|
Hornswaggle is an alternate spelling of hornswoggle, an archaic word that means to bamboozle or hoodwink. I take my pronunciation from the late Harvey Korman in "Blazing Saddles" -- "I want rustlers, cutthroats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, conmen, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswagglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass kickers, shit kickers and Methodists!" |
|
|
Friday, February 13, 2004Here's a good article on the National Guard fiasco by the Boston Globe, which broke the story the first time around in 2000. They're inching closer and closer to the information. Hopefully they'll keep pushing all the way through. I still fear that this story will go away before we get to the bottom of it once and for all.I mean, all I want is the facts of the matter. Is that too much to ask in America, year 2004? The president served in a branch of the military. The records ought to be there. Where are the records, and what do they say? The Globe story reminds me of just how shoddy the San Francisco Chronicle's national coverage is. Have they every broken a story? Do they devote any time or resources to investigative reporting? Besides Barry Bonds' steroid use, that is? The Drudge Report's attempt to insert the Kerry infidelity scandal into the news has failed so far. No one has picked it up. Drudge's timing strikes me as interesting. Consider that he is connected up to the highest levels of the Republican Party at this point. He did the religious right a great service by breaking the Monica Lewinsky story. Now he fills in occassionally for Rush Limbaugh on his radio show. I would not be surprised to learn that the primary motivation to leak the Kerry story this week was to get the media off the National Guard story and that the idea was vetted at the highest levels of the Republican Party. The fact that the story didn't gain any traction with the press could point to Drudge rushing the story out before it was ready in order to provide that needed distraction to the press, which appears to have really seized on the National Guard story now. If, in fact, major outlets like Time and ABC News are sitting on this Kerry story and investigating it, it could be that they just don't have the information at this time to run it, provided they have the inclination. I'm reminded by Drudge's method of "The Insider." The facts of that case, as I remember it, are that CBS killed Lowell Bergman's story because the tobacco company in question threatened a multi-million dollar lawsuit at a time when CBS was up for sale and the lawsuit presented a liability that could have threatened the deal. Bergman ultimately leaked the story to a reporter at the New York Times. Once the story was out in the public domain, "60 Minutes" could then go ahead and run its story. If the major news outlets are reluctant to pursue yet another salacious sex scandal (and Lord knows why; isn't that pretty much their MO these days?), then maybe Drudge was trying to force their hand by getting the story out. Of course, the difference between Bergman and Drudge is that Bergman is a highly respected journalist and seemingly an honorable man, while Drudge is a worm. A worm who's good at getting information and who has helped the Internet develop into an alternate source of news from the stultified print and the dumb and clammering television media, but a worm nonetheless. And a GOP shill. I forgot to mention one thing about Bush's "Meet the Press" interview: At one point Russert asked the president if, in light of all the WMD developments, he considered the campaign in Iraq to have been a war of "choice" or "necessity." Bush acted as though his interest was piqued, saying, "I've never heard of" that way of describing it. It goes to show how out of touch he is with the debate and discourse that is taking place in our society and in the media. Thomas Friedman, the Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times and one of the most influential supporters of the Iraq war, given his generally liberal tendencies, has been writing about the war of choice versus war of necessity thing for ages now. Bush not only never picks up a newspaper, something that he has admitted, but also is patently apathetic towards the national discourse that his actions create. He's said he gets all his information from the most objective sources possible, from his staff. (I'm hunting for the actual quote. I thought it was reprinted in a New Yorker article on Bush and the media from Jan. 19, but no luck so far.) .: posted by hornswaggler 2:14 PM| |
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||
|
| Contact |
