NEW! - A big Fat LIST of BUSH LIES
Crash
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL writes,
"Before [Republicans] get too giddy, however, they ought to
glance at a recent book, THE LIES OF GEORGE W. BUSH, by
David Corn....He carefully documents many charges. Some examples:
the president's claim that there already were 60 separate
stem-cell lines sufficient for medical research, when he'd
been told there were far fewer; the false claims that his
tax cuts were aimed mainly at working-class Americans;
the untrue charge that government labor unions were
refusing to cooperate in key homeland security measures;
and the numerous misrepresentations before the Iraq war."
...too boring to repete yet again.
BOOKLIST says,
"Corn's take on the topic is straightforward and chronological.
No raised voices here. The longtime editor of The Nation, Corn
sets out to build a serious case against Bush in which the
president's own words indict him. Beginning with the 2000
campaign ("I am a uniter, not a divider"), Corn examines Bush's
record on many issues--the environment, health, the war on
terror--all referenced to the president's words....This is a
judicious and readable offering."
John Dean, a former Counsel to the President of the
United States, writes:
"misleading the public about the
direction of government policy does not allow the
electorate to make an informed choice and undermines the
premise of the democratic process." Corn cites the work of
American philosopher and ethicist Sissela Bok to suggest
why such deception is abhorrent:
*** "It allows those in power to override or nullify the
*** right vested in the people to cast an informed vote"
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20031024.html
"Mixing hard cold facts
with a rapier wit, David
Corn lacerates Bush, using
the president's own words
and deeds to prove that the
straight-shooting candidate
who vowed to restore
honor and integrity to the
Oval Office has, instead,
turned out to be a serial
liar."
--Arianna Huffington
Author of Pigs at the Trough
AVAILABLE NOW!!!
http://www.bushlies.com/
THE LIES OF GEORGE W. BUSH:
MASTERING THE POLITICS OF DECEPTION
THE NEW BOOK BY DAVID CORN (CROWN PUBLISHERS)
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!
**************************************************
THE LIBRARY JOURNAL says,
"Corn chronicles to devastating effect the lies,
falsehoods, and misrepresentations....Corn has painstakingly
unearthed a bill of particulars against the president that is as
damaging as it is thorough." For the full
review, click here.
THE NEW YORK OBSERVER says,
"Corn does not believe that wit and indignation are mutually
exclusive, which makes the indictment that is THE LIES
OF GEORGE W. BUSH all the more searing."
*****************************************************
HEAR DAVID CORN TALK ABOUT
"THE LIES OF GEORGE W. BUSH"
On NPR's "Diane Rehm Show"
On WNYC's "Brian Lehrer Show"
**************************************************
CHECK OUT THE MOST RECENT BUSH LIES AND
MISREPRESENTATIONS and BUSH'S TOP TEN LIES
THE LIES KEEP COMING
Links:
* * * Bush Press Conference Whoppers (NEW!)
* * * More Evidence Bush Hyped Iraq Nukes (NEW!)
* * * More Evidence Bush Hyped WMD Intel (NEW!)
* * * Rumsfeld Memo Undermines Bush Claims (NEW!)
* * * State Dept. Study Challenges Rice
* * * Did Bush Overstate Terror Win?
* * * Did Bush EPA Lie To Congress?
* * * Bush's False Dichotomy
* * * Rice Spins More on Iraq
* * * Bushies Misled on Iraq Oil?
* * * New Revelations in Wilson Case Undercut Bush Spin
* * * Kay Report on (Lack of) WMDs Compels Bush to Dissemble
* * * McClellan Misrepresents Prewar Info on WMDs
* * * House Intel. Panel Undermines Bush on WMDs
* * * US Air Force Undermines Bush Claim
* * * Bush Double-talks To Defend Powell
* * * Bush Misleads (Once Again) At The United Nations
* * * Bush EPA Lied About Post-9/11 Air Safety
* * * Cheney Misleads on 9/11-Iraq Tie...And More
* * * Rumsfeld Admits He "Overstated" Regarding WMDs in Iraq
Click here for the latest in Bush lies and deceptions.
"Bush bashers, your ship has come in.
Bush backers, I dare you to read this."
--Arianna Huffington
see also:
