Conservatives shoot and miss with Kerry pic

December 28, 2006

kerry
I’ll spare you the litany of links, but several of the right’s major blogs yesterday were all aflutter over a picture of John Kerry, in Iraq a couple of weeks ago, apparently sitting alone at a mess hall. The picture, as the story went, proves that Kerry’s “botched joke” has caused lingering resentment among men and women in uniform. If the troops respected Kerry, he wouldn’t have been sitting by himself at the breakfast shown in the photo.

The photo, and the accompanying narrative about how the troops avoided Kerry, made the rounds by way of far-right radio-host Scott Hennen, who claims the “priceless story” was sent by “a friend of mine serving in Iraq.” (If Hennen’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he has an interesting history with the White House.)

The problem, however, is that the “priceless story” may not be true. Justin Rood explains.

At Hennen’s site, commenter “Anthony” noted that the picture’s embedded data, just a right-click away, shows the picture was taken on January 9, 2006 — several months before Kerry botched his joke….

News accounts at the time put Kerry in England around that time — which might explain the giant Union Jack hanging on the far wall.

At PowerLine, another problem surfaced: As commenter “Angus” noted, the flag hanging to the right of the Union Jack belongs to Portugal, which withdrew its mighty 120-man coalition force from Iraq nearly two years ago.

Between Cliff May’s email yesterday, and Kerry’s questionable pic today, the right isn’t having any luck at all, are they?

At a certain point, this is just trivia. The right enjoys taking cheap shots at Kerry, so whether the photo — and the story behind the photo — are legitimate or not is almost irrelevant. If we learn for certain the picture is not what Hennen and others claim, they’ll just find some other reason to smear Kerry.

But a few certain facts remain:

* Kerry is a decorated war hero, and most of his critics aren’t.

* Any suggestion that Kerry’s “botched joke” was criticism of the troops is ridiculous.

* Kerry chose to spend time during the holiday season with troops in Iraq, and most of his critics didn’t.

* Kerry has spent the past few years being right about the war in Iraq, and most of his critics haven’t.

This isn’t about 2008; this is about a little decency. There’s reason to believe the photo is bogus, but even if we never know for sure, the glee with which the right smears Kerry is absurd.

Update: I have a follow-up post on this subject here.

Well, if the reports of troops lining up “out the door” to get autographs from Bill O’Reilly are true, then Kerry’s “botched joke” is more an accurate description of reality.

As a veteran myself, allow me to remind you all that the military generally does accurately represent the country. There are the same percentage of morons and halfwits in the military as there are in the population in general. And they rise as high in the organization as the morons and halfwits do in civilian life. Just as in civilian life, the morons and halfwits in the upper ranks are unlikely to promote the intelligent and the competent, whose intelligence and competence would demonstrate their personal lack of both.

  • This isn’t about 2008; this is about a little decency. There’s reason to believe the photo is bogus, but even if we never know for sure, the glee with which right smears Kerry is absurd.

    Decency rates far behind their need to justify their support for BoyGeorgetheDeciderer. Desperate times call for desperate smears.

    As for the photo, it seems pretty obvious that Kerry has his head turned to listen to someone who has been cropped from the shot. Pathetic.

  • Add this

    * Republicans always get tripped up by technology. Al Gore may not have invented the internet (though he was responsible for pushing it in Congress), but Republicans still seem easily confused.

    This, of course, is a corollary of the more general “Republicans always get tripped up by the real world”.

  • I think them loving this is symptomatic of the right’s love of their particular narrative rather than with actual facts or with reality in general. Look at their hostility to science. Look at their obssession of the “liberal media” meme no matter what the evidence to the contrary suggests. Look at the Schiavo matter and their little crusade against the dark forces they see making war on Christmas. Heck, look at the bush administration and Iraq, Brown and Katrina, etc., in other words, their lack of emphasis on policy.

    A few days ago they were atwitter with that email of dubious orgin and and that picture. Both are not exactly what they purport and both are trumpeted as something new and right (or at least right enough for their purposes).

