Fox News and RNC Continue Lying

Over the holidays I traveled from Austin to Sherveport and back by car. That’s a 5 hour drive each way if you only stop to pee once. I saw God’s hand at iTunes in the form of Al Franken’s audio-book for Lies and Lying Liars Who Tell Them which clocks in around 10 hours. (Is that sacreligious? Probably doesn’t matter because God’s too busy still trying to locate “compassionate” conservatives.) It’s an excellent book and I highly reccommend it to anyone open minded enough to take Al Franken ripping into Coulter, Hannity, Limbaugh and O’Reilly in his friendly harmless manner. (Oh and he takes a good chunk out of the Bush administration while he’s at it.)

My favorite theme in the book is Franken’s use of clear and simple statistics to prove the lies that the conservative media tells and re-tells. Even better are when Fox outright tells a lie and the rest of the media world picks it up as if it were fact (because you know Fox would never lie.) Fox is at it again — this time attacking MoveOn.org in an effort to head off MoveOn’s upcoming anti-bush ad.

RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie launched the attack on “Fox News Sunday,” and the RNC followed it with press releases and calls to reporters. The charges centered on two ads posted on the Bush in 30 Seconds website which compared President Bush’s tactis with those of Adolf Hitler. Mr. Gillespie repeatedly referred to the ads as ‘the MoveOn ad’ or ‘MoveOn’s ad,’ implying that we had sponsored or perhaps even commissioned the ad. And he also claimed that we might spend $7 million to run it on TV.

This is a lie. MoveOn.org hasn’t sponsored such an ad, and we never would — we regret the appearance of these ads on the Bush In 30 Seconds site. The two ads in question are from more than a thousand posted by members of the public, and they were voted on by MoveOn members through December 31st. Obviously the few hundred of you who viewed these ads agreed that they were not worthy of further broadcast or recognition, because they got low ratings. Yesterday we announced the 15 finalists — all good, hard-hitting and fair appraisals of the Bush record, in the judgment of the members and others who rated them. The two offending ads can only be found one place now — on the RNC website!

in a letter titled “RNC Smear Campaign” from Eli Pariser, MoveOn Voter Fund [moveon-help@list.moveon.org]

p.s. My favorite part of the book is the story of the Clinton adminstration handing the Bushies a plan that strongly resembles Homeland Security along with a breakdown of why terrorism was the biggest threat the U.S. faced. The Bushies promptly ignored it (for about 9 months) deciding instead to invest money and political power on a missle defense system… What ever happened to that?

Posted by etrigan at January 6, 2004 1:37 PM