Howard Kurtz hasn’t been shy about his conservative ideology, but today was truly ridiculous.
In an item about Bill Clinton challenging his right-wing media critics in his best-selling memoir, Kurtz defended Rush Limbaugh.
The 42nd president also lambastes Rush Limbaugh, one of his most vociferous critics. In 1993, writes Clinton, the radio host claimed that White House aide Vince Foster “had been murdered in an apartment Hillary owned, and that his body had been moved to Fort Marcy Park. I could not imagine how that made Vince’s wife and kids feel.”
Kurtz, however, wrote that Clinton is wrong and that isn’t what Limbaugh said.
What Limbaugh actually said was that he’d been told a corporate newsletter would claim that Foster had been murdered in an apartment owned by Hillary Rodham Clinton. He later said that some “disbelieve” the newsletter, which never appeared. Limbaugh also recited a series of deaths but said the links to Clinton were based on “rumors.”
Limbaugh told listeners last week that he had repeated information about Foster, whose death was ruled a suicide, from a fax or e-mail. “I never said, I never reported that there was a murder,” he declared. “I never reported Foster had been murdered. . . . I played up what was being said by others and what was going around and I played up the climate because it all fit in.”
So, to hear Kurtz explain it, Clinton is falsely accusing Limbaugh, and the radio blowhard had nothing to do with pedaling this lie.
The problem is Kurtz isn’t coming close to telling his readers the whole truth.
Limbaugh may have taken a “Who, me?” attitude with Kurtz last week, but there’s no getting away from what Limbaugh actually said about Foster’s death in 1994.
“OK, folks, I think I got enough information here to tell you about the contents of this fax that I got. Brace yourselves. This fax contains information that I have just been told will appear in a newsletter to Morgan Stanley sales personnel this afternoon…. What it is is a bit of news which says…there’s a Washington consulting firm that has scheduled the release of a report that will appear, it will be published, that claims that Vince Foster was murdered in an apartment owned by Hillary Clinton, and the body was then taken to Fort Marcy Park.”
None of this was true; Limbaugh was just slandering the Clintons, as he did every day for eight years. There were no caveats to disclaimers, just insane accusations with no basis fact.
In fact, Limbaugh spent much of 1994 insisting that foul play was involved with Foster’s suicide. For Kurtz to suggest otherwise in one of the nation’s most important newspapers is irresponsible.