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=13488
Crash
A few new lies
from http://www.bushlies.com/newlies.php
** 10/28/03 - Bush Press Conference Whoppers
** During a White House press conference--in
** which Bush argues that his adminsitration is
** making progress in Iraq despite the escalating
** violence in Baghdad--he makes several false or
** misleading statements.
** * When he is asked about the large "Mission
** Accomplished" banner that hung on the USS
** Abraham Lincoln during his triumphant May 1
** speech aboard the aircraft carrier, Bush
** suggests the crew of the ship--not White
** House staff--had been responsible for the
** sign's appearance. Subsequent news reports
** disclose the banner was produced by the White
** House. Bush says true, but the crew of the ship
** requested it.
** * When a reporter notes that a recent donors'
** conference only produced $13 billion in
** pledges for reconstruction in Iraq--leaving a
** $23 billion shortfall--Bush says, "Iraqi oil
** revenues...coupled with private investments
** should make up the difference." Yet L. Paul
** Bremer, the head of the U.S. occupation
** authority in Iraq, has said that in the near-term
** oil industry revenues will cover only the
** industry's own costs. That is, there will be no
** oil revenues available to pay for
** reconstruction.
** * Bush says of the war, "We took action based
** upon good, solid intelligence." To date, the
** House intelligence committee (which is led by
** a Republican), the GOP chairman of the
** Senate intelligence committee, chief WMD
** hunter David Kay, and Richard Kerr, a former
** deputy CIA chief, have each said that their
** reviews of the prewar intelligence on Iraq's
** WMDs and the supposed connection between
** Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda showed that the
** prewar intelligence was circumstantial,
** inferential, fragmentary, and full of
** uncertainties. They have not pronounced the
** prewar intelligence either "good" or "solid."
** * Bush claims, "I was the first president ever
** to have advocated a Palestinian state." On
** January 7, 2001, President Bill Clinton said,
** "There can be no genuine resolution to the
** [Middle East] conflict without a sovereign,
** viable Palestinian state that accomodates
** Israel's security requirements and demographic
** realities."
** **
** 10/26/03 - More Evidence Bush Hyped Threat
** **
** **
** Before the war, Bush and Cheney repeatedly
** asserted that Saddam Hussein was moments
** away from developing nuclear weapons. Now
** there's more evidence they didn’t know
** yellowcake from shinola. In a devastating
** front-page story in The Washington Post on
** October 26, reporter Barton Gellman notes
** that there was nothing to substantiate Bush's
** and Cheney's claims that Hussein was about to
** go nuclear. Gellman writes,
** "According to records made available to The
** Washington Post and interviews with arms
** investigators from the United States, Britain
** and Australia, it did not require a
** comprehensive survey to find the central
** assertions of the Bush administration’s prewar
** nuclear case to be insubstantial or untrue.
** Although Hussein did not relinquish his nuclear
** ambitions or technical records, investigators
** said, it is now clear he had no active program
** to build a weapon, produce its key materials or
** obtain the technology he needed for either."
** Forget Nigergate and those 16 words in Bush’s
** last State of the Union address. Gellman
** reports that the Iraq Survey Group—the
** WMD-hunters led by David Kay—has
** concluded that Iraq’s nuclear weapons
** scientists did no significant weapons-related
** work after 1991. What about those aluminum
** tubes that the Bush administration—including
** Secretary of State Colin Powell—pointed to as
** evidence the Iraqis were seeking to develop
** uranium-enrichment technology? They were
** rocket tubes. So says Brig. General Stephen
** Meekin, who commands one of the units that
** report to Kay. An unnamed U.S. official told
** Gellman that Meekin is not qualified to make
** this judgment. But a fact in Meekin’s favor is
** that Kay’s team has made no effort to collect
** these tubes.
** **
** 10/24/03 - More Evidence Bush Hyped Bad Intel
** **
** **
** The Washington Post reports that the Senate
** intelligence committee is preparing a "blistering
** report" on prewar intelligence that will
** apparently conclude that the intelligence did
** not definitively show that Iraq possessed
** WMDs or that Saddam Hussein maintained
** close connections to al Qaeda. The intelligence
** was sometimes "sloppy" and inconclusive,
** Senator Pat Roberts, the Republican chairman
** of the committee, tells the newspaper. Yet
** before the war, Bush said the intelligence on
** Iraq's WMD left "no doubt" about Hussein's
** (supposed) weapons of mass destruction.
** Though Roberts is willing to criticize the CIA,
** he has so far blocked an investigation into how
** Bush and his aides used the prewar
** intelligence. That is, he has refused to examine
** whether Bush misrepresented the intelligence
** he received. Consequently, Democrats accuse
** Roberts of seeking to blame the CIA in order
** to protect the administration. Still, Robert's
** evaluation of the prewar intelligence
** contradicts that of Bush, who has repeatedly
** said the intelligence was good and solid.
** **
** 10/22/03 - Rumsfeld Memo Challenges Bush
** **
** **
** USA Today reveals that in an October 16,
** 2003, memo written to four senior aides,
** Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld asked,
** "Are we winning or losing the Global War on
** Terror?" Rumsfeld also noted, "We are having
** mixed results with Al Qaida." The memo was
** clearly intended to goose his top
** people--General Richard Myers, General Peter
** Pace, Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith--to think
** boldly and imaginatively about the war at
** hand. But Rumsfeld observed, "Today, we
** lack the metrics to know if we are winning or
** losing the global war on terror." He wondered
** if more terrorists were being produced on a
** daily basis than the number of terrorists being
** captured, killed, deterred or dissuaded by U.S.
** actions.
** If Rumsfeld says there is no way to measure
** success or defeat in the campaign against
** terrorism, how can George W. Bush declare
** that he is indeed winning the war? Speaking at
** Fort Stewart on September 12, before soldiers
** and families of the Third Infantry Division,
** Bush said, "We're rolling back the terrorist
** threat, not on the fringes of its influence but at
** the heart of its power."
** As Rumsfeld might inquire, according to what
** metrics, Mr. President?
** **
** 10/19/03 - State Dept. Study Undercuts Rice
** **
** **
** In September, national security adviser
** Condoleezza Rice deflected criticism that the
** Bush administration had not planned
** adequately for the postwar occupation by
** saying, "if there was something that was really
** underestimated [by the Bush White House], it
** was how really awful Saddam Hussein was to
** his own people" and how deteriorated the Iraq
** infrastructure had become under Hussein's
** rule. She was maintaining that the
** administration had been surprised by the
** postwar reconstruction challenges. Yet today
** The New York Times reveals that a year-long,
** prewar study conducted by the State
** Department had predicted many of the
** problems confronted by the US occupation
** authority. The study, for instance, noted that
** Iraq's electrical and water systems were in
** terrible shape and that an Iraqi society
** brutalized by Hussein might not be able to
** quickly rebuild its civil institutions. "Several
** officials said," according to the newspaper,
** "that many of the findings in the $5 million
** study were ignored by Pentagon officials." And
** apparently by Rice as well
Herb Martin
> glance at a recent book, THE LIES OF GEORGE W. BUSH, by
> David Corn....He carefully documents many charges. Some examples:
The worm Corn is the liar. He has nothing.
--
Herb Martin
Roy Blankenship
"Herb Martin" <ne...@LearnQuick.com> wrote in message
news:Su1ob.5812$W84...@twister.austin.rr.com...
You must be deaf and blind. You don't have to read ANYONE to know that we
just got totally fucked by this administration............
Bush Wax
comes back from kicking his $1200 per day habit) these guys tell it like it
is - from what I've heard this book tries to twist the facts. This lying
anti-American bastard needs to be put on Guantanomo for treason with the
rest of those enemy combatants. I hope Fox sues his ass for detravation.
B. Wax
"Crash" <see.m...@theBeach.edu> wrote in message
news:vq0u1do...@corp.supernews.com...
Greg
honest people in the world. Your gods are the bigger liars and we're suppose
to take your word on Corn. That's like you saying Bush isn't a murderer of
american soldiers.
"Herb Martin" <ne...@LearnQuick.com> wrote in message
news:Su1ob.5812$W84...@twister.austin.rr.com...
Jez
"Bush Wax" <bw...@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:3fa0c...@127.0.0.1...
> Total liberal bushit. Listen to Hanity, O'Reiley and Limbaugh (after he
> comes back from kicking his $1200 per day habit)
Surely Limbaugh should be up on drug possesion charges.......
Ah ! Of course he only shouts about justice for other types
of junkies..fucking hypocrite....
>these guys tell it like it
> is -
Limbaugh tells it like it is !!! Jezus....you must be on the same
junk he's on........
>from what I've heard this book tries to twist the facts. This lying
> anti-American bastard needs to be put on Guantanomo for treason with the
> rest of those enemy combatants.
No free-speech in America today then is there?
--
Ho hum
Jez
"Few of us can easily surrender our belief that
society must somehow make sense. The thought
that the State has lost its mind and is punishing so
many innocent people is intolerable. And so the
evidence has to be internally denied."
- Arthur Miller
Herb Martin
> just got totally fucked by this administration............
That was Clinton. Even he now admits he should have gotten
Bin Laden when offered the chances.
--
Herb Martin
Herb Martin
I don't speak for any of them (and never listened to Limbaugh much) -- I
certainly don't always agree with Hannity or O'Reilly -- Hume inclusion
in the list says much about your prejudices but he makes mistakes as well.
I have repeatedly ask for anyone who can find ONE FACTUAL ERROR in
Ms Coulter's book,
"Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism"
to report it.
No one has -- I haven't read the (entire) "Treason" book yet, but I have it
here and will
read it (eventually.)
Do you have any specific errors to report?
--
Herb Martin
Herb Martin
> Ah ! Of course he only shouts about justice for other types
> of junkies..fucking hypocrite....
Probably not -- the ACLU has made it pretty hard to convict a
known criminal unless you actually have the PHYSICAL EVIDENCE
and obtained it through a COURT ORDER (obtained before you knew
that evidence existed.)
Actually, I thing most of the search and seizure rulings make sense most
of the time but this would likely prevent any prosecution since their is now
no way to chemically analyze the material in question and the only one who
can (apparently) testify to such possession committed the much more
serious crime of DRUG DEALING.
While it is common for drug users to be given a deal for ratting out their
pusher, usually the pusher cannot expect leniency for ratting out the users;
only the DISTRIBUTERS' NAMES will buy a deal.
--
Herb Martin
Greg
her.
