Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Lying is Fine for the Chron Editor, Unless....
Shorter Phil Bronstein:
Lying for a conservative pundit is totally cool by me, unless it is impugning on my courageous heroic war journalist heroism.
Longer version: Today, Phil draws the line in the sand where it is not fine for a conservative pundit to lie.
As a journalist, I know I should revere Bob Novak,...
Bob Novak, the guy who outed a CIA agent to advance Bush's case for a useless war in Iraq and silence its opponents, of course. And that little piece of information won't even be mentioned in Phil's column about Novak.
Why? Because Phil did not get to see an Iraqi family murdered first hand (even though 100,000s unnecessarily died).
I was covering the bloody conflict in El Salvador in the late '80s. I'm not an either/or person, generally, and I had good relations with colonels on the right and guerrillas on the left...
Grampa, please take your medication, these war stories always get you all excited, you never finish your yogurt. Go sit by the fireplace, and tell it to the TV, dear.
So I go to a disinterment of a couple of murder victims on the dusty outskirts of town...Once they were dug up and carted off for more examination, I left...I went to my rented house in the Escalon district of Salvador and slumped in a chair in front of an old TV set...There was Robert Novak, screaming ..."Death squads in El Salvador is a liberal MYTH!"
I haven't been accused of being a liberal all that much,...but I can tell you reliably that Salvadoran death squads were as real as Scooter Libby and Evans and Novak. At the time, I wanted to reach through the TV screen and strangle the guy into sensibility. Or have the two tragic dead men delivered, without benefit of makeup, on his front lawn.
Oh, no, Phil, you can't be accused of being a liberal, for sho. Nevertheless, what did you learn from the lesson? That conservative pundits will blatantly lie and lie and lie to dismiss facts and people who are reality-based? Well, not exactly:
Someone noted... that he was called "The Prince of Darkness," not by his enemies but by his friends because of his contacts and his power to move the D.C. discussion. I remember once being at dinner...when Bob Novak came in. He had that invisible wake around him that surrounds celebrities, that sense that the molecules in the room bend when someone famous arrives.
It's not the lying, agenda-pushing part that bothers Phil, it's when it's colliding with his heroism!
Lying for a conservative pundit is totally cool by me, unless it is impugning on my courageous heroic war journalist heroism.
Longer version: Today, Phil draws the line in the sand where it is not fine for a conservative pundit to lie.
As a journalist, I know I should revere Bob Novak,...
Bob Novak, the guy who outed a CIA agent to advance Bush's case for a useless war in Iraq and silence its opponents, of course. And that little piece of information won't even be mentioned in Phil's column about Novak.
Why? Because Phil did not get to see an Iraqi family murdered first hand (even though 100,000s unnecessarily died).
I was covering the bloody conflict in El Salvador in the late '80s. I'm not an either/or person, generally, and I had good relations with colonels on the right and guerrillas on the left...
Grampa, please take your medication, these war stories always get you all excited, you never finish your yogurt. Go sit by the fireplace, and tell it to the TV, dear.
So I go to a disinterment of a couple of murder victims on the dusty outskirts of town...Once they were dug up and carted off for more examination, I left...I went to my rented house in the Escalon district of Salvador and slumped in a chair in front of an old TV set...There was Robert Novak, screaming ..."Death squads in El Salvador is a liberal MYTH!"
I haven't been accused of being a liberal all that much,...but I can tell you reliably that Salvadoran death squads were as real as Scooter Libby and Evans and Novak. At the time, I wanted to reach through the TV screen and strangle the guy into sensibility. Or have the two tragic dead men delivered, without benefit of makeup, on his front lawn.
Oh, no, Phil, you can't be accused of being a liberal, for sho. Nevertheless, what did you learn from the lesson? That conservative pundits will blatantly lie and lie and lie to dismiss facts and people who are reality-based? Well, not exactly:
Someone noted... that he was called "The Prince of Darkness," not by his enemies but by his friends because of his contacts and his power to move the D.C. discussion. I remember once being at dinner...when Bob Novak came in. He had that invisible wake around him that surrounds celebrities, that sense that the molecules in the room bend when someone famous arrives.
It's not the lying, agenda-pushing part that bothers Phil, it's when it's colliding with his heroism!
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