Why is Rethuglican Breitbart a Lying Spineless Coward
C'mon Andrew you can do it. Courage. Courage.
In the wake of James O'Keefe's New Orleans guilty plea, Breitbart's site is pulling down out of storage one of its old talking points and pretending it's a very big deal that when the O'Keefe story first broke in January some news outlets got a key fact wrong: O'Keefe was never charged with trying to wiretap, or bug, Sen. Mary Landrieu's phone.
Apparently that's the beset Team Breitbart can do following O'Keefe's embarrassing guilty plea and confronting the fact that the judge overseeing the case condemned O'Keefe's undercover actions as "unconscionable," "nefarious," and "potentially dangerous."
But here's the evergreen problem with the correction tact: lots of right-wing sites got the exact same fact wrong about O'Keefe and the alleged wiretapping and bugging charges [emphasis added]:
-"Filmmaker who targeted ACORN arrested for trying to bug La. senator's office" (NY Post)
-"Feds Cuff ACORN 'Pimp' in Attempt to Bug Sen. Landrieu's Phones" (NRO's The Corner)
-"James O'Keefe Arrested for Attempting to Bug Senator Mary Landrieu's Offices?" (Ace of Spades)
-"ACORN Sting Man James O'Keefe Arrested for Allegedly Trying to Bug Mary Landrieu's Office." (The Lonely Conservative)
-"James O'Keefe arrested for attempting to bug Mary Landrieu's office" (Another Black Conservative)
Oh my, were they on the get-O'Keefe conspiracy, too?
So yeah, last winter you could detect the screaming hypocrisy of Breitbart whining about the press coverage over a single fact, yet while at the same time he remained stoically silent when right-wing sites made the exact same factual error.
But as I mentioned, the whole charade has been pulled out of the moth balls in the wake of the O'Keefe guilty plea and Breitbart's now calling for more O'Keefe-related corrections. But you know what would make those requests seem even slightly legitimate? If Breitbart would finally, after months of cowardly behavior, buck up and demand that the New York Post formally correct its egregious O'Keefe reporting when the newspaper recklessly claimed the activist tried to "bug" the senator's office.
Until Breitbart gets up the nerve to call out Rupert Murdoch, we'll continue to see this correction petition for what it is, more empty, right-wing posturing.
Andrew does have a huge issue with the facts - they must be bent or ignored when they do not support the extremist anti-American agenda of the rabid Republican Right.
Sean Hannity And Fox News Give Credibility To Conspiracy Theory Accusing The Left Of Working With Muslims To Instate Sharia Law And Sabotage America. Legend has it that Hannity tried to do a show once that was free of lies and wacko conspiracy theories. It was 10 minutes of silence.
Why BP is the Anti-Katrina
Yuval Levin today:Think of all the emergencies that happened on Bush and a Republican Congress's watch - from 9-11 to Katrina - to the collapse of the financial sector and massive unemployment. These are the same people that nw have the nerve to invent crap about how negligence by an oil company is the fault of Democrats. Republicans, sleazy as ever.
I think it’s actually right to say that the BP oil spill is something like Obama’s Katrina, but not in the sense in which most critics seem to mean it.
It’s like Katrina in that many people's attitudes regarding the response to it reveal completely unreasonable expectations of government. The fact is, accidents (not to mention storms) happen. We can work to prepare for them, we can have various preventive rules and measures in place. We can build the capacity for response and recovery in advance. But these things happen, and sometimes they happen on a scale that is just too great to be easily addressed. It is totally unreasonable to expect the government to be able to easily address them — and the kind of government that would be capable of that is not the kind of government that we should want.
This conflates two very different things. Katrina was an example of the type of disaster that the federal government is specifically tasked with handling. And for most of the 90s, it was very good at handling them. But when George Bush became president and Joe Allbaugh became director of FEMA, everything changed. Allbaugh neither knew nor cared about disaster preparedness. For ideological reasons, FEMA was downsized and much of its work outsourced.
