Poor David Brock. His resolutely anti-Bush but ever-behind-the-curve website Media Matters for America was the last on the planet to believe, along with the befuddled Dan Rather, that an IBM Selectric typewriter of the 1970s could churn out a Microsoft Word document. Now, Media Matters is the last site on the planet to hold that the scores of news outlets–NBC, ABC’s The Note, whatever–that have been poking holes in that Kerry-endorsed lost-explosives yarn that the New York Times and CBS cooked up are just plain wrong. Oh, David, don’t you wonder why even your fellow liberals don’t pay much attention to you’
Even funnier, however, is David’s latest move: his campaign to get NBC to drop Rush Limbaugh as a commentator on the Nov. 2 elections. Here’s an excerpt from the letter he wrote to NBC’s Mel Shapiro as president and CEO of Media Matters (thanks, Tim Graham of National Review Online (scroll down), for the hat tip):
“As you should know, Limbaugh has a track record of using extreme, hateful speech that has no place in civil discourse. To pick just a few examples from this year, as documented by Media Matters for America: Limbaugh compared the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib to a fraternity prank, telling America and an international audience on the taxpayer-funded American Forces Radio and Television Service that the torture was a ‘brilliant maneuver’ and that the photos were ‘good old American pornography.” Limbaugh further claimed that ‘the reaction to the stupid torture is an example of the feminization of this country.’ He has also labeled Senator John Kerry a ‘stupid S.O.B.’ and a ‘gigolo.'”
Gosh, that’s awful! Plus, as David writes, Rush is a mean old male chauvinist pig:
“Limbaugh’s sexist commentary is beyond the pale as well. Last spring, Limbaugh said that women ‘actually wish’ for sexual harassment. Limbaugh shared with listeners his ‘pet name’ for the National Organization for Women (NOW): ‘National Association of Gals’ (his acronym: ‘NAG’), claiming that the ‘militant feminists’ who make up the ‘NAGs’ ‘aren’t determining who wins elections. White men are.’ Limbaugh also warned that with ‘new female police chiefs … we can watch out for some naked pyramids,’ a crude reference to Abu Ghraib following the appointment of four women as chiefs of police in four major U.S. cities.”
Gals–oops, I mean “wimmin,” we gotta thank David for standing up for us!
As David tries to NAG the National Broadcasting Co.into censorship, James Glassman has a fine essay about the NYT/CBS missing-explosives urban legend on Tech Central Station. (See also The Other Charlotte’s Naked Partisans today below.) As Jim notes, Kerry’s enthusastic endorsement of the tale only reinforces Bush’s case for invading Iraq when we did:
“Kerry and Edwards say that Bush didn’t do enough to prevent the disappearance of the explosives, which could be used against Americans here at home. But the very existence of such explosives — whether defined as weapons of mass destruction or not — was the reason Bush led the nation into Iraq in the first place.
“Why did we invade Iraq’ Specifically, so dangerous weapons would not be used against us here at home — either by Saddam Hussein’s forces or by his terrorist friends. Did we miss some of these weapons’ Of course. But we got a lot more than we would have gotten if we had not gone into Iraq in the first place.”