"Herb Martin" <ne...@LearnQuick.com> wrote in message
B
You do (of course) have a cite for that Herb?
Or are you just giving us the "benefit" of your opinion?
You should read the book Herb ... it was an eye-opener for me and I already
thought I knew all the lies.. I didn't know half of it.
Unlike Coulter's and O'Reilly's books there are multiple sources quoted and
follow-ups when people were willing to go on record.
You *can* read I assume?
B.
----== Posted via Newsfeed.Com - Unlimited-Uncensored-Secure Usenet News==----
http://www.newsfeeds.com The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World! >100,000 Newsgroups
---= 19 East/West-Coast Specialized Servers - Total Privacy via Encryption =---
Crash
In <vq0v6r8...@corp.supernews.com>
On Thu, 30 Oct 2003 02:51GMT, (Crash) wrote about:
Re: NEW! - A big Fat LIST of BUSH LIES
>
> A few new lies
> from http://www.bushlies.com/newlies.php
>
> ** 10/28/03 - Bush Press Conference Whoppers
......snip recent-lies list
> THE WALL STREET JOURNAL writes,
> "Before [Republicans] get too giddy, however, they ought to
> glance at a recent book, THE LIES OF GEORGE W. BUSH, by
> David Corn....He carefully documents many charges. Some examples:
> the president's claim that there already were 60 separate
> stem-cell lines sufficient for medical research, when he'd
> been told there were far fewer; the false claims that his
> tax cuts were aimed mainly at working-class Americans;
> the untrue charge that government labor unions were
> refusing to cooperate in key homeland security measures;
> and the numerous misrepresentations before the Iraq war."
> ...too boring to repete yet again.
>
> BOOKLIST says,
> "Corn's take on the topic is straightforward and chronological.
> No raised voices here. The longtime editor of The Nation, Corn
> sets out to build a serious case against Bush in....
...........snip
> John Dean, a former Counsel to the President of the
> United States, writes:
> "misleading the public about the
> direction of government policy does not allow the
> electorate to make an informed choice and undermines the
> premise of the democratic process." Corn cites the work of
> American philosopher and ethicist Sissela Bok to suggest
> why such deception is abhorrent:
> *** "It allows those in power to override or nullify the
> *** right vested in the people to cast an informed vote"
> http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20031024.html
John W. Dean: 'Has George W.
Bush met his own Ken Starr?'
Friday, October 24, 2003
Presidential Lies,
Those Who Expose Them, and How We Ought
to Judge Among Them
By John W. Dean, FindLaw
The Washington editor of The Nation, David Corn, has
written a powerful -- not to mention disquieting -- 324-page
polemic addressing the pervasive mendacity of George W.
Bush's administration. It is entitled The Lies of George W.
Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception.
Actually, calling the book a polemic is misleading. It may
be more accurate to call it a bill of particulars -- the
document that provides the specific charges underlying an
indictment.
In this case, the charges are highly credible. Corn is an
experienced and respected Washington journalist. His
evidence is overwhelming, his tone is measured, and his
book a jaw dropper. This devastating work is not a laundry
list of false statements; rather, it is the chronology of a
presidency. Corn found that "lies, in part, made this
president, and lies frequently have been the support
beams of his administration."
In sum, Corn has done for George Bush what Ken Starr did
for Bill Clinton: provided evidence that places his
presidency in jeopardy.
Corn's comprehensive, laudable work largely refrains from
touching on one important issue, however: How should
one judge presidential lies? In this column, I'd like to
suggest criteria for doing so.
All Presidents Lie, Some More Than Others
Readers can find the book's introductory chapter posted
online, on the author's site at http://www.bushlies.com/
-- which also plans to track Bush's ongoing lies,
after the time when the book went to
press. Right out of the box, Corn acknowledges that a
number of presidents have been found to be liars.
To mention only a few of Corn's examples, William Henry
Harrison was not, as he said, born in a log cabin; Abraham
Lincoln, the nation's leading railroad lawyer, was not the
simple country lawyer he claimed to be when he ran for
president; Franklin Roosevelt failed to explain to
Americans, when he wanted to lead the nation to war, how
the USS Greer had actually provoked a Nazi attack; and
Harry Truman was untruthful when he said the first atomic
bomb was being dropped on a military base at Hiroshima
to avoid killing citizens.
Corn argues, however, that Bush may have "pushed the
envelope further than recent presidents," and that his
"reliance upon deceptive arguments to support the major
initiatives of his presidency" while perhaps "not
unprecedented," is "still distinctive."
More importantly, he points out that what prior presidents
did is history: "Bush is the president of the nation has now
-- at a point when honesty in government is needed as
much, if not more, than ever."
A Fair and Balanced Analysis: Corn is No Bush-Basher
This is not a Bush-bashing book. Indeed, much of its
power comes from the fact that it is not.
It is not shrill or nasty, and Corn exhibits no glee in finding
lie after lie. Instead, he methodically deconstructs key
statements from the Bush presidential campaign (in
1999-2000) to the present (through his August 2003
vacation).
Not until after he lays out the evidence, for readers to draw
their own conclusions, does Corn offer his own
assessment. In doing so, he examines how Bush has
gotten away with his lies.
Corn argues that much of the fault belongs to the
mainstream media, which is loath to call any president a
liar. (For instance, The New York Times directed its "feisty,
liberal columnist" Paul Krugman to not use the word "lie"
when addressing Bush's proposals during the campaign.)
In addition, Corn notes that those who regularly cover the
President have good reason to treat him easily, for they
fear retribution, given the White House's "vindictive
streak."
For example, Corn describes how the White House went
after Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank, when he
wrote a piece entitled "For Bush Facts Are Malleable;
Presidential Tradition of Embroidering Key Assertions
Continues." The White House phoned The Note -- a daily
political newsletter produced by ABC News and widely
read by the news media and political junkies -- and
"trash-talked Milbank" while making a false rebuttal to his
story.
Presidents Must Do More than Refrain From Knowing
Lies
Corn's evidence against Bush brings us to the question I
raised at the outset of this column: How should we judge
Presidential lies?
Corn himself implicitly suggests a few criteria. He notes
that it is not enough for a president and his principal aides
to refrain from making knowingly false statements. Rather,
they must find the truth, and if they can't, must say so. In
addition, an error in a presidential statement, when
discovered, is every bit equal to a false statement if not
corrected immediately.
I agree. And that means that it is no defense that a
President is unaware (such as President Reagan, who may
have been in the early stages of Alzheimer's) or believes
his own spin. The obligation to find the truth remains.
Some Rare Presidential Lies May Be Justifiable
Are there exceptions to this obligation to find and tell the
truth? Some scholars say yes. The thinking of Hans
Morgenthau, and more recently, that of James Pfiffner, are
.....snip
Pfiffner has also offered a classification of Presidential lies.
There are those that are wrong but understandable, those
that are serious breaches of the public trust, and those
that, he contends, are most loathsome -- lies of policy
deception. As I read Corn's study, I was tracking Pfiffner's
additional categories to see where Bush's lies might fit.
....big snip
John W. Dean: 'Has George W.
Bush met his own Ken Starr?'