  • The pettiness of most political pundits and observers is always amazing to me. He we are dealing with some of the most important issues in the world, but most of the chattering class can only concern itself with pedantic minutiae, “he said”-“she said” and “scandals” that are forgotten about almost immediately.

  • As a reminder, for those of you not reading Steve’s posts back then:

    Why I couldn’t care less about ‘Memogate’

    Posted 9:58 am January 11, 2005:

    I hope my readers aren’t expecting too much in the way of commentary on the “scandal” surrounding the CBS/Dan Rather/bogus memos/Bush’s Guard service story. This may be the political story-of-the-day, but the truth is, I don’t care.

    Yes, I realize CBS screwed up in a huge way. Those involved with the story were careless, reckless, and unprofessional. Still, I don’t care.

    The reasons for my lack of concern are three-fold.

    First, the point of the story — that Bush never fulfilled his obligations to the National Guard — is still true. CBS relied on bogus documents and failed to apply standards used by journalists at the high-school level, but the hoopla surrounding their ridiculous mistakes doesn’t change the fact that our commander-in-chief, the one who smears war heroes when it’s politically convenient, did not fulfill his responsibilities to the National Guard and shirked his duties to the military in a time of war.

    Second, as media screw-ups go, the 60 Minutes flap is hardly the most critical. Jayson Blair, Jack Kelley, and Stephen Glass literally made up stories out of whole cloth for major publications, Bob Novak’s reporting has at times been literally felonious, and many others (cough, Judith Miller, cough) have been embarrassments to the news industry. Indeed, the media’s Whitewater coverage makes “Memogate” look like a typo. As Atrios put it:

    [T]he worst Rather has been accused of by sensible people is letting partisanship cloud his judgment. Accepting that as true just for sake of argument, it’s still a far less egregious sin than most of the Whitewater-era horseshit which has never been acknowledged as horsesh*t by the liberal media, even though unlike the Rather incident, much of that horsesh*t was clearly deliberately manufactured by the producers and reporters. These events were recycled and echoed throughout the entire liberal media, with no one calling foul and no one calling for their heads. Without making any statement about what the appropriate consequences for “Rathergate” should be, it’s clear that the media attention by that liberal media and the actual consequences have been much greater than dozens of worse incidents involving clear deliberate deception by people in the media.

    And, finally, I really don’t care about “Memogate” because one news program getting one story’s support materials wrong pales in comparison to a White House getting an entire war wrong at the same time.

    Once it became obvious that the network had screwed up, CBS appointed outsiders to conduct a thorough internal investigation to review the network’s mistakes and recommend preventative measures for the future. Four people have been fired as a result and their national anchor is heading into retirement under a cloud of scandal.

    Simultaneously, the Bush White House was getting every detail of the war in Iraq wrong. Once it became obvious that the president had screwed up, there was no internal investigation, external investigations were discouraged, no one has been fired, and responsible parties were promoted.

    It reminds me of one of my all-time favorite Daily Show exchanges, broadcast in September.

    Stephen Colbert: There’s got to be some accountability. Dan Rather is the head — the commander-in-chief, if you will — of his news organization. He’s in the ultimate position of power who made a harmful decision based on questionable evidence. Then, to make things worse, he stubbornly refused to admit his mistake, choosing instead to “stay the course” and essentially occupy this story for too long. This man has got to go.

    Jon Stewart: Um, we’re talking about Dan Rather.

    Stephen Colbert: Yes, Jon, Dan Rather. CBS is in chaos, unsafe, driven by internal rivalries. If you ask me, respectable, reputable outsiders need to be brought in to help the rebuilding effort.

    Jon Stewart: At CBS News.

    Stephen Colbert: Yeah, at CBS News. What possible other, unrelated situation could my words be equally applicable to? Now, people need to be held accountable: the commander-in-chief, the vice president, the secretary of defense, the national security advisor…everyone at CBS News needs to go.

