Should a J-school panel be convened to consider Bob Woodward’s lies to the nation? John Podhoretz of the New York Post charges that, while Woodward’s new book ‘Plan of Attack,’ actually a presents a ‘persuasive portrait of an extraordinarily serious Bush administration and the 17-month process that led to the war,’ the super scribe has gone on TV with ‘sexed up’ findings to increase sales.
“How did Woodward deceive the audience of ’60 Minutes’ and the entire press corps? He made people believe Plan of Attack rivaled Richard Clarke’s bestseller in Bush-bashing — by pulling out a few isolated sentences from the book’s endless 465 pages to make it appear as though Plan were a startling indictment of the war in Iraq….
“Woodward and his publisher (Simon & Schuster) clearly looked at the best-seller list and determined that the best way to sell the book was to appeal to the hate-Bush crowd. If the prevailing winds of best-sellerdom had been in the president’s favor, they would have spun the book the other way – and that would have been far more representative of the book’s own revelations.
“In other words, their spin is a lie! A damnable lie! Paging Al Franken, David Corn, Joe Conason, Eric Alterman and all those on the left who like to dissect lies.”
The Pod charges that Woodward and his publishers are able to get by with this extraordinary cherry picking of facts for one reason: While many will buy Mr. Woodward’s hefty new book, few will actually read it.
Whew!