Allison and Larry Makinson of Sunlight created a DabbleDB database of the Clinton Foundation donor list released yesterday. This database is the place to go if you’re interested in pouring through this data without trying to access the constantly crashing – thanks to the journalist/blogger stampede – Clinton Foundation web site. (It’s as though journalists and bloggers have this obsession with the Clintons. Who knew?) And just to make sure we cover all our bases, here’s a quote from Bill (emphasis mine):

“I should also note that disclosing this information isn't required by any law (but should be); the Obama transition and the Clintons themselves deserve some marks for releasing the information. But all these donations to presidential foundations–for Bushes as well as Clinton (and Carter) should be publicly disclosed.”

The lesson here is that, while anti-Semitic tropes can inflame and excite those moved by such rot, they provide no basis for understanding the real world.

–j.

[Note: This article was written for MRC Watch, a blog dedicated to a critique of the Media Research Center]

Special Report: George Soros, Anti-Semitism & the Media Research Center

MRC Watch Dept. - On Thursday, the NBC Nightly News devoted a segment to detailing allegations found in an upcoming book ("Clinton Cash") that, as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton helped facilitate the sale of an American-owned uranium mine to Russian interests to the benefit of donors to the Clinton Foundation. The MRC's Curtis Houck spotlighted the piece, but objected to the fact that the segment included an "expert"--Houck put the word in quotes--from the Sunlight Foundation, which, he wrote,

"has received funding from left-wing billionaire George Soros… To no one's surprise, the expert parroted some pro-Clinton talking points: ‘There is no smoking gun. There's no evidence that she changed a policy based on, you know, the donations to the foundation.'"

The next day, Kyle Drennen objected to how "NBC keeps trying to dismiss Clinton Foundation scandal with Soros-funded ‘expert,'" and relates how,

"After using an ‘ethics expert' from the Sunlight Foundation – an organization funded by left-wing billionaire George Soros – to dismiss the Clinton Foundation scandal on Thursday's NBC Nightly News, correspondent Andrea Mitchell appeared on Friday's Today using the same so-called expert… to reject corruption allegations against Bill and Hillary Clinton."

Founded by lawyer and businessman Michael Klein and Ellen Miller of the Center for Responsive Politics, the Sunlight Foundation is a D.C.-based public interest group dedicated to increasing government transparency. In short, just the sort of people a journalist would consult on a question like this. The Foundation's mission is, of course, inherently liberal, but contrary to the crude implication in the MRC articles, Sunlight certainly isn't any sort of Clinton or Obama apologist--it, in fact, regularly attacks both for the same shady practices deplored by the MRC. The Foundation is funded by a variety of sources, but the one funding source about which the MRC wanted its readers to know, the one both its writers took pains to say made the Sunlight expert an "expert" who can be regarded as discredited merely as a consequence of the connection, is the rich Jew George Soros.

The Puppet Master is, of course, a stock anti-Semitic trope, a dark, racist conspiracy fantasy about evil, wealthy Jews who pull the strings from the shadows, manipulating events in our world to their own sinister ends. In propaganda, the Puppet Master is often depicted as an octopus, its crafty tentacles creeping their way into everything. It's proven depressingly long-lived, deployed over the years by everyone from the Russian Tsars to the Third Reich to the lunatic fringe here at home. And when, in recent decades, the American conservative elite began to mainstream elements of that lunatic fringe, the fringe brought the trope with them. For those unscrupulous enough to engage in this despicable breed of racist dog-whistling, Soros, a wealthy philanthropist who gives generously to various liberal causes, has proven a lightning rod. On Fox News, both Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly have prominently blown this tune,[1] but few have devoted as many words over as long a period to inflame and delight these particular low-dogs as the Media Research Center.

The MRC, in fact, maintains an entire subdivision dedicated to this project, dubbed, appropriately enough, "The Soros Project." It grinds out rubbish like this "special report" entitled "George Soros: Godfather of the Left." Written by Dan Gainor and Iris Somberg and principally concerned with putting Soros's fingers in every conceivable pie while treating this as, in itself, sinister, the ponderous piece is astonishingly sloppy, even by MRC standards--little more than a compendium of anti-Soros allegations, wild assertions and data points reduced to a hopeless mess by the authors' refusal to contextualize or demonstrate the relevance of the various items they outline, their constant delving into marginal tangents and asides, their failure to substantiate or even significantly evaluate most of what they relay and their complete lack of any focus beyond a caveman's grunt of "Soros Bad."

The claim in the article's preface that Soros has helped "foment revolutions" is certainly eye-catching. And in the entire painfully lengthy article, this is the sole item Gainor and Somberg offer to substantiate it:

"In 2004, ‘two young me threw water and mayonnaise at him' in Ukraine, accusing Soros of trying to push a ‘velvet revolution' just like had happened in Georgia, reported the BBC."

Soros is accused, at one point, of being "pro-government controlled media"; the authors offer nothing to support that one either, and, in reality, Soros projects have spent years battling state-controlled media apparatuses in repressive regimes around the world.

It's true, as the article says, that Soros was "convicted of insider dealing in France and fined $3 million." It's also true, though entirely unmentioned by the authors, that the French regulator declined to pursue Soros on the matter on the grounds that the anti-insider trading laws in question were, in the words of Bloomberg News, "too vague to determine whether he'd broken them." Soros's lawyer, citing this fact, asserted, "It is inconceivable to expect that the citizen has a better understanding of the law than the authority in charge." The European Court of Human Rights, who heard Soros's appeal and eventually upheld the conviction, decided Soros was an experienced businessman and should have known better, and that's probably true. It's also true--and also unmentioned by the authors--that no one in French history had ever been prosecuted under the law used to nab Soros.

Did you know that Soros's grants to Bard College included some that went to "a Palestinian youth group and an initiative to educate prisoners across the country"? Gainor and Somberg certainly want you to know it. They first bring it up as support for their notion, expressed in a subheading, that "Soros Indoctrinates Students Around the World." Then only four paragraphs down, they write, "Programs at Bard include a Palestinian youth group, an initiative to educate prisoners across the country…" Then, a little further down:

"The grants to Bard College show exactly what type of efforts Soros gives to in order to train student activists. Programs at Bard include a Palestinian youth group, an initiative to educate prisoners across the country, and various other groups for ‘community service and social action.'"