    With this in mind, it’s just a little too difficult to get worked up over the “Memogate” story.

  • Gee, Thomas, from what I can tell, CB chastized CBS in his ’05 post, but simply didn’t think it was worth getting his boxers in a twist about it. After all, at that point and time the right had spent the better part of two years just relying on faulty info to support a “real” story, but also making stuff up out of thin air. Which the right still does on a daily basis.

    I know all of you on the right just about reach climax when bringing up the CBS news story, but if you want to get into the “what’s real” game when it comes to comparing left vs. right media, you best bring an ideological helmet and medical staff, becuase you’d get your assed trounced.

  • you know, if the right wants to spend all of its time re-fighting 2004, and concentrate all of its fire on Kerry (who I predict will announce in 2007 that he is NOT running for President), i couldn’t be happier. Yeah, its dishonest, crass, childish and wholly lacking in basic decency. But every day they are not spending their time and resources on Clinton, Obama, Edwards, or even Gore is a day they get further from holding the WH in 2008. So go ahead, yahoos of the right, and take aim at Kerry every day between now and the election. . .

  • I’m simply making the comparison, folks. You get to decide why Steve’s boxers are twisted this time around.

  • I’d have to say that Steve is just pointing out the right’s apparent obsession with Democrats who aren’t currently running for national office.

    After all, don’t you all have some culture war to fight against people who are different than you?

  • Call it “insurance” if you’d like. I will believe Kerry is not running when I see it with my own two eyes.

  • He presents the facts and you decide: Thomas and Faux News – twins separated at birth? 🙂

  • Thomas–
    So showing a photo of Kerry sitting at a table obviously talking to someone out of the frame is “insurance”? How about the picture at Malkin’s site that shows Kerry at a table full of people? What’s that?

    Quite frankly, if that’s what you call “insurance,” you may want to get a refund on your premiums because your policy ain’t worth shit.

    And maybe you — or anyone else — can explain to me what in the hell the picture has to do with anything other than the right’s ability to make something out of nothing, and it’s inability to get the hell over it.

  • Speaking of which, did any of you see Rick Warren’s sermon from Saddleback Church on Fox News over Christmas?

  • Unholy Moses:

    Maybe someone else will be able to explain it (I’m still trying to figure out how to avoid typing “orange” for every single post).

  • I’m still trying to figure out how to avoid typing “orange” for every single post.

    That should you keep you occupied for … well, forever.

    🙂

  • Very funny, but I can multi-task AND post about the liberal bias in the media all day long. As for someone “currently running for national office”, how about this guy?

  • Dan Rather was just the tip of the iceburg (and you will notice I never resort to personal attacks).

  • Very funny, but I can multi-task AND post about the liberal bias in the media all day long. As for someone “currently running for national office”, how about this guy?

    YouTube is blocked here at work, so maybe someone can tell me how devastating the video is in reality.

    Is Edwards sitting at an uncrowded table?!

    Did he screw up a joke?!

    Was he **gasp** windsurfing?!?!?!

    SOMEONE SHARE WITH ME THE HORRORS THAT ARE JOHN EDWARDS’ EATING HABITS, HUMOR AND HOBBIES!!

    Oh, and if someone could double check the kerning in the comments section of the video in question, that’d be great. Thanks.

  • “Once it became obvious that the network had screwed up, CBS appointed outsiders to conduct a thorough internal investigation to review the network’s mistakes and recommend preventative measures for the future. Four people have been fired as a result and their national anchor is heading into retirement under a cloud of scandal.”

    Gotta love acountability.

    I’ve always wondered about the “liberal media bias”,

    How did the GOP keep control of Congress from 1994 to now if you had a media out to undermine them?

    How did the election debacle from 2000 get shut down immediately once the SC ruled in favor of Bush? Wouldn’t a “liberal medai” have hammered at this story for months afterwards?