Friday, October 24, 2003
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20031024.html
Crash
"Herb Martin" wrote about:
> Herb Martin
pot kettle black - idiot big-government tailwagger bootlick
blow me little punk
--
"They who give up liberty for safety,
deserve neither" -- Ben Franklin
Crash
On Thu, 30 Oct 2003 02:51:38 GMT, (Crash) wrote about:
Re: NEW! - A big Fat LIST of BUSH LIES
....big snip of bush lies list & great book reviews
> John Dean, a former Counsel to the President of the
> United States, writes:
> "misleading the public about the
> direction of government policy does not allow the
> electorate to make an informed choice and undermines the
> premise of the democratic process." Corn cites the work of
> American philosopher and ethicist Sissela Bok to suggest
> why such deception is abhorrent:
> *** "It allows those in power to override or nullify the
> *** right vested in the people to cast an informed vote"
> http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20031024.html
--
Herb Martin
have
> it
> > here and will
> > read it (eventually.)
> >
> > Do you have any specific errors to report?
"Greg" <gra...@surferie.net> wrote in message
news:vq2ugvc...@corp.supernews.com...
> Read Franken's book, he'll explain Coulter to you.He's got 2 chapters on
> her.
That's (you don't have any yourself) what I thought.
I will have to go to the bookstore and read it there -- I have heard Franken
who is neither very smart nor was he ever very funny so it certainly makes
no
sense to buy his book.
If you knew of something we presume you would quote a SPECIFIC and
SUBSTANTIAL ERROR in her book....
We're waiting.....
Come on, there must be ONE...
--
Herb Martin
Crash
In <vq2ugvc...@corp.supernews.com>
Re: NEW! - A big Fat LIST of BUSH LIES
> Read Franken's book, he'll explain Coulter to you.He's got 2 chapters on
> her.
I like brainy women like coulter.
She wears dresses so short, when she bends over,
you can see her brains.
She's hot.
Why?
Frankin fried her brains
and exposed her assets for
all the world to see.
Of course, the dittohead parrots & Co
fear both sides of the story, they
run and hide, and toss bombs blindly from
their bunkers just like "Hidey-Bunker" Bush
does. It's what Republicans do best.
Bunker up, cling to each other, and toss
shit at "The Others."
--
"They who give up liberty for safety,
deserve neither" -- Ben Franklin
> "Herb Martin" <ne...@LearnQuick.com> wrote in message
> news:Q7eob.9919$W84....@twister.austin.rr.com...
> > > Right Herb, and Coulter, Hannity, O'Reilly, Hume, Limbaugh are the most
> >
> > I don't speak for any of them (and never listened to Limbaugh much) -- I
> > certainly don't always agree with Hannity or O'Reilly -- Hume inclusion
> > in the list says much about your prejudices but he makes mistakes as well.
> >
> > I have repeatedly ask for anyone who can find ONE FACTUAL ERROR in
> > Ms Coulter's book,
> > "Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism"
> > to report it.
> >
> > No one has -- I haven't read the (entire) "Treason" book yet, but I have
> it
> > here and will
> > read it (eventually.)
> >
> > Do you have any specific errors to report?
Where do YOU hide all day neocon?
Try crawling outa yer bunker now and then.
The world wouldn't smell so bad.
> >
> > --
> > Herb Martin
> >
> >
>
>
Crash
In <3fa0c...@127.0.0.1>
On Thu, 30 Oct 2003 00:37:36 -0800, "Bush Wax" <bw...@yahoo.com> wrote
about:
Re: NEW! - A big Fat LIST of BUSH LIES
> Total liberal bushit.
> > THE WALL STREET JOURNAL writes,
> > "Before [Republicans] get too giddy, however, they ought to
> > glance at a recent book, THE LIES OF GEORGE W. BUSH, by
> > David Corn....He carefully documents many charges.
damn commies!
> Listen to Hanity, O'Reiley and Limbaugh (after he
> comes back from kicking his $1200 per day habit) these guys tell it like it
> is -
Why do I det the feeling no
irony is intended?
If brains were dynomite, you Republicans
couldn't blow yer nose.
>from what I've heard this book tries to twist the facts. This lying
> anti-American bastard needs to be put on Guantanomo for treason with the
> rest of those enemy combatants.
If so, then Duhbya needs to be hung for
subversion of America and a coup attempt.
Why does he hate America as it is so much?
What punks. What liars.
He couldn't do it it, on the truth,
could he? And you boys are all lined up,
lickin up his vomit, making excuses for
the lies, the dead and maimed Americican boys,
and his ruining our economy and tossing us
into debt. Hitler woulda love your kind.
What ever happened to American individualism?
What ever happened to America the Good?
You boys condone this crap?
Shame.
>I hope Fox sues his ass for detravation.
>
> B. Wax
> "Crash" wrote in message
Herb Martin
> > The worm Corn is the liar. He has nothing.
> > Herb Martin
> pot kettle black - idiot big-government tailwagger bootlick
> blow me little punk
Well, there is YOUR reasoned argument showing you level of
intelligence and (lack of) ability to debate.
Sorry you are so handicapped -- but perhaps one day when you
grow up you will be ashamed that these posts are archived on the
Internet. Too bad.
Oh, that's right, you don't have the guts to post a REAL NAME or
REAL SIG since even your are embarrassed by your posts.
Got it!
--
Herb Martin
The Lone Weasel
news:vq38ncr...@corp.supernews.com:
Thanks for that link - great article. I also checked out
David Corn's website which lists new lies going back to July:
http://www.bushlies.com/forum/index.php?s=
49626e9089d8f6234703b597afe2a268
--
Yours truly,
The Lone Weasel
ShrikeBack
That depends on your definition of "fucked".
Roy Blankenship
"Herb Martin" <ne...@LearnQuick.com> wrote in message
tried to get him, we didn't have the technology, now we do." I watched him
say it on TV. Get it right next time.
Roy Blankenship
"Herb Martin" <ne...@LearnQuick.com> wrote in message
Gabrielle Rapagnetta
>
>"Herb Martin" <ne...@LearnQuick.com> wrote in message
>
>>
>> I don't speak for any of them (and never listened to Limbaugh much) -- I
>> certainly don't always agree with Hannity or O'Reilly -- Hume inclusion
>> in the list says much about your prejudices but he makes mistakes as well.
>>
>> I have repeatedly ask for anyone who can find ONE FACTUAL ERROR in
>> Ms Coulter's book,
>> "Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism"
>> to report it.
>>
>> No one has -- I haven't read the (entire) "Treason" book yet, but I have
>> it here and will read it (eventually.)
>>
>> Do you have any specific errors to report?
>>
From the essay "101 Errors in Ann Coulter's Treason" By Jeff
Kisseloff:
Error No. 1: At the very beginning of the chapter, on page 17, Coulter
says that "in 1938, Whittaker Chambers broke with the Communist
Party." This innocent-sounding statement is in fact crucial to any
telling of the Hiss case, because it goes to the heart of Chambers'
credibility. No document has ever come to light, either in America or
in Russia, that shows when Whittaker Chambers left the Communist
Party.
The only evidence that exists is Chambers' own testimony Ð and Coulter
does not mention that Chambers told two distinctly different versions
of this story. For nine years, between September 1, 1939 and November
17, 1948, Chambers on more than two dozen occasions swore or stated
that he had left the Party in 1937, and, in addition, swore or stated
that he and Hiss had never committed espionage. The 1938 Party-leaving
date only emerged on November 17, 1948, when, for the first time,
Chambers swore that he had repeatedly been lying for the previous nine
years. It was at that moment that Chambers first produced copies of
State Department documents that he said Hiss had given him; the
documents were dated 1938.