And they're not done with it yet--further still, they bring up that youth group again and quote the youth groups "about us" page:

"Their about us section states that they want 'civil engagement, cultural exchange, and education are the fundamental means to building a viable and sustainable Palestinian state.' Below they describe the TLS as a program that ‘encourages and supports students to do challenging, even brazen acts of world change.'"

Real subversive stuff, eh? Equally so is the prison initiative, which then makes yet another appearance, described as "a degree program held in five New York correctional facilities. They provide degree programs for incarcerated men and women and created the Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison to promote similar programs around the country."

Another cited example of how Soros indoctrinates students: "One professor at CEU [Central European University, which Soros founded] praised the Occupy movement combining environmentalism, feminism, the labor movement, and social justice." Goodness gracious alive! Four paragraphs down, we again hear about how that professor "proudly described how the [Occupy] movement combined feminism, environmentalism, social justice, and the labor movement all under one roof." And yes, further along, it's repeated again, nearly word-for-word, followed by, "Praise for the extreme views of the Occupy movement came from one program director." Is this the same professor? It would appear to be so! Gainor and Somberg outline a video in which she was featured: "Earlier in the video, she praised the Occupy movement for combining the environmental, social justice, feminist, and labor movements to talk about issues that ‘really mattered.'"

The authors describe the dastardly mission of the Central European University:

"CEU [Central European University] is dedicated to promoting Soros's idea of an open society and ‘that professors and students could be recruited internationally to build a new and unique institution, one that would train future generations of scholars, professionals, politicians and civil society leaders to contribute to building open societies and democracies throughout the region and beyond.'"

Other horrors: In 2011, one of the school's intellectual themes was "the social responsibility of academia," which the authors denounce as "this indoctrination," without offering so much as a word to substantiate the charge. Unforgivably, the university hosted lectures by Soros himself--its founder. Its president John Shattuck "described the universities mission as one to promote open societies around the world, ‘CEU is committed to provide intellectual support for building and strengthening open and democratic societies that respect human rights.'" And so on.[2] Reasonable observers could be forgiven for failing to find much of anything terribly sinister in any of this, and if the dependence on constant repetition leaves one with the impression there exists a distinct sparsity of facts to support the authors' premise, well, one is paying attention.[3]

Gainor and Somberg tell us that "while Soros has even been nominated for Nobel Peace Prize, many governments have viewed him as the enemy." And what governments are those? Astonishingly, the authors proceed to offer up a laundry-list of charges against Soros made by authoritarian regimes. The witnesses for the prosecution include Belarus, Croatia, Albania, Serbia (under war criminal Slobodan Milošević), Malaysia and Russia. The politically-motivated, often outlandish charges they've flung at Soros over the years are repeated largely without any critical evaluation[4] and without giving readers any indication of the corrupt, repressive nature of these governments. Elsewhere, the authors assert that "there's been lots of negatives in Soros's past as he's spread his influence around the world" and snipe at Soros because he "wears criticism like a badge of honor," but that Soros's work on behalf of free and open societies has earned the enmity of these regimes is highly commendable. Gainor and Somberg treat them as a stain on his character--an item on his rap-sheet.

In outlining some of Soros's philanthropy, the authors engage in an orgy of numbers porn. Soros spent millions-of-dollars here, Soros spent billions there. The numbers are both overlapping (a fact the authors obscure) and are, like so much else, repeated and repeated--huge figures filling their pages. That makes it particularly amusing when they turn to electoral politics and try to tie their target to that black guy in the White House:

"When you like a product, you give it your stamp of approval – whether it's the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval or the USDA imprint on food. But if you love a product, then you pony up the cash… There's no product the Soros family likes better than Obama. The Democratic president has received more money from Soros and his kin than any other political candidate in the last 11 years – $16,000 and counting. They gave an additional $250,000 to the inauguration fund, with five members of the family each giving the maximum contribution of $50,000."

That Soros sure does love Obama, doesn't he? I'm sure Obama, who raised more than $1.7 billion in his presidential races, was touched by that $16,000. The authors dismiss Soros's assertion that he doesn't involve himself very heavily in electoral politics while still telling us that whopping figure, combined with the inauguration fund donations--the cumulative amount given to Obama by not only Soros but Soros's entire family--marks Obama as the candidate who has received more Soros money than any other. Soros the Puppet Master is deceitful and operates from the shadows; while he "has claimed he tried to stay out of domestic political turmoil, his political donations show otherwise… Soros just wanted to give the appearance of distance."

Much larger than the Obama contributions is $550 million Soros is said to have given to liberal causes from 2001 to 2009. One suspects a rather broad definition of "liberal causes" in that accounting but that's of little importance here. Some basic facts about the nature of the recipients of this largesse in comparison with the MRC's treatment of same help underscore that the MRC's invocation of Soros is merely anti-Semitic dog-whistling. Most of the groups that make up this seeming infinity of orgs are, broadly, liberal but each has its own individual mission, its own staff, its own goals.[5] Sometimes those goals are similar, sometimes they're in conflict.[6] For some, Soros money pays most of the bills; for others, the Soros contribution to their budget is relatively insignificant. Soros doesn't direct their affairs. He exercises no control whatsoever over the overwhelming majority of them. They are independent entities--that's reality. But they're diligently treated by the MRC as one entity: George Soros. The MRC's persistent implication is that they're under the direction of George Soros, serving the evil agenda of George Soros and entirely discredited by the association with George Soros, no matter how tenuous that association may be. When Gainor and Somberg write about Soros's contributions to media outlets, they describe it as "his extensive network of liberal media outlets"--he is the Puppet Master and "his hold over the American political left is especially strong." The MRC's stomping-ground is the U.S.--furthering that same imagery is the only reason Gainor and Somberg spend so much time and space on some Hungarian university. The MRC regularly indulges in a basic fallacy of suggesting any source that is liberal--typically defined as anything not of the MRC's particular breed of far-right-ness--is inherently without credibility or merit. Yet when discussing orgs that have received funding from Soros, its writers never fail to wave the Soros voodoo fetish, displaying it prominently in their headlines.