    Why did a majority oft Americans contiue to support the war in Iraq until this year, when the “liberal media” was only reporting negative stories?

    And finally, how did Bush win reelection in 2004 if he had the full power of the “liberal media” against him?

    There are two conclusions I can draw. One, that there is a liberal media bias, but it has no effect on policies, legislation, or the thinking of the American people. In which case, it’s threat is non-existent.
    Or two, there is no liberal media bias.

    Moses,
    From what I saw, it shows him brushing his hair, like he was getting ready to go on camera.

  • Just to pick off some low-hanging fruit first, we can all at least agree with Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, who admitted recently what many conservatives have long argued: taxpayer-funded National Public Radio (NPR) leans heavily to the left politically, right? Don’t you think the recent news about Sandy Berger would have been FRONT PAGE news across NPR and every network / national newspaper had it been a former NSA from a Republican Administration? As for impact of the liberals in media, another possiblity is that Bush would have won with landslide victories, or retained at least ONE HOUSE of Congress, were it not for the constant bashing.

    In an earlier blog posting to NewsBusters.org, the Media Research Center’s (MRC) director of media analysis Tim Graham noted that Kurtz had previously withheld judgment and even proclaimed himself “agnostic” on whether MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann used his program to advance a left-wing agenda.

    “The true test will come the next time there’s a Democratic president,” Kurtz insisted in a Washington Post online chat — please tell me with a straight face that you think Olberman is going to attack the next Democratic president anywhere close to this one — even Kurtz later conceded “there’s no other daily cable show” that gives President Bush “such a hard time night after night.”

    http://www.businessandmedia.org/articles/2006/20061002113634.aspx

  • I notice the John Edwards “Tomorrow Begins Today” web ad popping up everywhere too. Interesting . . .

  • If there is a Liberal media bias, why do I have to go online to know whats happening in the US and Iraq? I see a five second shot of a tank burning and an Iraqi prodding the wreckage , and thats the coverage. Considering there are 100 Iraqis dying everyday, would a Lib media bias be highlighting these things by showing the horrors of this war? But we get nothing .Nothing but a two minute report once every 24 hours on mainstream media. Kinda kills that Lib media talking point.

  • Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz “admitted” that NPR has a liberal bias?

    Wow! That’s convincing!

    What’s Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz’s GOP operative wife’s name, again? the one who worked for Arnnold Schwarzennagger? Would FoxNews ‘liberal’ Juan Williams be an example of that bias? Or Cokie Roberts, who became a Republican because Bill Clinton got a blowjob (unlike Steve Roberts)?

  • It seems well worth noting that “Ben of Mesopotamia” — aka Benjamin Runkle — one of the RW bloggers who first really pushed hard on this non-story about the photo in question, is a self-described communications specialist (which means, in some quarters, ‘propaganda specialist’) who has worked for the DOD, the NSC, and according to his blog’s ‘About Me’ blurb is a “Harvard PhD and Presidential speechwriter called back to Active Duty for Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

    Is this another example of BushCo’s proven policy of planting propaganda mouthpieces into supposedly non-partisan bailiwicks so that they can churn out pro-administration spin and misinformation? Could this be another sock-puppet soldier embedded with the troops so that he can influence them on the ground and feed back pre-canned points to the folks at home?

    I’m not saying that he’s just another paid BushCo spokespuppet hiding behind a blogname, because I don’t have access to enough facts to prove or disprove that. But given the little bit of facts that are available to us on this end, especially coupled with this administration’s known history of using plants and fake pundits to feed false information to the public, it certainly seems to me like this is something that bears further investigation by those with more access to the details –like, for example, the Carpetbagger Report team.

  • The recent story about Sandy Berger probably didn’t much attention probably because he had already pleaded guilty last year. So it’s kind of a footnote to old news.

    You are right about Republican NSAs getting more attention. Of course, Reagan’s did because of their involvment in that little Iran-Contra thing (something about selling weapons to a terrorist-supporting state, I think).