Error No. 2: Coulter, again on page 17, quotes Chambers' supposed
fears that the Communists might kill him after his break from the
Party. Coulter does not mention that no documentary evidence or oral
testimony from any of Chambers' contemporaries has ever surfaced to
substantiate his claim (put forward a decade and a half later) that
his life had been in fact in danger. Coulter also ignores Chambers'
own statements that during this same period he had traveled openly to
New York to meet with his publisher, someone, he later said, who was
himself connected with the Communist Party underground; and that his
phone number continued to be listed in the Baltimore phone book.
Chambers even claimed that he had dropped by Alger Hiss's home,
uninvited, and stayed for dinner, despite being convinced that Hiss
might even murder him that evening.
Error No. 3: Coulter, on page 17 again, quotes Chambers saying that
his break with the Party "was more than 'leaving one house and
occupying another.'" Actually, Chambers said at Hiss's trial that this
was precisely what he had done: "I broke by disappearing from the
place where I had been living and going into hiding" (first trial
transcript, page 193).
Error No. 4: On page 18, Coulter says that Walter Krivitsky (a former
Russian general who defected to the United States and wrote a book
about his experiences) forced Chambers to "state the painful truth out
loud" about the Soviet government, and quotes Chambers saying he had
decided to become an informer after meeting Krivitsky. Despite
Chambers' statement, his informing in fact considerably predated his
meeting with Krivitsky, which didn't take place until 1939. In 1938,
Chambers told journalist Herbert Solow that he would be willing to
tell all he knew in exchange for a promise of executive clemency.
Chambers' introduction to Krivitsky was arranged by Isaac Don Levine,
who had ghost-written Krivitsky's memoirs and was himself a Russian
immigrant. Levine, who played a crucial (and still mysterious) role in
developing Chambers' story, years later was shown to be a falsifier of
evidence: he claimed to have a document showing that Stalin had once
been an agent of the Czarist secret police; the document proved to be
a forgery.
Error No. 5: Still on page 18, Coulter implies that Chambers'
revulsion with the Nazi-Soviet pact first led him to approach American
government officials. Although it's true that this first meeting took
place after that pact had been signed, planning for it had begun long
before Hitler and Stalin formed their alliance.
Error No. 6: Coulter, again on page 18, writes that after dinner at
the home of Assistant Secretary of State Adolf A. Berle, Jr., the
State Department's chief security officer, Chambers "spent several
hours detailing the Communist espionage network of which he had been a
part." This is a critical misstatement since, as we shall see, it
becomes the bedrock argument on which Coulter's presentation of modern
American history rests — her contention being that, beginning in 1939,
the American government laughed off warnings of Soviet espionage, a
situation that went uncorrected for over a decade and was first
reversed only by Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy's 1950s campaign against
Communist subversion.
The fundamental flaw in this argument — omitted by Coulter — is that
according to 14 years worth of testimony about this meeting (including
notes Berle made immediately after the meeting in 1939; diary entries
Berle made in 1948 and 1952; interviews Berle gave to the FBI and the
Hiss defense; sworn testimony Berle gave to the House Committee on
Un-American Activities in 1948; and 1948 HUAC testimony by Chambers
himself) Chambers never at that meeting accused anyone of espionage.
Indeed, Berle told a Hiss lawyer in 1950, Chambers, although he seemed
sincere, "was incapable of standing up under questioning on any
matter."
Although Chambers at first called several people (including Alger Hiss
and his brother, Donald) Communists, he later "admitted that he really
meant no more than that they were the kind of people whom the
Communist Party had tried to interest generally in the Communist point
of view." (Chambers also told Berle that he had left the Party in
1937.) Chambers, Berle concluded, "gave the appearance of a crackpot."
Errors No. 7 and 8: Coulter, still on page 18, says Chambers named "at
least" two dozen men "in high government positions" as Soviet spies.
Berle's notes of the meeting, however, record 13 names, not 24; none
held high-level positions (and, of course, as just noted, none were
named as spies, or even as Party members). Several, for example,
worked for the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, while another
was in the Office of Price Administration.
Error No. 9: Coulter, still on page 18, calls Alger Hiss a "top" State
Department official. Hiss later became important in the Department,
but in 1939 he was a mid-level official, one of many.
Error No. 10: Coulter, still on page 18, says that Chambers named
Donald Hiss as an espionage agent: As already noted, Berle said
Chambers made no such accusation; in later years Chambers indeed
repeatedly repudiated the notion: he told the FBI Donald Hiss had
never been an espionage agent, and swore to the same fact at both of
Alger Hiss's perjury trials.
Error No. 11: Coulter, still on page 18, says that after meeting
Chambers in 1939, Berle urgently reported his information to President
Roosevelt, who, she says, "laughed and told Berle to go f--- himself."
This is completely false, according to Berle, who only heard about
this claim in 1952 when he read in Chambers' "Witness" (which Coulter
cites in a footnote) that Roosevelt had said, "in words which it is
necessary to paraphrase, 'go jump in a lake.'" In 1948, Berle had
recorded in his diary his enduring memory of what Chambers told him in
1939: "There was no evidence sufficient to base a conclusion as to
Hiss's underground associations." Berle's 1952 diary entry shows that,
because Chambers had failed to put forward convincing evidence, Berle
had not gone directly to the President, but had instead "reported the
substance of this [his interview with Chambers] ... to [Presidential
secretary Marvin H.] McIntyre." Berle said he had a vague recollection
of having later mentioned the matter to Roosevelt, and called the
allegation about Roosevelt's alleged comment "an unfair attack" since
no specific charges had ever been made that the President could
respond to — either to act on or to laugh off. Berle's diary entries
at no point indicate that Roosevelt ever made any negative comments
whatever about Chambers' allegations.
To sum up: all of Berle's written and oral comments on this one and
only meeting with Chambers were consistent. Coulter mentions none of
them, and fails to come to acknowledge a central issue of the Hiss
case — not the question of "Do you believe Hiss or Chambers?" but the
question that precedes it: "Do you believe Chambers or Chambers?"
Meaning the Chambers who (after November 17, 1948) swore that he and
Alger Hiss had both been Soviet spies, or the Chambers who until then
swore there had been no espionage.
Error No. 12: There's a further problem with this same passage on page
18 about Roosevelt: a Coulter footnote lists William Rusher's book,
'Special Counsel,' as the source for her "go f--- himself" claim,
which would appear at first glance to offer independent corroboration
for the story. But "Special Counsel" actually says only that the
President laughed, citing Chamber's book, "Witness," as its source. In
"Witness," Chambers says he heard the story from Isaac Don Levine (who
had arranged the Berle meeting) and that Levine had said he received
his information from Berle. Since Berle in fact denied that the
incident had taken place, the result is Coulter attempting to use
Chambers to confirm Chambers' story.
Error No. 13: Coulter, again on page 18, says no action was ever taken
against Hiss. Chambers' early allegations of Communist sympathies,
even when presented only as vague suspicions, were in fact followed up
on by security authorities: Hiss was interviewed by the FBI and his
phone was wiretapped.
Error No. 14: Coulter, again on page 18, says that Roosevelt, after
ignoring Berle's warnings, promoted Hiss, making him a "trusted aide
who would go on to advise him at Yalta." In fact, Hiss was never an
"aide" to Roosevelt, and all his promotions were made by his State
Department bosses. Hiss was included as part of the Yalta team almost
by chance and only as a last-minute replacement. The decision to take
Hiss to the Yalta Conference was made by Secretary of State Edward R.