To overtly state the screamingly obvious, the MRC's treatment of Soros is not rational. Nothing about it can be defended as such. And that's precisely the point--it isn't meant to be.

This week's invocation of Soros by Houck and Drennen is a case-study.

The Sunlight Foundation, being all about transparency, helpfully lists its funding sources online. Looking over its last two full years, these sources are many and varied. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Rockefeller Family Fund, the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation--there are over 100 named in only a two-year period. Soros foundations are there, but they make up a relatively small portion of it. In 2013, Soros's Open Society Foundations and Foundation to Promote Open Society offered $175,000; in 2014, Soros foundations contributed far less, a little over $40,000. By contrast, Omidyar Network (established by Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar) ponied up over $4.5 million in that same two-year period, the Knight Foundation over $2.2 million and Sunlight founder Michael Klein himself contributed more than $1.3 million.

Yet Houck and Drennen focus on one rich Jew as the source of Sunlight's funding, describing the org as "Soros-funded" (in both headlines), "an organization funded by left-wing billionaire George Soros", an org "which has received funding from left-wing billionaire George Soros." Sunlight's Bill Allison is described as "Soros-backed," his views discredited by the association--he's ridiculed as an "expert" (the word placed in quotes) and a "so-called expert."

Sunlight has been very critical of both Hillary Clinton and Obama for many of the practices the MRC itself decries. A recent Sunlight blog entry salutes Republican presidential candidate (and MRC darling) Ted Cruz for becoming "the first major presidential candidate from either party to start playing by the presidential rules" while condemning both Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton for declining to officially announce their candidacies in order to continue shady campaign practices. The Clinton Foundation's fundraising, the very burr up the MRC's butt in the Houck and Drennen articles, is singled out for attention:

"By contrast, all but declared candidates like former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush can, and do, raise money in huge chunks. Because Bush has not uttered, tweeted or otherwise expressed the magic words, he's able to ask donors for contributions of $25,000, $100,000 or more for his Right to Rise super PAC (Sunlight's Party Time shows quite a few examples). Part of Bush's strategy for winning the nomination is a campaign of shock and awe fundraising; should he declare his candidacy, he'd have to leave the six- and seven-figure solicitations to others.

"A trio of super PACs--Priorities USA Action, American Bridge and Ready for Hillary--are promoting Hillary Clinton. One of them, Ready for Hillary, successfully fended off a complaint to the FEC last month over its purchase of the mailing list compiled by Clinton's last presidential campaign. The FEC concluded that the sale by Clinton's 2008 campaign, which comprised names of her donors and supporters, to a super PAC promoting her 2016 campaign did not require Clinton to register as a federal candidate.

"That decision has allowed Clinton--and the two floors' worth of close associates she brought with her from the State Department--to continue her work with the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation undisturbed, an organization that takes funds, sometimes in multi-million dollar chunks, from foreign governments, foreign corporations and foreign individuals, among others."

Another blog notes that, while the Obama administration "has made some strides in making government records more accessible," it "has picked up where its predecessor left off in stonewalling the media, avoiding disclosure and thwarting accountability":

"Take its treatment of email. In addition to Hillary Clinton's private server, there is former Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson, who used the nom de pixel Richard Windsor for her email correspondence to evade FOIA requests. (In what must be some kind of record for government ineptitude, the EPA gave Richard Windsor an ethics aware.) The Internal Revenue Service's series of claims as to the disposition of Tea Party targeter Lois Lerner's emails turned out to be no longer operative, while the president himself invoked executive privilege to shield from disclosure emails sent by Attorney General Eric Holder relevant to the Fast and Furious scandal."

Regular readers of the MRC will recognize many of these as longrunning causes célèbres of the org. And the article continues to list even more Sunlight grievances against the administration.

But, as mentioned earlier, Houck, in discussing Sunlight's Bill Allison, threw in the Soros association then wrote, "To no one's surprise, the [Sunlight] expert parroted some pro-Clinton talking points"--Allison, you see, is just a mouthpiece for the Puppet Master.

Allison, by the way, authored both of the blog posts just quoted.

This same irrationality permeates all of the MRC's anti-Soros commentary.

When rolling out Soros as a magnet for its own fundraising, the MRC's rhetoric is savage, unambiguously referring to him as "The Master Puppeteer":

"George Soros has spent an astounding $52 million building the ‘Soros Web'--a vast array of organizations and associations dedicated to wiping freedom and democracy off the face of the earth. "These Soros legions are riddled with hundreds of America's most well-known media personalities, including CNN's David Gergen and Christiane Amanpour and the New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson. They represent only a tiny percentage of elite media leftists who are associated in one way or another with a Soros-funded entity. He is the puppet master of the liberal media."

The assertion about Soros's goal is, of course, laughable,[7] but insofar as the ugly anti-Semitic appeal, it can at least be said that the MRC knows its audience.

–j.

---

[1] Beck, in an example that became notorious, took to his incredibly popular Fox News show in 2010 to launch an extended attack on Soros, not only portraying him as a Puppet Master but openly calling him a "puppet master." Never one for subtlety, Beck fired off this first of what would become several volleys at Soros on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Nazi kickoff to the Holocaust. Only last month, Bill O'Reilly–the host of the top-rated show on Fox News–was plumbing the same dismal depths:

"Soros has now taken his ill-gotten gains and is financing the most radical left-wing organizations in America. He is the shadow puppet master behind corrupt far-left groups like Media Matters. Soros has his tentacles into political organizations like the Center for American Progress, which has provided operatives for the Obama administration, some of whom are now going over to Hillary Clinton's campaign. Few Americans even know who Soros is, but the 84-year old uber-leftist is behind much of the political strife in this country."

[2] For all the time Gainor and Somberg devote to it, Central European University--as the name itself informs us--isn't even an American institution. It's based in Soros's native Hungary. Soros himself founded it and it's the primary recipient of his donations to higher education. The authors quote Soros as saying that, "as a general rule I do not support higher education in the United States," then write that "this is inherently false seeing as  Soros gave more than $100 million to U.S. universities." But by their own figures, 3/4 of that total went to only one institution, his ex-wife's home base at Bard College. Elsewhere, they write that, "together, CEU and Bard received roughly 75 percent of Soros's total [education] contributions." In their frequent tangents and asides, the authors try to compare the global educational spending of Soros to educational spending in the U.S. by the oil billionaire Koch brothers, inevitably managing, in the process, to distort and misrepresent the criticism leveled at the latter.