    As for Bush getting robbed of a landslide, his margin of victory was slightly more than the reelection margin of that darling of the liberal media, Bill Clinton.
    And this landslide theft apparently did not dampen Bush’s spirits, as he soon after would speak of this election giving him a mandate and “political capital”.

    So it takes the liberal media 12 years to help the Democrats win back Congress? Wow, with friends like that,…..

    “…were it not for the constant bashing.”
    That’s like the lousy student bitching to the teacher that his shitty grades are keeping him from graduating.

    “MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann used his program to advance a left-wing agenda. ”
    So Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly, Savage, Ingraham, Gibson, Beck, and the rest of them are allowed to push their collective conservative agendas, but KO isn’t?

    “please tell me with a straight face that you think Olberman is going to attack the next Democratic president anywhere close to this one”
    You mean like how the above-mentioned names attack Bush like they attacked Clinton?

  • I don’t know of anyone with a functioning knowledge of media who can even utter Howie ‘The Hack’ Kurtz’s name with a straight face.
    I’m always amused and bewildered when a wingnut goes off about ‘the liberal media’. It’s like they’ve just written STOOPID across their forehead and still expect to be taken seriously. I just can’t do it.
    But I’m an easily amused kind of guy. If we’re going to discuss ‘the liberal media’ can we expand the discussion to include other, equally deserving topics? I’m thinking alien abduction, bigfoot sightings, and faked moon landings.

  • Ed (#3): ” Republicans always get tripped up by technology.”

    Hey man, it’s haaaaard work operatin’ one of them computer doo-hickeys and shootin’ stuff down the tubes around the internet when you lack opposable thumbs and frontal lobes! They say them things is real “user-friendly” right now, but they sure don’t cut us no slack, now do they?

    —Any Republican in Right Blogistan

  • Tom,

    They have the Google, so that makes it easier. And as Bush so aptly put it, it’s the best way to ‘hear there’s rumors on the Internets.’

    Except getting those e-mails through the tubes can be a real bitch if they have attachments. Sometimes the paperclips fall off.

  • Malkin followed up here. The picture appears to be legit. Embrace the reality, liberals. American soldiers can’t stand Kerry and won’t come near the guy. No surprise, really, considering the “botched joke” debacle. The picture shows that he embarked on a botched visit.

  • So how come one of the photos at Malkin’s site shows Kerry surrounded by soliders? And in the disputed photo, he’s obviously engaging in a conversation with someone off camera. Maybe a soldier, maybe not.

    But just because he has a couple of empty seats next to him doesn’t mean the soldiers are shunning him. I’ve sat by myself in messhalls before, usually because I was late getting to chow, and they weren’t that busy. Were my squad members ignoring me? No,….. well, maybe.

    Hell, I’m sure we all have photos of us at functions or in public that make you look like you’re sitting by yourself. Were you being shunned?

    Now this shit is just getting silly. We’re arguing over semantics and dates and flags in pictures. Who cares? Okay, you know what? Yes, the photos are real. Yes, in one photo Kerry is sitting at a table with empty chairs. No, soldiers were not shunning him over a stupid joke.

    There, everyone happy? Good-fucking-night.

    “American soldiers can’t stand Kerry and won’t come near the guy. No surprise, really, considering the “botched joke” debacle.”

    Yeah, a botched joke blown out of proportion is really more damaging to troop morale than say, oh, this comment:

    “As you know, you have to go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you want,”

  • The photo doesn’t appear to be a photoshop job. I’m a steadfast Kerry supporter and rather than go down the road of photoshop doctoring I think there’s a number of plausible explanations why Kerry was at a table that wasn’t full, including that he could have lingered there after others left and their places were cleared away.

    The wingnuts hate Kerry with a passion, they will turn the slightest thing into sad, sorry twist to play their games. We’ve seen this a thousand times now. — So, John Kerry Was In Iraq.