Stettinius, Jr., a former chairman of U.S. Steel. At Yalta, where he
worked as a junior Stettinius staffer and never dealt directly with
Roosevelt, Hiss took a forceful anti-Soviet position, according to
official conference notes released in the 1950s, arguing strongly
against the Soviet Union's request to increase its voting strength by
admitting three constituent Soviet republics as independent members of
the U.N. (the equivalent of admitting Vermont to the U.N.).
Error No. 15: Coulter, on page 19, writes that William C. Bullitt was
also "laughed off" when he reported to President Roosevelt that he,
too, had heard of Chambers' charges. Coulter is correct in citing
"Seeds of Treason" as the source for this story (although omitting the
name of Ralph de Toldedano's co-author, Victor Lasky, from her
footnote). But a close reading of that book shows that the two authors
themselves mention no specific source for the assertion that Roosevelt
laughed at Bullitt's information.
Bullitt himself told the Internal Security Subcommittee in 1952 that
he had once spoken about Hiss not to the President but to Hiss's State
Department boss, Stanley K. Hornbeck. Since Bullitt was merely
repeating a rumor he had heard via Chambers, Hornbeck, a political
conservative who worked closely with Hiss, saw nothing in Bullitt's
remarks to raise his suspicions and chose not to act. Hornbeck may
have considered Bullitt a witness whose reliability had limits. During
a hearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947,
Bullitt, a former ambassador to the Soviet Union, testified that he
had seen evidence that Soviet parents ate their young.
Error No. 16: Coulter, again on page 19, writes that "the Democrats'
nonchalance about Soviet agents on their staffs was scandalous." In
fact, following allegations by Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, more
than 100 government employees were investigated by the FBI, had their
mail opened and their phones tapped, and were brought before grand
juries.
Error No. 17: Coulter, on page 19 again, accuses Berle of later
concocting "an inane straw-man argument" to "soft-pedal" his lack of
action against the Hiss brothers. Berle, she says, had in equivalent
modern terminology been "informed they were members of al-Qaeda," yet
still maintained (here she quotes Berle directly) that "The idea that
these two Hiss boys ... were going to take over the United States
government did not strike me as any immediate danger." But this was a
true statement, based on what Chambers had actually said to Berle.
To use equivalent modern terminology, all that Berle had really heard
from Chambers (see Error No. 6) was that the two Hisses could
potentially have been useful to al-Qaeda, if it had ever been able to
sign them up, though as far as Chambers knew, it hadn't.
Error No. 18: Coulter, again on page 19, quotes Berle as saying that
there were "pretty consistent leaks" from Alger Hiss's office,
implying both that information went straight from Hiss's office to the
Soviet Union, and that Berle knew about it. But this truncated quote
only resuscitates a distortion of Berle's testimony first put into
print 38 years ago by de Toledano and Lasky, who tried to make it
appear that Berle was linking the Hisses to foreign agents when he was
actually scolding them for talking to American reporters. To correct
the record, here is the full quote from Berle's diary: "The Hiss boys
were later of the appeasement faction of the State Department.
Anything that went through their office leaked, usually to [newspaper
columnist] Drew Pearson...."
Error No. 19: Coulter, still on page 19, writes that, in 1948, "almost
a full decade later," Chambers was called to testify before HUAC,
implying that he had been ignored or shunned by U.S. security
officials during that time. Not so — between the Berle meeting and his
HUAC testimony, he was interviewed numerous times by the FBI and twice
by Raymond Murphy, a State Department security officer. Of course,
Chambers never gave his questioners much to go on, since during these
interviews, Chambers always insisted that there had been no espionage
that he knew of (and also always said that he had left the Communist
Party in 1937).
Error No. 20: Coulter, still on page 19, writes that before HUAC
"Chambers again named Hiss as a Soviet agent." In fact, Chambers
didn't; testifying before HUAC he swore once again that he and Hiss
had not been spies. He also once again swore that he had no proof that
Hiss was or had been a member of the Communist Party.
Error No. 21: Coulter, still on page 19, says that HUAC was somewhat
more interested in Chambers' charges than Roosevelt had been, implying
that the Congressmen were more eager to fight Communist subversion
than Roosevelt had been. This is an observation without a beginning,
an end, or any context. In the first place, as we've noted, Roosevelt
had never been told about allegations of Soviet espionage, because
Chambers had never made such charges.
In the second place, there were powerful political reasons for taking
Chambers' non-espionage charges seriously in 1948. 1948 was a
presidential election year, and the Republicans, who had lost four
presidential elections in a row but had just won control of Congress,
were looking for issues to use against President Truman, Roosevelt's
successor, who was considered vulnerable. In addition, HUAC had its
own pressing need for issues — since many Congress members had begun
talking about abolishing the committee after the 1948 elections.
Error No. 22: Coulter, on page 20, contradicts herself when she calls
Hiss's denial before HUAC that he had ever known anyone by the name of
Chambers a "Clintonian lie" — since in her next sentence she
acknowledges that Chambers, while in the underground, had adopted a
different name. Moreover, Hiss in his early testimony was telling the
whole truth available to him at that time: in 1934 and 1935, he had
known a freelance writer who had introduced himself as George Crosley.
Hiss had never known Crosley by any other name, had never known that
Crosley had any other names (including Whittaker Chambers). Further,
Hiss had never known that Crosley had ties of any kind to either the
Communist Party or the Soviet Union. (For a definitive discussion on
the Hiss-Chambers relationship, see "Two Foolish Men: The True Story
of the Friendship between Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers," by
William Howard Moore, Moorop Press, Portland, Oregon, 1987.)
Error No. 23: Coulter, again on page 20, repeats her inaccurate
contention (see Error No. 20) that Chambers, in his HUAC testimony,
named Hiss as a spy. He did not.
Error No. 24: Did Hiss and Chambers know each other? Coulter asks,
still on page 20. She then offers an abbreviated, oversimplified
answer: "One of them was lying." In the first place, Hiss, as soon as
he realized who Chambers was, volunteered to the Committee that
Chambers was a man he had once known as George Crosley, thus
amplifying and correcting his first statement. (Chambers, on the other
hand, wouldn't admit to having used the pseudonym until months later.)
More troublingly, Coulter ignores the fact that it is only possible to
believe in any of Chambers' stories about Hiss by first accepting that
he was, necessarily, someone who repeatedly lied under oath. As the
man who both swore that he and Hiss had not been spies and then later
swore that they both indeed had been spies — if Chambers was telling
the truth when he said that their espionage was real, then he must
have been lying when he previously denied this. Conversely, if
Chambers was telling the truth when he originally said no spying had
taken place, then he must later have become a liar when he claimed
that both of them had once been spies.
Error No. 25: Coulter, still on page 20, says it has now been proved
"beyond cavil" that Hiss was a spy. Although she doesn't spell it out,
this is presumably a reference to the "Venona" documents — several
thousand decrypted and recently released Soviet cables sent during
World War II. One of these documents has been said by some scholars to
implicate Alger Hiss, because the code-named spy it describes at first
glance bears some superficial resemblance to the espionage activities
Chambers began describing in November 1948. A recent careful
examination of this document, however, comes to the opposite
conclusion, and asserts that Venona actually exonerates Hiss. For more
on this, click here.
