And his Lying Loyal Subjects Who Don't Seem to Mind.
By Brad Friedman on 9/21/2004, 10:42am PT  

It's much easier to run for the White House when you have neither scruples, morals, or a conscience. The Right proves that every day.

The hypocrites that support George W. Bush have been breathless in their sycophantic rush to say "see I told ya so!" about the potential errors in part of Dan Rather's report. Predictably they go so far as to say that those errors somehow "prove what we've been saying all along" that somehow this demonstrates a "liberal bias" at CBS, and oh, while we're at it, the rest of the "mainstream media".

Happily, of course, they ignore the year long series of acknowledged incorrect and faulty reports of The New York Times who, under the byline of Judith Miller and others, and with the help of the Bush Administration and their discredited allies in the name of Ahmad Chalabi and friends, frightened the United States into an entire war over completely wrong and wholly disproven premises.

The New York Times was hardly alone, of course, who can ever forget the "accurate" reporting in The Washington Post like their Dec. 12, 2002 story, errantly aiding the run-up to war in their story headlined "U.S. Suspects Al Qaeda Got Nerve Agent From Iraqis; Analysts: Chemical May Be VX, And Was Smuggled Via Turkey"?

In other words, when the bias (accidental or otherwise) and faulty reporting ends up serving the desires of the Right --- and in the cases mentioned above, ironically, via the Right's other favorite whipping boys, the supposedly "liberal" New York Times and Washington Post --- you'll hear not a peep from the same folks who are simply "outraged" when an error occurs in a report whose information (true or otherwise) they don't like.

Need more proof? Where is the "outrage" and armchair amateur typographer's when it came to demonstrating that George W. Bush had used forged documents to make a case for war in his own State of the Union Address? The documents Bush used to suggest that Saddam was attempting to purchase uranium in Niger were long ago discovered to have been forgeries, and even acknowledged as such by the 9/11 Commission.

And yet, not a single amateur document specialist slash rightwing blogger seemed outraged over that mistake, by the "Commander-in-Chief", and one that also sent us on a path towards a mistaken war.

What, no self-righteous indignation over that one either?

And what of the story from just two days ago, screamed by Drudge and dutifully picked up and reported by both Rush and Sean that Drudge headlined "GIRL CRIES AFTER BUSH/CHENEY SIGN RIPPED BY THUGS..." The one with the picture of the poor little girl in tears on her father's shoulders after thugs in union t-shirts tore up her Bush/Cheney sign. The father, it turns out, who, in addition to happily making his six-year-old daughter cry so pictures could be taken, astoundingly, for the third election year in a row, was harrassed by "thugs" from the opposition party.

As it turns out those "thugs" were the father's other children. His sons. The story, which once run on Drudge will run everywhere else, was a fake.

None the less, the Rightwing D.C. rag The Washington Times picked it up and ran their own breathless and outraged feature on this fake story.

Haven't yet heard the wingnuts wailing and crying about the "outrageous" bias of Drudge and The Washington Times on the matter. How very strange.

Yesterday, Fox's "Campaign" Carl Cameron said that John Kerry, in a speech yesterday, called Bush "a warmonger who wants a perpetual state of war around the world". Well, Bush may be a proven warmonger, and he has suggested that we will now be in a perpetual state of war around the world. But the trouble is, John Kerry never said it. I wish he would. But he didn't.

Again, not so curiously perhaps, no outrage about the bias of Fox News from the Right.

I could, of course, go on and on pointing out one biased news report after another, based on fake information or simply out and out lies from the Right, in both Conservative media and the supposed (yet non-existant) "Liberal" media. From CNN's Bill Schneider who baselessly claimed on Sunday, with absolutely no evidence whatsoever, that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda "would very much like to defeat President Bush" (an absurd suggestion if ever there was one) to newspaper after newspaper which, to this day, continue to quote "information" from the discredited "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" even now after nearly every one of their allegations has been proven false and/or baseless by official contemperaneous documents from the Military themselves.

No cries of "See! Look how biased the media is!" from the Right in regard to such every day occurences. Stop by Media Matters for America for an endless cataloging of such blatant anti-liberal, pro-conservative bias in every quarter of the media, not just the expected culprits, as updated every five minutes or so.

But, like the evidence of a mistaken War, waged for no good reason, or the 25 or so different and ever-changing ones that Bush has continually created to justify his actions once each previous justification became "inoperable", hard evidence is no match for an immoral, power-hungry group of rabid partisans willing to lie their way across the consciousness of the good, but largely too-busy-to-keep-up-with-this-bullshit American people.

Yes, there are a few Republicans and/or Conservatives who still have a conscience. Even the thinly disguised Conservative Bill O'Reilly has the decency to point out that CBS was most likely the victim of shabby reporting rather than any sort of malicious bias. But for the most part, for the winning-is-everything crowd on the Right, such honest admissions are a rarity, and rather off-message for the Bush worshipping, zombified opportunists.

So, on they press, lying their way to the White House. "Things are improving in Iraq", "Freedom is on the march", "America is safer" and "the Mainstream Media has a Liberal Bias". All without the blink of an eye or the blush of a conscience.

Meanwhile, the lies and or misleads of factually challenged Rightwingers have directly lead to the deaths of thousands of innocents across this globe during George W. Bush's Reign of Error. Far more than the number that perished on September 11th, 2001. And there is little doubt that thousands more will die via such lies before the cycle can balance itself out. All the while, Drudge, Rush, Sean, the Fox "News" team and all of their immoral admirers likely sleep well at night, albeit with a loaded pistol beneath their pillows to keep them safe should any God-loathing, America-hating "Liberals" break into their house at night and threaten the only thing they actually care about; Themselves.

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