[3] The authors will throw in just about any anti-Soros story they can find, no matter how minor:

"He ran into trouble in Thailand in 1997, as well. ‘The financier George Soros canceled a speech in Bangkok in February when protesters, including some respected local businesspeople, threatened to pelt him with rotten eggs and fruit.'"

And two paragraphs later:

"The next day he had to cancel a trip to Thailand ‘after protestors threatened to pelt him with rotten eggs and excrement.'"

[4] The authors' only real stab at a critical evaluation of these charges comes when they relate Soros's public battle with Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad. The authors relate that the attacks against Soros in that case "also were laced with anti-Semitism and easily discredited." No irony at all there, eh? If these attacks were so "easily discredited," why bring them up at all? And that this is the only listed item in this section of the "special report" that the authors challenge suggests, of course, that the other listed items from equally disreputable sources are credible.

[5] And while they advocate for their particular causes, they don't, as a rule, engage in electoral politics. They have their own separate and distinct missions--the Center for Responsive Politics tracks money in politics, MapLight correlates donations to politicians with how those politicians vote, the Drug Policy Alliance works toward ending the War On Drugs--but they're not out pimping some candidate or politician.

[6] Several of the prominent Soros-funded orgs, for example, strongly oppose the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling and seek to overturn it; the ACLU, which last year received the largest single grand in its history from Soros's Open Society Foundations, is one of the most prominent supporters of that ruling in the U.S.

[7] The notion that Soros is out to wipe out freedom is interesting, given that one of the MRC's big gripes, as expressed by Gainor and Somberg, is that "the Soros network is laughably left-wing: pro-abortion, pro-euthanasia, pro-gay marriage, pro-drug legalization, pro-union," etc.--in a phrase, pro-freedom. Something that makes the MRC laugh. Soros has a curious way of going about eradicating democracy as well–he spends several times more on democracy-promotion than the U.S. government's own National Endowment for Democracy.


[Note: This article was written for MRC Watch, a blog dedicated to a critique of the Media Research Center]

Mailman Attempts To Raise Awareness of Money in Politics, MRC Gang Goes Berzerk

MRC Watch Dept. - Doug Hughes was on a mission. The 61-year-old mailman from Florida wanted to raise some awareness about money in politics, so he boarded his gyrocopter last week and flew it into Washington D.C., violating the no-fly zone and landing on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol to personally deliver to congress letters expressing his concerns. As a news story, it’s a relatively minor tale about a guy who committed some minor civil disobedience in an effort to draw some attention to an important issue. But it’s a liberal issue and the response of the Media Research Center was fast, furious, preposterously authoritarian and, for such a lighthearted story, both remarkably ugly and completely hysterical.

And extensive. Newsbusters has run 8 articles in as many days on the subject of Hughes and the coverage he received. In them, Hughes is described as a “disgruntled mailman,” a “lefty gyro-copter loon” with a “liberal agenda” who carried out a “dangerous stunt“. Ken Shepherdwas appalled that MSNBC’s “seemed rather bemused rather than alarmed” by Hughes’s actions:

“Mr. Hughes is damn lucky he wasn’t injured or killed in the process of his stunt and that he didn’t injure an innocent bystander — he could have lost control of his aircraft and crashed into tourists on the National Mall, for example… [I]t is a deadly serious matter and a cable-news host like Wagner would do well to keep that in mind.”

There was, of  course, about as much "danger" in Hughes’s actions as there was of any aircraft falling out of the sky at random, but Shepherd continued this theme in another article, which objected to portraying Hughes in a less hysterical, more human way:

“It’s worth noting for the record that neither [Democratic Rep. Steve] Israel nor [Politico reporter] Vogel seemed incredibly concerned about the peril and inconvenience that Hughes unnecessarily put thousands of Washingtonians in, judging him a harmless and earnest man of sincere political conviction, if misguided tactics in communicating that vision.”

When ABC’s Good Morning America interviewed Hughes, Scott Whitlock asserted that while “no one was killed” by Hughes’s actions, “they could have been” and complained that the interview had presented Hughes as — gasp! — a likable guy!:

“…the tone of the segment was one of appreciation for an odd, but lovable rascal. [Host George] Stephanopoulos cheered Hughes’s ‘quirky sense of humor.'”

Kyle Drennen took the false assertion that Hughes’ actions were “dangerous” and tried to spin it into a standard right-wing persecution narrative, claiming that network news is “eager to falsely blame conservatives” for violent acts but that “none of the reports [on Hughes] attempted to connect the reckless action to heated Democratic rhetoric on the topic.” Drennen wants the networks to try to use Hughes to make Democrats stop talking about the issue of money in politics. Hughes “stunt,” he writer, constitutes

“reckless criminal action that could have put bystanders in real danger. Where was the press analysis of his political ideology? Where were the calls for Democrats to tone down their rhetoric to prevent such risky forms of protest?"

In another article, Drennen told us what kind of folks would support Hughes:

An update to the story at 1:50 p.m. noted Hughes winning a supporter on the Hill: “Richard Burns, 27, who said he works for a marijuana lobby group in Washington, stood in wonder and solidarity. ‘I don’t know whatever it was he was doing but I support him.'”

And so on.[*] Press outlets who offered any less-than-negative coverage, from the Tampa Bay Times to the Washington Post to Hardball, have been raked over the coals by the MRC gang.

All this over a mailman who simply wanted to draw some attention to money in politics.

–j.

---

[*] The MRC’s ideological jihadists make a regular practice of challenging the conservatism of conservatives who express any view with which the jihadists disagree and Scott Whitlock took the Hughes story as an opportunity to slam Nicolle Wallace of ABC’s The View on the grounds that she “yet again failed to offer the conservative perspective.” Her sin? “Wallace praised Doug Hughes, the postal worker who landed on the grounds of the Capitol, hyping, ‘He had a cause and I think he probably did his cause some good.'”


