Left-Wing Smear Campaign Brought to a Halt

This week the George Soros financed, Hillary Clinton smear machine called Media Matters was exposed for the slimy liars they are – joining the other smear machine, MoveOn.org, in the consciousness of a nation that had just listened to Ahmadinejad maintain that there were no homosexuals in Iran.

What Media Matters did is what left-wing organizations often do: they cherry pick quotes and take them out of context to try to discredit conservatives. They did it to Speaker Gingrich, Reuters did it last week to President Bush (the Mandela malarkey), and Media Matters tried to do it to Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, but they didn’t get away with it. Both men had transcripts and were able to prove what they really said – and not what Media matters said they said. What is really interesting is what a number of Democrat politicians, operatives and left-wing media like Time, CNN and MSNBC did with the Media Matters lies – they ran with them without checking or hesitating a moment.

Neither Bill O’Reilly nor Rush Limbaugh need me to defend them, but my readers might like to know some of the details. First about O’Reilly:

Williams Defends O'Reilly, Rips CNN, Captains Quarters, 9/29/07 (Excerpt)

“Juan Williams defends Bill O'Reilly against charges of racism in Time Magazine, and angrily calls out O'Reilly's critics for calling him an Uncle Tom. He charges those critics with intellectual dishonesty for pulling one quote out of context to reverse what O'Reilly really said -- and he also accuses CNN for deliberately misreporting the incident in order to eat into O'Reilly's substantial ratings lead over CNN.

It's a media meltdown!

It started with Bill O'Reilly's grandmother. And it blew up into charges of O'Reilly being called a racist and me being attacked as a "Happy Negro" (read that as a lackey or Uncle Tom)....

So, O'Reilly says to me that the reality to black life is very different from the lowlife behavior glorified by the rappers. He told me he was at a restaurant in Harlem recently and there was no one shouting profanity, no one threatening people. Then he mentioned going to an Anita Baker concert with an audience that was half black, and in sharp contrast to the corrosive images on TV, well dressed and well behaved.

I joked with O'Reilly that for him, a guy from Long Island, a visit to Harlem was like a "foreign trip." That's when he brought up his grandma. He said she was prejudiced against black people because she knew no flesh-and-blood black folks but only the one-dimensional TV coverage of black criminals shooting each other and the rappers and comedians glorifying "gangsta" life and thug cool. He criticized his grandmother as irrational for being afraid of people she really did not know.”

And as for Rush Limbaugh:
NewsBusters.org, September 28, 2007 (Excerpt)

“Not content to wait until Bill O'Reilly's hoped- for demise, the George Soros- funded Media Matters / mainstream media smear machine has added a second target: Rush Limbaugh.

And this time, the distortion of words may actually be more severe than in O'Reilly's case.

Now, Media Matters has twisted and edited Rush's words in a way that makes it appear he's insulting the troops. They've taken the false idea that he called anti- war soldiers "phony troops" and spread it across the Internet. But Limbaugh said nothing of the sort.

Maloney explains that MMA took out of context a remark Limbaugh made about "phony soldiers:"

Limbaugh's best point is this (Bill O'Reilly, take note): critics of conservative talk radio, especially in the mainstream media, never actually listen to these shows. They simply accept the Media Matters spin as gospel without actually tuning in. O'Reilly and Limbaugh cannot emphasize this point enough.

Limbaugh was actually talking about the story of Jesse MacBeth, a fake "soldier" who never made it out of boot camp, yet was utilized by the anti- war left as a "veteran" who agreed with Iraq opponents.”
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Let’s also join Rush Limbaugh’s show to get his reaction to the attempted smear:

Transcript excerpts from 9/28/07
“I want to illustrate something for you today, folks. I've done it before. I want to do it again. I call this the anatomy of a smear, and what this is is a great illustration of the liberals and the Democrat Party playbook for '08, which is underway now. The morning update on Wednesday dealt with a soldier, a fake, phony soldier by the name of Jesse MacBeth who never served in Iraq; he was never an Army Ranger.

He was drummed out of the military in 44 days. He had his day in court; he never got the Purple Heart as he claimed, and he described all these war atrocities. He became a hero to the anti-war left. They love phony soldiers, and they prop 'em up. When it is demonstrated that they have been lying about things, then they just forget about it. There's no retraction; there's no apology; there's no, "Uh-oh, sorry." After doing that morning update on Wednesday, I got a phone call yesterday from somebody, we were talking about the troops, and this gentleman said something which you'll hear here in just a second, prompting me to reply "yeah, the phony soldiers."

That comment, "phony soldiers" was posted yesterday afternoon on the famous Media Matters website, which is where all leftists go to find out what I say. I have a website, and I have a radio program that reaches far more people than Media Matters could ever hope to, but the critics of this program never listen to this program.

They never go to my website. All they do is read Media Matters and they get the lies and the out-of-context reports. They assume it's all true because they want it to be true, and then they start their campaigns. This has led to me being denounced on the floor of the House. Howard Dean has released a statement demanding I apologize; Jim Webb; John Kerry issued a statement, three Congress people went out on the floor of the House last night and said some things, and it's starting to blossom now in the Drive-By Media. So this is the anatomy of a smear, and this is how it starts. The same group is trying to get Bill O'Reilly into problems because of some innocent comments that he made about going to dinner at a restaurant in Harlem. So the illustration begins with just a sample report from MSNBC whose content is produced almost exclusively by Media Matters for America and MoveOn.org. This is this morning with the anchorette Contessa Brewer reporting on the phony soldier controversy, spawned by me.

BREWER: Some leading Democrats are attacking radio talk show personality Rush Limbaugh because he called soldiers who opposed the Iraq war "phony." Limbaugh was criticizing the anti-war movement generally and made the comment to a caller.

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“The truth for the left is fiction that serves their purpose, which is exactly the way the website, Media Matters, generated this story, fiction, out of context, did so knowingly. What is amazing is that after all of the examples of how this organization is simply a Democrat Party Hillary Clinton front group; how they constantly do this; how they take things out of context and embarrass themselves and get things wrong; they still have credible so-called journalists and others, members of Congress, Democrat Party, who treat what they say as gospel. Not one member of the media, not one congressman, nobody has called our office to ask, "Did you really say this? And what did you mean by it?" The reason this does not work, ladies and gentlemen, is that I have a 19-and-a-half-year record on this program of being one of the most devoted supporters of US military personnel in uniform that there is.

The effort here is simply to discredit people that they consider effective and powerful on the right ginning up, leading up into the '08 elections. They cannot beat us in the arena of ideas. They cannot challenge what we say and refute it and come out on top, so this is the anatomy of a smear. I'll show you how it works when we come back after the break. We have a bunch of sound bites here from Jim Webb, Jan Schakowsky, Frank Pallone, Democrats and senators, plus the Kerry statement that I read to you, all that coming up right after this.”

All in all, together with the news that Al Qaeda in Iraq and Afghanistan is crumbling, this was a good week for those who care about America.