Coulter does not point out that opinion remains divided. As
best-selling journalist Eric Alterman (author of "What Liberal Media?
The Truth About Bias and the News"), who follows the Hiss case,
pointed out on H-DIPLO, a scholarly e-mail discussion list devoted to
diplomatic and international history (on July 24, 2003): "I do think
all should be aware that the case is not yet closed and probably won't
be, absent stronger evidence from the Soviet archives." Alterman added
a cautionary note about Venona interpretation: "I think I've looked at
a considerable portion of the English language sources, and I do not
find Dr. Haynes' [John Earl Haynes, a historian at the Library of
Congress] et al. interpretation of the single alleged Venona reference
to Hiss to be compelling. I don't think that particular document
proves anything."
Error No. 26: Coulter, still on page 20, writes that for all but the
"willfully stupid" the so-called Pumpkin Papers proved that Hiss had
been an agent. The Pumpkin Papers were films of government documents
that Chambers had temporarily hidden in a hollowed-out pumpkin on his
Maryland farm. One roll of film was completely fogged. Two other rolls
of film consisted of unclassified Navy Department information sheets
(about, for instance, the proper color to paint fire extinguishers)
that were available for the taking as public handouts from the Bureau
of Standards. Two strips of film did display State Department
documents, although, since they had circulated throughout the
department, it was never demonstrated that Chambers must have received
them from Hiss (and Chambers later acknowledged that at least some of
them had been handed to him by another State Department employee,
Julian Wadleigh).
One historian has recently noted that even the genuine State
Department documents in the Pumpkin Papers were not spy-worthy
documents: Writing on H-DIPLO on July 22, 2003, Dr. Robert Whealey,
who teaches diplomatic history at Ohio University, commented that "The
many books hostile to Hiss never discuss what was in the Pumpkin
Papers. They were probably low grade intelligence hardly harmful to
the State Department or Roosevelt."
Error No. 27: Coulter, again on page 20, writes that Hiss's request at
one HUAC hearing to call the Harvard Club and deliver a message that
he would be late indicates that his defense was essentially that "he
was a Harvard man." This is an attempt to turn politeness into a
character flaw. Hiss had appeared before HUAC in an executive session
on August 16. The next day, a HUAC member invited him to come to the
Commodore Hotel at 5:30 that evening. Hiss agreed without being told
the purpose of the meeting. When Hiss arrived, he found that instead
of a short, informal conversation, several HUAC members had arranged a
surprise executive session and a confrontation with Chambers (a
Columbia man). Instead of walking out on this trickery, Hiss stayed
and answered all the questions put to him. Before the session began,
however, he asked the Congressmen to inform the friend he was supposed
to meet at six that he would be late.
Error No. 28: Coulter, again on page 20, writes that the press
vilified Chambers after his appearance before HUAC. A check of The New
York Times in 1948 reveals it was straightforward, fair, and balanced
in its coverage of the controversy. Newspapers with more conservative
outlooks favored Chambers. One reporter assigned to the story — Bert
Andrews of The New York Herald Tribune — was a personal friend of
Chambers. Another journalist, Eugene Lyons of Reader's Digest, later
served as a private conduit between Richard Nixon and Thomas J.
Murphy, the Hiss case prosecutor, during the trials.
Error No. 29: Coulter, still on page 20, writes that "the press"
referred to HUAC's members as the least intelligent in Congress. She
does not point out that her source for this critique is not a media
historian, but Chambers himself. That being said, the HUAC membership
was not a distinguished assortment. For example, Chairman J. Parnell
Thomas (R.-NJ) the next year was sent to a federal penitentiary after
being convicted of embezzlement. Rep. John E. Rankin, a Democrat from
Tupelo, Mississippi was openly a white supremicist and an anti-Semite.
Karl E. Mundt (R.-SD) would co-sponsor the Internal Security Act of
1950, which set up concentration camps for those perceived as
pro-Communist.
Error No. 30: Coulter, on page 21, writes that to prove to the
committee that he knew Hiss, Chambers offered many intimate details
about Hiss and his personal life. He did — but much of what he said
was wrong (for instance, claiming that Hiss was deaf in one ear),
indicating that he did not know Hiss nearly as well as he claimed to.
Error No. 31: Coulter, again on page 21, writes that Chambers'
testimony recalling that Hiss was an avid bird watcher who had seen a
rare prothonotary warbler convinced the Committee that Chambers knew
Hiss. While accurate as far as it goes, this fails to separate out the
threads of the two stories. Both men agreed that they had known each
other, but Chambers (at this point) said, in effect, "We knew each
other, and were also both part of a Communist group." Hiss countered,
"We knew each other socially — and nothing more." Knowing each other
did not in itself constitute a conspiracy. As the Earl Jowitt, former
Lord Chancellor of Great Britain, commented in his 1953 book, "The
Strange Case of Alger Hiss," "I was amazed to observe that the fact
that Chambers had this knowledge [of Hiss's life] and was able to
recall it was in some way regarded as a proof of his story [of a
clandestine conspiracy]."
Error No. 32: Coulter, still on page 21, writes that the "entire
Social Register of the liberal establishment" backed Hiss, "the
patrician, Harvard-educated Soviet spy." Instead, the Hiss case
sharply divided liberals (and conservatives, too, for that matter,
although to a lesser extent). Prominent younger liberals, such as
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, and Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, disavowed Hiss. The "patrician" Hiss, by the way, sprang
from a solidly middle-class Baltimore family. His most important
mentor was an old-line conservative Republican, Supreme Court Justice
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., for whom Hiss clerked after graduating
from law school. (For an account of the Holmes's lasting influence on
Hiss's life, see a private memoir by Hiss.)
Error No. 33: Coulter, again on page 22, lambastes the Justice
Department for inquiring into whether Chambers should be indicted on
perjury charges after he changed his story and said he and Hiss had
both been agents of the Soviet Union. The inquiry was inevitable — by
changing his story, Chambers was insisting that his previous sworn
testimony had been perjured. (And, of course, if his new testimony was
false, then he had just become a perjurer.)
Error No. 34: Coulter, again on page 22, writes that after Chambers
turned over the Pumpkin Papers, HUAC's hearings could no longer be
held behind closed doors. But HUAC had already held open hearings on
the Hiss-Chambers matter: Its first sessions, on August 3 and August
5, had both welcomed the press. Its August 25 hearing, in which
Chambers and Hiss confronted each other publicly for the first time,
was not only a public session, it was, many historians have asserted,
the first televised Congressional hearing.
Error No. 35: Coulter, still on page 22, quotes Chambers as saying
that he faced a "savage verbal assault and battery ... without pause
and with little restraint or decency" when he appeared on the radio
program, "Meet the Press," to repeat his early charges against Hiss.
Although Coulter frequently cites Allen Weinstein's pro-Chambers book,
"Perjury" (the footnote immediately following this passage, for
instance ' see Error No. 36 ... draws from "Perjury"), she fails to
include Weinstein's description of Chambers' radio appearance, perhaps
because Weinstein's mild words undercut Chambers' perfervid account:
"His questioners," Weinstein wrote, "displayed considerable skepticism
about Chambers' accusations" ("Perjury," updated 1997 edition, page
51).