[Note: This article was written for MRC Watch, a blog dedicated to a critique of the Media Research Center]

Dickens Laments Declining Clinton Email Coverage, Declines To Share Reasons For It

MRC Watch Dept. - Geoffrey Dickens on Tuesday complained that major network news coverage of the Hillary Clinton email matter has been declining. The MRC tabulated the numbers for 7 weeks of coverage since the story broke in the New York Times. The initial reaction of the networks was a feeding frenzy:

“When news first broke that Clinton improperly used her own private e-mail account, the Big Three networks actually jumped to cover the story, filling their evening and morning shows with a total of 124 minutes and 55 seconds of airtime (NBC: 53 minutes, 51 seconds; CBS: 36 minutes, 39 seconds; ABC: 34 minutes, 25 seconds) within the first two weeks (March 3-16) of coverage that encompassed Hillary Clinton’s March 10 press conference.”

But coverage by week 3 had declined precipitously. A brief uptick in week 4 was followed by another decline and “the networks have essentially discarded the story, reducing their coverage to just a total of 2 minutes and 11 seconds (CBS: 14 seconds, ABC: 42 seconds, NBC: 1 minute, 15 seconds) by the seventh week.” Dickens complains that

“The waning interest in this latest Clinton controversy actually follows a familiar pattern of the networks initially covering Obama era scandals (IRS, Benghazi, VA) only to drop them like a hot potato and sadly seems to validate the Clinton strategy of stonewalling until they and their allies in the media can claim a controversy is old news and move on without ever really getting to the bottom of the story.”

Dickens doesn't even try to substantiate the charge of a “Clinton strategy of stonewalling,” something not really in evidence in this matter, and his account of the course of the story over these weeks is, at best, grossly misleading.

The controversy began on 2 March with a sloppy article in the New York Times that sought to scandalize Clinton’s use of a private email server for official business during her years as Secretary of State and alleged Clinton “may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record.” It’s all a lot of “may haves” because the author, Michael Schmidt, apparently didn't bother to learn anything concrete about the rules in place during Clinton’s tenure regarding such records or the procedure by which such records are preserved or if there even was an established procedure and if Clinton followed it. In the wake of the Times story, the press pounced, and the intense and extensive interest documented by the MRC ensued.

And the story began to fall apart almost immediately.

Clinton loyalists noted that, while the fact that Clinton had used a private email server was breathlessly treated as a scandalous revelation, it has actually been a matter of public record for 2 years. As the Times had noted, Clinton returned 55,000 pages of emails in response to a request by State last year, asserting she’d only withheld some that were of a personal rather than official nature. Old news. In spite of the Times’ insinuation that emails were supposed to be filed on official servers in real time, that was actually a feature of a law signed by Obama two years after Clinton had retired as Secretary of State. Experts including Jason Baron, who, in the Times piece, had raised serious concerns about Clinton’s practices, conceded there was nothing illegal about these practices. Clinton returning her emails after she retired apparently satisfied the regulations existing during her tenure.

That disposed of the most explosive of the Times’ allegations, using one of its own sources, no less.[1] Though this took a lot of the steam out of the story, Dickens doesn't even mention it in his detailed bemoaning of the decline in coverage.

While Dickens asserts that “unanswered questions still persist,” there’s really only one unanswered question related to Clinton herself: What was withheld? To that, we have Clinton’s insistence that she only withheld personal material and anything beyond that is probably unknowable. Lost to history. As a Clinton story, it quickly became a dead end. Clinton’s behavior reflects badly on her and has significant implications for her fitness to hold the executive office she now seeks but though Dickens complains about the story coming to be seen as a partisan fight, those are partisan political arguments and not subject to infinite clamor on the evening news without any new developments to cover.

Dickens mentions one such development, which didn't lead to a resurgence in coverage:

“Even a new angle on the e-mail scandal–the New York Times reported April 14 that Clinton never responded to a congressional inquiry [in December of 2012] that ‘directly asked’ if she had used a private e-mail account–failed to re-ignite the interest networks initially showed when the scandal first broke in March.”

But the Times story in question was just another sloppy job by Michael Schmidt. Its lede:

“Hillary Rodham Clinton was directly asked by congressional investigators in a December 2012 letter whether she had used a private email account while serving as secretary of state, according to letters obtained by The New York Times.

“But Mrs. Clinton did not reply to the letter. And when the State Department answered in March 2013, nearly two months after she left office, it ignored the question and provided no response.”

Schmidt obscures the fact that the congressional inquiry, which came from Darrel Issa (the clownish chairman of the House Oversight Committee), was a general letter sent, in identical form, to many cabinet officials at the same time, not just to Clinton. “Mr. Issa had sent letters to the State Department and other executive agencies,” he writes, his sole reference offered as a virtual afterthought in the closing paragraphs of his article (it was left to the Hill the next day to reproduce the letter and reveal it had been sent to 18 different officials). The letters went out only days before the Christmas break and only a few weeks before Clinton’s tenure at State came to an end. While Schmidt notes the State Department’s reply came in March 2013, he declines to share with his readers the fact that this was the same month Clinton’s private email server was first revealed to the public.[2] Schmidt does quote a Clinton aide as saying Clinton’s

“usage [of the private server] was widely known to the over 100 department and U.S. government colleagues she emailed, as her address was visible on every email she sent.”

…but he immediately drops the subject, declining to address its implications. It’s the torpedo that takes out his entire story, as among those who would have known of Clinton’s use of the private server–before it went public–were the members of the House Oversight Committee. Dickens, whose account of this is quoted in full above, is even less forthcoming than Schmidt.

There is a scandal in all of this, of course. One of the highest officials in the U.S. government was able to use a private email server over which she had complete control to conduct all of her official business. Then she was allowed to pick and choose which emails to return to the government for inclusion in the official record. The scandal is that, one of the central lessons of Watergate still unlearned, all of this was legal. The preservation of public records isn't a very sexy issue but it’s an important one to which lefty writers (including this one) and liberal interest groups have tried for years to draw attention. That article in the Hill referenced above appeared the day after the Times piece and hit this nail on the head:

“‘What she [Clinton] did was not technically illegal,’ said Patrice McDermott, a former National Archives staffer and the head of the Open The Government coalition, a transparency group.

