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Mainstream Media Collude in Republican Lies About Obama: SINator DeMented: Most Dangerous Terrorist in America

Tuesday, January 05 2010 @ 10:43 AM CST

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by Adele Stan

On the "Today" Show and in Politico, DeMint and Cheney's lies about Obama go either unchallenged, or weakly corrected.

RepubliCON Family Values: Lying, falsehoods, 'mis-speaking', rumor-mongering, gossiping, fraud, anything for a buck!



Sen. Jim DeMint wants to "break:" President Obama. He said so himself, in the famous blogger call in which he promised that Republicans would make health-care reform the president's "Waterloo".

It should come as no surprise then, that DeMint would use the recent attempted terrorism attack on a U.S. airliner to advance a rack of lies about the president. What should be surprising -- but, alas, has become all too common in the mainstream media -- was the failure of the "Today" show's Matt Lauer to correct the lies laid out by DeMint in response to a question about whether or not he blames the president for the failure of the national security system to detect the threat posed by the would-be bomber:

DeMINT: Again, I don't think we should try to blame -- whether it's the president or any other person right now -- but a lot of us have been concerned over the last year that the president did seem to downplay the threat of terror; he doesn't use the word anymore, he hesitates to say that there's a war on terror. In the last few days he seems to have come around to the idea that there are people, in Yemen and in other places, who are intent on hurting Americans. And I think that puts us all on the same page and, hopefully, we can take the politics out of this, focus on security, and the president seems to be in the right place now.

Now, like every reporter who covers national politics, Lauer knows this is a flat-out lie. One need only recall Obama's speech at West Point, delivered a little over a month ago, in which the president said:

This is no idle danger; no hypothetical threat. In the last few months alone, we have apprehended extremists within our borders who were sent here from the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan to commit new acts of terror.

Yet Lauer ignored the lie, and simply dove into his next question, which was about why DeMint has placed a hold on the Senate confirmation of Obama's nominee for the position of chief administrator for the Transportation Security Administration, the agency charged with passenger screening at airports. (DeMint's response to that question was a bit more transparent; he cited his objection to the nominee's potential support for the president's embrace of collective bargaining rights for TSA screeners.)

The Big Lie allowed to go unchecked by Lauer comes from a line of crap excreted by former Vice President Dick Cheney in the pages of Politico, in which the Darth Veder contended that Obama is "trying to pretend we are not at war" with terrorists:

[W]e are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren't, it makes us less safe," Cheney said in a statement to Politico. "Why doesn't he want to admit we're at war? It doesn't fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn't fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency -- social transformation -- the restructuring of American society.

After that, a tirade against the president by Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., is presented without refutation, and then the full text of Cheney's statement to Politico. It's not 'til you get to the bottom of the piece -- the second page on the Web site -- that any challenge to the lie is offered, but only weakly so. Politico reporter Mike Allen cites the president's inaugural address -- made nearly a year ago -- but not the West Point speech, which, for better or worse, is all about the war against al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Politico goes on to quote an administration official, John O. Brennan, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, but not the president's recent speech.

A video clip of Allen that accompanies the piece is similarly weak. After noting the pertinent words in Obama's inaugural address, Allen says, "You can quibble about the facts..."

Well, actually, no you can't. Facts are facts. How 'bout presenting them as such? Whether or not the president has said the U.S. is at war with al Qaeda is a matter of public record -- nothing to quibble over there.

So, what gives here? Members of the media, it seems, are so cowered by the accusations of being "liberal" and "in Obama's pocket" that they allow the wingers to advance a false narrative in the interest of trying to appear to be fair and balanced. The religious right won the media war that way, so why not the Obama-hater right?

Media figures feel vulnerable to these charges because, by and large, people who work in journalism do tend to be a bit more liberal than the public at large, just as they tend to be less religious. Right-wing leaders use that soft spot to instill guilt and fear into media gate-keepers who, above all, want to appear to be objective.

The problem with this model is it hides the truth from the reading, listening and viewing public. And democracy depends on truth. The outlandish claims of the Tea Party movement's foot soldiers are believed whole-heartedly by them because such stories are advanced by leaders they trust -- leaders like DeMint, a Tea Party favorite. No fact-checking needed; if DeMint said it, it must be true. This is the same DeMint who, by the way, told a group of FreedomWorks supporters that he wished he had heckled President Obama the way the Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., had at the president's address before a joint session of Congress.

Nice work, media dudes.

South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint interviewed on NBC's "Today" show yesterday by Matt Lauer.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy







http://www.alternet.org/

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