  • “fake but accurate”?
    ————–Thomas

    Hmmm…looking at the phorograph, ot seems that old men in suits outnumber young men in fatigues. Old women in dresses outnumber young men in fatigues. Then there’s the cadre-or-two of waiters (you know, Tommie—the guys in white shirts and black vests) who also outnumber young men in fatigues.

    And your “Look! A shiny thing!” stunt of changing the subject just doesn’t work any more. When the Reich is in such a bother that they can’t even tell a lie with some modicum of attention paid to the accuracy of the illusion, then I would suggest that it’s really “someone else” whose got a wedgie….

  • Who gives a shit whether the photo is real or not? What is this, the Charles Johnson grayscale test? All it proves is that John Kerry has spent more time in Iraq (and Vietnam) than the entire wingnut brigade will ever spend there in all of their miserable lifetimes.

  • The photo was photoshopped. The picture is 300×225 pixels. That is not a possible resolution for the camera it was taken with, which has 640×480 as its smallest resolution. One of the properties of the picture is that the Creating Application is Photoshop. So, the question is how much was done to the picture in Photoshop.

  • Steve:

    I don’t think it was some “stunt” as even 2Manchu proved we could discuss both this specific instance as well as the general liberal media bias. I already granted you guys that Fox News and conservative talk radio is a backlash against the mainstream press (and I would think it is obvious that NBC and the New York Times is about as “mainstream” as you can get YMMV).

  • Jim and JoeW:

    I admit I don’t listen to NPR much, but I have heard Armstrong Williams a few times, so I’m not saying it is 100% liberal 24/7. There are lots of specific examples, though, if you really want to discuss NPR. I would have thought that was a given, and then we could discuss mainstream media. But, maybe not. I personally have heard the following commentators trash Bush: Lenore Skenazy of the New York Daily News, Joe Davidson of BET.com, and Kevin Phillips (who I think used to work for Nixon curiously). Others who give regular political commentary on NPR are admittedly less easy to categorize as either left or right. Matt Miller, for instance, normally takes left-of-center stands, but he says he is the “center” chair on the Los Angeles–based public radio show “Left, Right and Center” and has a self-described ideology of “radical centrism.” I’m not sure where to place him honestly, but I wouldn’t mind discussing it in a civil manner. Let me know if that is too “stoopid” for you.

  • This was interesting as well, from someone who listens to NPR more than I can stand to:

    “National Public Radio is properly understood, even by the media, as radio by and for liberals, not the general public. As Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz puts it, the media landscape stretches “from those who cheer Fox to those who swear by NPR.”

    The only ones who seem not to know that the left has a massive, taxpayer-funded radio network of 700 affiliates are the liberals trying to sell investors on their own private-sector talk-radio network. A recent PBS “NewsHour” story on talk radio turned ridiculous when reporter Terence Smith allowed liberal-network booster Jon Sinton to proclaim: “Every day in America on the 45 top-rated talk radio stations, there are 310 hours of conservative talk. There is a total of five hours of talk that comes from the other side of the aisle.”

    Don’t buy that for a minute. The key word in that sentence is “top-rated” stations. Sinton’s upset that conservatives apparently dominate “top-rated” talk. That doesn’t mean NPR doesn’t have hundreds of hours of liberal talk shows, not to mention liberal “news” shows. It’s just not “top-rated.”

    Last week, NPR’s own official ombudsman, Jeffrey Dvorkin, admitted a liberal bias in NPR’s talk programming. The daily program “Fresh Air with Terry Gross” – a 60-minute talk show about the arts, literature, and also politics – airs on 378 public-radio stations across the fruited plain. Gross recently became a hot topic on journalism Web sites for first having a friendly, giggly interview with “satirist” Al Franken, promoting his obnoxious screed against conservatives on September 3, and then on October 8, unloading an accusatory, hostile interview on Bill O’Reilly. She pressed the Fox host to respond to the obnoxious attacks of Franken and other critics. Dvorkin ruled: “Unfortunately, the [O’Reilly] interview only served to confirm the belief, held by some, in NPR’s liberal media bias….by coming across as a pro-Franken partisan rather than a neutral and curious journalist, Gross did almost nothing that might have allowed the interview to develop.”