“However, ‘it was highly inappropriate and it was inappropriate for the State Department to let this happen,’ she said…“John Wonderlich, the policy director at the Sunlight Foundation, agreed that the practice ‘seems like it’s not unlawful, which suggests to me that we’re in pretty serious need of a legal reform.’”

And reform, in fact, followed. Inadequate reform that should be followed up. That’s the matter that could have carried this story forward: it could be a spur for reform. But in spite of the MRC’s “liberal media” talk, the corporate press simply doesn't care about the concerns of public-interest-minded liberal groups who agitate on this issue and certainly isn't going to carry out a crusade on their behalf. While Clinton earns and has taken lumps for her activities being quite ill-considered and inappropriate–an outrage, really–and those who are predisposed to regard her every move as sinister see dark conspiracies in them, the policy that allows them is the real scandal, not Hillary Clinton.

Screamingly relevant to the larger project of Dickens and the MRC–portraying the media as hopelessly liberal–is that during the same timeframe as the Clinton email controversy, several “dark money” stories and scandals involving the top Republican presidential nominees have appeared in the press and just as promptly disappeared, having never been picked up by anyone. Media Matters has publicized the stories and has noted the lack of coverage given them. While, by Dickens’ own figures, the Clinton email matter has received 147 minutes of coverage on the major network newscasts, none of these stories have even been mentioned on any of those same newscasts. Not once. As MM documents, they've been almost as entirely ignored by the print media.

Don’t expect a Dickens “study” on that.

–j.

—

[1] Margaret Sullivan, the New York Times’ public editor, replied to criticism the article had received. She conceded the story “was not without fault,” but largely defended the story, limiting her own criticism to the fact that it was unclear on what regulation Clinton was supposed to have violated.

[2] The Clinton loyalists at press watchdog Media Matters provided further context the day after the Times story when they did some original reporting of their own and discovered that State’s reply to Issa, treated by Schmidt as a non-response, wasn't unusual.


[Note: This article was written for MRC Watch, a blog dedicated to a critique of the Media Research Center]

News Reviews: Critically Covering the Corporate Press

Hey, how 'bout a blog devoted to a critique of the corporate press? One day, I'll tell a story here...

--j.

The One About Carrie Underwood's New Song: Anatomy of a Persecution Narrative [Updated Below]

Convincing people they're persecuted can generate a strong emotional reaction, eh? The American right has, for years, forged phony persecution narratives into a potent propaganda weapon. When weaving their particular variants on these narratives, those of the Religious Right[tm] persuasion have made a habit of portraying those who criticize them--criticism almost invariably aimed at their politics, not their religion--as calling for persecution of "Christians," positioning themselves as the representatives of the entire Christian faith who are victimized by any disapproval of their backwards, authoritarian political views. The entire political program of the Religious Right[tm] is, of course, directed at persecuting huge swathes of the population; at their most comical, they present themselves as victims of persecution if they're disallowed from persecuting everyone else.

I go on about this today because, on and off since this morning, I've been tracking the latest Religious Right[tm] persecution narrative. Singer Carrie Underwood recently released a new song dealing with her Christian faith, "Something In the Water," and right-wing blogs across the internet are claiming atheists are just fuming over it.

"Atheists Outraged By Carrie Underwood's Latest Song," proclaims the headline at TellMeNow,. The article informs readers that "Atheists are outraged that such a hit-maker as Underwood would dare to sing about Christianity, but Carrie doesn’t seem to care."

Mr. Conservative sayeth, "Atheists Outraged By Carrie Underwood's Latest Song," an article that asserts, "Atheists are outraged that such a hit-maker as Underwood would dare to sing about Christianity, but Carrie doesn’t seem to care."

Clash Daily: "Whiny Punk Atheists Will Hate This New Carrie Underwood Song."

The Political Insider asserts, "Carrie Underwood Is Known For Being Nice, But She Has A TOUGH Message For Atheists Attacking Her New Song."

The tale began to grow. The Conservative Tribune claims "Atheists have a new target in their sights and it’s country music star Carrie Underwood, who recently released a new song expressing her Christian faith and values...  According to TheBlaze, Underwood has always been an outspoken defender of singing about religious themes and has a message for all the liberals and atheists who are whining and complaining about the lyrical content of her new hit... With the current state of pop culture being radically opposed to religion, especially Christianity, and traditional values, its refreshing and uplifting to see someone as popular as Carrie Underwood take a bold stand on her convictions and refuse to be silenced by atheist bullies."

With American News, the tale gets even taller: "Atheists Viciously Attack Carrie Underwood's New Song, Want It Banned." The article says "As part of their constant attack on religious freedom and anything Christian, it appears that atheists have founds a new target: Carrie Underwood." But, it says, Underwood is standing up to those no-accounts.

Two days later, American News made another pass at it. Under the headline "Carrie Underwood Fires Back Against Radical Atheists: 'If You Don't Like My Song...," we get the reiteration of the original charge: "As we recently reported, country singer Carrie Underwood has become a new target for atheist activists, following her release of 'Something in the Water', which expresses her feelings towards God and highlights experiences like baptism."

TheFrisky.com even quotes Underwood in its headline: "Carrie Underwood Addresses Her Atheists Haters: 'If You Don't Like It, Change The Channel." The accompanying story asserts that the new song

"has left some of her atheist fans less than thrilled. But despite the criticism, Carrie told Glamour that she’s not sorry for singing about her personal faith, and she’s certainly not planning on changing her tune.

"'Country music is different. You have that Bible Belt-ness about it. I’m not the first person to sing about God, Jesus, faith [or] any of that, and I won’t be the last. And it won’t be the last for me, either. If you don’t like it, change the channel.'"

And so on.

Astute readers who wade through these articles will notice something about all of them (besides the plagiarism, that is): Not one of them cites a single actual atheist, liberal or anyone else who is outraged, upset or expressing any critical sentiment at all toward the song in question, much less trying to bully anyone over it, ban it or any of the rest. There are no quotes. There aren't even any direct references to anyone doing anything of the kind.

Poking around the major atheist and freethought sites today, I haven't been able to come up with any either. I did find one writer at Patheos who had discovered this "controversy." Hemant Mehta's headline: "Atheists Don't Give A Damn About Carrie Underwood's New Song." He notes that "none of [these stories] actually name any atheist groups, websites, or even random individuals who have a problem with the song."

