May 31, 2004
ARE THEY LIES IF YOU MAKE YOUR OWN POSITIONS MURKY ENOUGH?:
From Bush, Unprecedented Negativity: Scholars Say Campaign Is Making History With Often-Misleading Attacks (Dana Milbank and Jim VandeHei, May 31, 2004, Washington Post)
It was a typical week in the life of the Bush reelection machine.Last Monday in Little Rock, Vice President Cheney said Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry "has questioned whether the war on terror is really a war at all" and said the senator from Massachusetts "promised to repeal most of the Bush tax cuts within his first 100 days in office."
On Tuesday, President Bush's campaign began airing an ad saying Kerry would scrap wiretaps that are needed to hunt terrorists.
The same day, the Bush campaign charged in a memo sent to reporters and through surrogates that Kerry wants to raise the gasoline tax by 50 cents.
On Wednesday and Thursday, as Kerry campaigned in Seattle, he was greeted by another Bush ad alleging that Kerry now opposes education changes that he supported in 2001.
The charges were all tough, serious -- and wrong, or at least highly misleading.
The immediate retreat from wrong to misleading gives up the game. Just to take one easy example, Mr. Kerry has indeed suggested that terrorism is more of a criminal than a military matter. He may even be right. He certainly was about the gas tax. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 31, 2004 4:23 PM
Shall we document all the "wrong" or, at leat, "misleading" things Mr. Milbank has said about the President?
Posted by: AC at May 31, 2004 5:11 PMMilbank is a prime example of a "fair" reporter who is pretty much a DNC spokesperson.
Posted by: AWW at May 31, 2004 5:37 PMYou guys should have seen Byron York take Milbank apart in National Review a few months ago. Milbank wrote one of his "Bush is a liar" pieces with "supporting examples," and York analyzed every one of them and demonstrated how Milbank had twisted the president's words. Ramesh Ponnuru once came across a "shocking" Cheney quote in an article, but decided to look into it more closely when he saw that Milbank was a co-author. Sure enough, Milbank had taken the quote completely out of context.
If I find that York article, I'll post the relevant facts here. It's one brutal takedown. Milbank is a DNC automaton, nothing more.
Posted by: Matt at May 31, 2004 7:55 PM
Really -- just the other day I saw an ad that accused John Kerry of dragging some guy behind his pickup truck ...
"Scholars Say" as if that means a d@m*d thing. If there is a more biased and less honest group of people in this country, than our so called scholars (not that the legions of professors ginding out tomes on the hermenutics of Homer Simpson deserve the title scholar), I will deep fry and eat OJ's Red Sox cap.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at May 31, 2004 11:33 PMThis is exactly the sort of comment that sends journalists foaming at the mouth about the dangers of the internet. They don't expect to be read that closely, and, as demonstrated, what they write doesn't stand up to it.
It is enough to fool people like Brad DeLong, who thinks of Millbank as a national treasure because the article supports his position. Sigh. About that comment on "scholars" ....
Posted by: Arnold Williams at June 1, 2004 12:18 AM