    The news reports on NPR should be cause for greater public concern. Under the guise of “objective news,” reporting, the left is actively advancing its political agenda. On the October 17 “Morning Edition,” host Bob Edwards launched into a long “news” report on the flaws of the Bush foreign policy, observing: “Overall, the policies of the United States are still very unpopular around the world. The Bush Doctrine, a preference for unilateral military action and a disdain for multinational diplomacy, is under scrutiny more than ever.” The Middle East “road map” was “in tatters,” Iraq and Afghanistan were “highly unstable.” NPR may as well have suggested it was time for a different president.

    Reporter Mike Shuster was intent on driving home the theme that the Bush foreign policy may (read: we hope) one day be analyzed as an utter failure. His three primary, supposedly nonpartisan “experts” were Ivo Daalder, a member of Clinton’s National Security Council; Michael Mandelbaum, a foreign policy adviser to the 1992 Clinton campaign; and John Mearshimer, a regular critic of Bush foreign policy who argued in Foreign Policy magazine that Iraq should have remained under “vigilant containment,” which we could also describe as maintaining a murderous tyrant in power. Their controversial views and Clinton connections were not developed by NPR.

    Perhaps the biggest public-relations problems for NPR come when its liberal reporters hit the weekend talk-show circuit and let their opinions fly wildly. On October 18, NPR legal reporter Nina Totenberg pronounced from her regular panelist perch on the TV show “Inside Washington” that General Jerry Boykin, who sermonized in Christian churches with the shocking, less-than-Unitarian message that Christianity is true and other creeds are false, should be fired.

    Well, that’s not the way it came out. First, Totenberg said Boykin’s remarks were “seriously bad stuff,” and then she said, “I hope he’s not long for this world.” Host Gordon Peterson joked, “What is this, The Sopranos?” Withdrawing to damage-control mode, Totenberg said she didn’t mean she hoped he would die, just that he shouldn’t last long “in his job.”

    But it’s Totenberg who ought to fear for her job with these outbreaks of hate speech. Totenberg used this very same TV show to wish in 1995 that if the “Good Lord” knew justice, Senator Jesse Helms will “get AIDS from a transfusion, or one of his grandchildren will get it.”

    It’s awfully ironic that a woman who has spent thirty years saying outrageous liberal things on the taxpayer dime is now attacking a general on the grounds that there ought to be some things government officials cannot say and keep their jobs. The concern over these Boykin remarks should not be about the separation of church and state. It ought to be about the separation of National Public Radio from the state.”

    http://www.mediaresearch.org/BozellColumns/newscolumn/2003/col20031021.asp

  • Hmmm. It sure looks like John Kerry is not eating alone in that top photo there. Are those guys eating with John Kerry wearing… camouflage?

    Those are troops EATING WITH JOHN KERRY!! Holy Dogshit! That must mean these very same troops must have left the table before Kerry did!

    Say, thanks for the tip Nunya, I’ll be sure that I’ll apologize to “MM” for questioning the authenticity of the earlier photo, then laugh at her for posting a photo that debunks the big wingnut story of the week. I’ll throw in a middle finger for no charge as well.

  • Photographs are single moments in time. If I photograph a surgeon at work, I might get a shot where he blinks. One should not conclude that this particular physician operates with his eyes closed.

  • It appears that Thomas and Charles Bird have had their collective heads up their collective anuses so far and so long that they have no idea what they are saying. Sorry boys, your lies are not selling

  • I am in the IZ. Numb nuts was here. This pix accurately reflects the fact that no one in the military wanted anything to do with him while here. Get over yourself. Or better yet, don’t: Nominate him again in 08. That would be even better.

    Thanks,

    Just another Republican ChickenHawk in Iraq.

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