All of the articles use the Blaze, Glenn Beck's sewer, as their source, which is a big warning-sign, but surprisingly enough, Beck and his minions appear to be blameless in this matter. The original Blaze article to which they're all linking is just a 30 Sept. puff-piece for Underwood and the song. The Blaze, in turn, uses Deseret News as its source, but the article there is, likewise, puff. Neither make any claims about angry atheists raving against or trying to persecute poor, rich, white Christian girl singers.

All of the articles offering the false narrative suggest or directly insist Underwood has responded to these liberal/atheist attacks and two claim to directly quote her as doing so. Underwood could hardly respond to attacks that have never, in fact, occurred. A quick Google search for the "if you don't like my song" quote attributed to her by American News turns up nothing; it appears to be entirely fabricated. The "if you don't like it" quote attributed to her by TheFrisky, on the other hand, appears at both the Blaze and the Deseret News. It does appear to be real and does come from Glamour magazine, just as TheFrisky said, but contrary to TheFrisky's tale, Underwood didn't offer it in response to those (non-existent) attacks on "Something In The Water" and neither the Blaze nor Deseret News ever claim she did. As reported on Taste of Country, Underwood made those remarks over two years ago, long before that song existed, in response to a question about how her fans reacted to an even older Christian-themed song ("Jesus Take The Wheel") she'd done earlier in her career:

From the start, Carrie Underwood was never shy about her personal beliefs, especially when releasing her single, ‘Jesus Take the Wheel’ in the early part of her career. The song went on to become a powerful smash in country music, landing the ‘American Idol’ winner her first chart-topping hit.
In a recent interview with Glamour magazine, Underwood said the song’s content never worried her as far as how fans would embrace her or the song. “It wasn’t a worry to me at all,” she says in the magazine. “Country music is different. You have that Bible Belt-ness about it. I’m not the first person to sing about God, Jesus, faith [or] any of that, and I won’t be the last. And it won’t be the last for me, either. If you don’t like it, change the channel.”


Read More: Carrie Underwood Takes Pride in Using Religion in Her Music | http://tasteofcountry.com/carrie-underwood-using-religion-in-music/?trackback=tsmclip

From the start, Carrie Underwood was never shy about her personal beliefs, especially when releasing her single, ‘Jesus Take the Wheel’ in the early part of her career. The song went on to become a powerful smash in country music, landing the ‘American Idol’ winner her first chart-topping hit.
In a recent interview with Glamour magazine, Underwood said the song’s content never worried her as far as how fans would embrace her or the song. “It wasn’t a worry to me at all,” she says in the magazine. “Country music is different. You have that Bible Belt-ness about it. I’m not the first person to sing about God, Jesus, faith [or] any of that, and I won’t be the last. And it won’t be the last for me, either. If you don’t like it, change the channel.”


Read More: Carrie Underwood Takes Pride in Using Religion in Her Music | http://tasteofcountry.com/carrie-underwood-using-religion-in-music/?trackback=tsmclip

"From the start, Carrie Underwood was never shy about her personal beliefs, especially when releasing her single, 'Jesus Take the Wheel' in the early part of her career. The song went on to become a powerful smash in country music, landing the 'American Idol' winner her first chart-topping hit.

"In a recent interview with Glamour magazine, Underwood said the song’s content never worried her as far as how fans would embrace her or the song. 'It wasn’t a worry to me at all,' she says in the magazine. 'Country music is different. You have that Bible Belt-ness about it. I’m not the first person to sing about God, Jesus, faith [or] any of that, and I won’t be the last. And it won’t be the last for me, either. If you don’t like it, change the channel.'"

Underwood released "Jesus Take The Wheel" back in 2005 and, just to dot every i, please note that even these comments regarding it weren't a response to any criticism that song was alleged to have received.

The image proffered by this phony story are very familiar to those who follow these matters, an heroic Christian standing up to persecuting liberal/atheist bullies who seethe at mere public expressions of Christianity and want to actively silence it. When one draws back the curtain, all of those villains are revealed to be merely a string of ugly fictions conjured up by conservative "Christians," who feel no compunction against freely lying in order to demonize those whom they despise, projecting on to those people their own sick hatred. There's something in the water they're drinking, alright. One suspects it isn't Jesus.

--j.


UPDATE (7 Nov., 2014) - The bullshit just keeps getting deeper. From axs: "Carrie Underwood Stirs Up Controversy With Atheists On 'Something In The Water'." The article claims "Atheist fans are speaking out and they don't like it [the song]. Well the thing is, Underwood doesn't care what they think about it."

From Headline Politics, now more than a month after the rest of these stories: "Christian Carrie Underwood's NEW MUSIC VIDEO is Making Atheists FURIOUS!" From the brief article:

"Unlike many young pop stars, Carrie Underwood is proud to proclaim her belief in the Bible and Jesus Christ. So when she release the new hit song 'Something In The Water' and its music video (above), left-wing Atheists across America were repeatedly attacking her for the lyrics and standing up for her faith in the public square.As you can tell from this music video, Ms. Underwood is not backing down from a fight."


UPDATE (12 Jan., 2015) - Months after these stories came and went, this same bullshit has reappeared, this time being peddled by Breitbart (6 Jan., 2015), one of the most popular nut-right sewers on the internet: "Atheists Won't Stop Carrie Underwood From Singing About Faith: 'If You Don't Like It, Change the Channel.'" The article asserts, "Here is a sample of the lyrics that struck a nerve with various atheist groups," then reprints some of the song's lyrics. "Underwood, who stands for traditional American values, issued the following statement in response to the attacks on her new song, which just hit #1 on the Country charts this week," and then the years-old Glamour quote is recycled.

On the positive side, fact-checker Snopes debunked these false claims, noting along the way that they'd spread to Twitter as well:

"Claims that atheists are trying to ban Underwood’s song 'Something in the Water' are faulty on multiple levels. No atheists have complained about the song’s content; and Underwood’s remarks implying otherwise were made years prior to the track’s release and in response to a completely unrelated question."

Clay Waters Defends Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, Leaves Out The Defense Part (And The “Republican” Part)

MRCWatch Dept. - The recent antics of newly-minted Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, offered in opposition to the nomination of Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense, have provoked comparisons to McCarthyism from some of Cruz’s Senate colleagues. Clay Waters, on Monday, whined that the New York Times, in a news story and op-ed column, had reported said comparisons. Waters declined to detail why Cruz is being subjected to them or to make any case for either the comparisons or the reporting of them being inappropriate. Waters’ article is unexceptional--basically Newsbusters’ usual nonsense--but it is a useful spotlight for the state of affairs in the Newsbusters' corner of the far-right fever swamp.

It's a standard Newsbusters technique to identify any view not emerging from that particular plot of ideological bottom-land as "liberal" and thus that of a blood enemy, even when it's being voiced by other conservatives--the kind of conservatives not approved by Newsbusters. The present fantasy narrative of the far-right’s activist base--the element of American politics the press carelessly labels "the Tea Party"[1]--is that of embattled reactionary rebels fighting not only an omni-powerful liberal Establishment but a hopelessly liberal, treacherous and entrenched Republican Establishment as well.[2]

Reflecting this fantasy, Waters’ headline refers to "Tea Party Sen. Ted Cruz" rather than “Republican Senator.” His opening identifies Cruz as a "Tea Party politician." Though Waters offers excerpts from some articles that identify Cruz as a Republican, he at no point does this himself. A particularly interesting departure given the fact that it's a standing gripe by Newsbusters that the press sometimes declines to provide a party identification for Democratic politicians caught in scandal.[3] Today alone, in fact, Newsbusters ran three different articles about various press organs failing to identify former Illinois Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. as a Democrat.

But Waters, of course, doesn’t think Cruz’s behavior is scandalous and, in fact, doesn’t even tell his readers why it's being compared to that of Joe McCarthy. He just wants to write off the comparison as a smear, which necessitates leaving his readers in the dark about the messy details. Times reporter Jonathan Weisman, Waters breathlessly fumes, "even put a mike in front of not one but two liberal Democratic senators who likened Cruz to notorious Sen. Joe McCarthy." A big deal, perhaps, in Newsbusters Land, where any coverage of any comment by any liberal Democrat is portrayed as a scandal, but hardly a basis for any real complaint. That Weisman also "put a mike in front of not one but two" conservative Republican Senators, who also criticized Cruz along exactly the same lines, doesn’t slow Waters’ roll at all.

Rather, he approvingly quotes crackpot National Review writer Michael Auslin’s reaction:

"Having largely dropped the charge of racism once leveled against tea partiers, the MSM has clearly looked for another slander, and now they’ve found it. Expect to hear McCarthyism dropped around a lot in coming months, whenever Republicans push back hard against Barack (I’m Not The Emperor) Obama’s hard-left choices in his second term. [The NY Times' Jonathan] Weisman's reporting is too vapid to actually explore the reasons Cruz and his conservative Senate compatriots have voted the way they have; rather, it is interested only in portraying them as slightly less deranged than General Jack Ripper in Dr. Strangelove."

The present push-back, identified as a reaction against one of "Obama’s hard-left choices," is, in fact, aimed at Obama’s nomination of Chuck Hagel to head the Defense Department. Hagel is, in the real world, an extremely conservative Republican. A former Senator sporting an 83.7% lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union, Hagel would more readily serve as an example of Obama’s persistent habit, throughout his administration, of stabbing his liberal constituents in the back by choosing more conservative nominees for nearly every major post to which he's made an appointment.

Though Waters  wants to write off the McCarthy comparisons as a smear, he declines to challenge their validity in any way, other than merely labeling them as a smear, an approach not unlike that of McCarthy himself. Challenging them would require telling his readers exactly what Cruz had been doing and that would both validate the McCarthyism charge and expose the smear talk for what it really is.

When Chuck Hagel got the Defense chief appointment, Cruz apparently decided that nomination was so noxious that he could justify throwing away anything remotely resembling moral or ethical standards when it came to opposing it. For example:

"We do not know... if he [Hagel] received compensation for giving paid speeches at extreme or radical groups... It may be that he spoke at radical or extreme groups or anti-Israel groups and accepted financial compensation."

Sounds rather serious, until one learns that the charges were based on nothing at all. Cruz pulled them straight out of an orifice. We don’t know if Hagel did such a thing in the same we we don’t know if he’s secretly Santa Clause--both propositions  are equally credible and have equal evidence in their favor.

Cruz was just getting started. Hagel had, for two years, worked for Corsair Capital, a private equity firm, work for which he was paid a total of $200,000. Like most employees, he didn’t know where his employer got the money with which it paid him, and Cruz saw this as an opportunity to inject even more poison:

"It is, at a minimum, relevant to know if that $200,000 that he deposited in his bank account came directly from Saudi Arabia, came directly from North Korea."

Propositions for which there is, again, no support at all. Cruz wasn’t finished:

"We saw with this nomination something truly extraordinary, which is the government of Iran formally and publicly praising the nomination of a defense secretary. I would suggest to you that to my knowledge, that is unprecedented to see a foreign nation like Iran publicly celebrating a nomination.”

...which is a bald-faced lie, a smear with, again, no basis in reality.

And so on. This is the business Waters is hiding from his readers, the reason Cruz’s behavior is being labeled “McCarthyism,” a characterization that is not only applicable but inescapable but that Waters would have us think is just a smear aimed by mean press liberals at a “Tea Party” pol.

--j.

---

[1] The “Tea Party” was nothing more than a faux “movement” created by professional astroturfers and elements of the far-right press. It had no numbers, no power and couldn’t elect anyone. The goal of astroturf though, is to present the illusion of a popular movement and in adopting "Tea Party" as shorthand for a portion of the same far-right activist base that has always been with us, the press is doing the astroturfers' jobs for them.

[2] In recent days, Karl Rove has become the poster child for this “Republican Establishment” and a hate-figure on the far right because of his just-stated goal of trying to support far-right Republicans who can actually win at the polls and of defeating the kind of openly batshit-crazy reactionaries who have no chance of winning a general election.

[3] When the press fails to provide the party identity of scandalized Republicans, Newsbusters is silent.