Error No. 36: Coulter, on page 23, writes that "money of mysterious
origin" was available to Hiss, and, in a footnote, cites as her source
a remark from Allen Weinstein's "Perjury." The cited page (page 158,
1997 updated edition) says that a bill submitted by Hiss investigators
was covered by Donald Hiss's lawyer, Hugh Cox, adding, "Cox did not
indicate who had picked up the tab." But 10 pages earlier (pages
147-148, 1997 updated edition), Weinstein had already explained that
Cox's firm, Cleary, Gottlieb, Friendly and Cox, had "paid for a good
portion of Hiss's investigative expenses."
Errors No. 37 and 38: Coulter, again on page 23, says that Hiss waited
"an interminable three months" before suing Chambers for slander — "to
the bewilderment of his supporters," who finally "shamed" him into it.
In the first place, Hiss waited one month to file suit, not three; he
had been advised that he needed to file in Maryland, and therefore had
to wait until his Maryland attorney, William Marbury, returned from a
trip to Europe. Believing that Chambers' charges were wholly without
merit, many of Hiss's supporters had urged him to ignore Chambers
altogether. In the second place, it was Hiss himself who insisted on
pursuing Chambers in court, telling friends that the American legal
system had been set up to correct errors and protect the innocent.
Error No. 39: Coulter, again on page 23, says Hiss's attorneys
launched "sadistic attacks" on Chambers, claiming he was "mentally
unstable and a homosexual." At both Hiss perjury trials, the
prosecution ridiculed the idea that Chambers was or had been
homosexual, as did Chambers and his friends and associates outside the
courtroom. It wasn't known publicly until the FBI files on the case
were released in the 1970s, but Chambers before the trials began had
in February 1949 acknowledged his homosexuality to the FBI. Although
the defense never directly questioned Chambers at trial about his
sexuality, it had looked into the idea that Chambers might have been
homosexual, seeking a possible motive to explain why Chambers had
brought charges against Hiss. (It was learned in the 1960s that one
pattern in Chambers' behavior was to befriend men and then later try
to ruin them.)
At the same time, Chambers and the prosecution tried to use
homosexuality (not yet a tolerated and respected lifestyle) against
the defense: Chambers once testified that Hiss had a "mincing" walk,
and the FBI made it clear that if Hiss's stepson, who could have
refuted the idea that the Chambers and Hiss families had been close
friends, testified to that in open court, the prosecution would make
public the fact the young man had been discharged from the U.S. Navy
for a homosexual incident.
Ultimately, the only importance of Chambers' gayness was that he
wanted it kept secret. Since homosexuality was in the late 1940s still
widely considered something shameful and discreditable than had to be
kept hidden, once the FBI knew about Chambers' past (and withheld the
information from the defense), Chambers had clearly become a more
pliable and a less independent witness.
That Chambers might have spent time in a mental hospital was examined
after the defense received several tips — inaccurate, as it turned out
— to that effect. The FBI was intensely interested both in Chambers'
mental state and in his interpersonal relationships, and, according to
FBI files, spent considerably more time looking into them than the
defense team did.
Error No. 40: Coulter, again on page 23, ridicules the defense for
what she says was an attempt to find deeper meaning in a book
translated by Chambers. In the book, "Class Reunion," the lead
character destroys the life of a classmate named Adler by making false
charges against him. Coulter correctly points out that Chambers didn't
write the book but merely translated it. This was not the end of the
story, however. A 1960s researcher pointed out that Chambers didn't
"merely" translate it — he distorted its meaning in key passages so
that it more closely resembled both the relationship he had once had
with his brother and the relationship he would later have with Hiss.
(For more on this, see "Friendship & Fratricide: An Analysis of
Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss," by Meyer A. Zeligs, Viking Press,
New York, 1967, pages 110-115 and page 233.)
Error No. 41: Coulter, again on page 23, writes that Hiss's attorney
in the libel suit, William Marbury, "maliciously" referred to
Chambers' deceased brother Richard "only as 'Dickie.'" She is again
relying on Chambers' memory of his interrogation rather than on the
pre-trial record itself, where Marbury never once used the word
"Dickie," referring instead to Richard Chambers as "your brother."
Page 49 of the transcript from the November 4, 1948 deposition in that
case — to take one example — indicates that Marbury spoke about
Chambers' brother with tact: "Marbury: I don't know that it is
necessary, but what you have said about the circumstances [of Richard
Chambers' suicide] make me inquire what was the trouble with your
brother? If it is embarrassing, I don't want to press it."
Error No. 42: Coulter, still on page 23, writes that Chambers didn't
understand the William Marbury's "obsessive focus on his brother." A
re-reading of the depositions in the Hiss-Chambers libel suit shows no
such obsession: less than two pages of the hundreds of pages of
testimony Chambers gave cover the subject of his brother. But Coulter
again relies on Chambers' memory rather than on the record for her
story.
Error No. 43: Coulter, again on page 23, cites Allen Weinstein's
writings on the Hiss case, this time to assert that "Allen Weinstein
in his book, 'Perjury,' reports that the Hiss defense team was ready
to launch the theory that Chambers had a homosexual relationship with
his own brother." But Weinstein doesn't report this — he says that a
private "memo" in the defense files written by Harold Rosenwald, a
Hiss attorney, noted that a New York psychiatrist has theorized that
"Chambers had a close and probably homosexual relationship with his
brother."
Weinstein does not suggest that the defense ever made use of this
theory, either as trial evidence or to generate negative publicity
about Chambers (it did not). Instead, he reports that William Marbury,
a second Hiss attorney, had around the same time interviewed a second
psychiatrist who "gave little reason to hope that our problem could be
solved with the aid of psychiatric advice" ("Perjury," 1997 updated
edition, pages 160-161). Chambers did acknowledge that he had once
formed a suicide pact with his brother, and wrote in "Witness" that he
himself attempted suicide in December 1948 during the middle of the
Hiss case.
Error No. 44: Coulter, again on page 23, claims that Hiss's defense
was unable to prove that Chambers was a "nutcase," "despite
sympathetic mental health professionals anxious to take up the case,"
and supports this contention by quoting a letter from Alger to Donald
Hiss about a psychiatrist who "feels so strongly about my case that he
would not have allowed considerations of professional ethics to play
any part in his actions." The quote, taken from Allen Weinstein's
"Perjury," turns out, when checked, to refer more prosaically to a
doctor who was not volunteering his services, because, as he told
defense investigators when they contacted him — they had found him,
rather than the other way around — he had never treated Whittaker
Chambers ("Perjury," 1997 updated edition, page 145).
Error No. 45: Coulter, on page 24, says that Secretary of State Dean
Acheson, who stood by Hiss, "was very likely giving confidential State
Department information" to the Hiss defense. Although Coulter once
again cites Allen Weinstein's "Perjury" as a source, this is a charge
that, in her telling, escalates from one sentence to the next, moving
far beyond any assertions by the source. She begins by saying that
"there is evidence" Acheson was "furtively passing government secrets"
to Hiss's lawyers. This evidence turns out to be an accusation,
reported by Weinstein ("Perjury," 1997 updated edition, page 170),
whose value he says he is unable to assess: "Some State Department
officials" (unnamed) in 1949 lodged a complaint that Acheson was
improperly assisting Hiss's lawyers.
Was this complaint valid? Weinstein (on the same page) says only that
its truthfulness "has never been determined." But the lack of proof
seems, for Coulter, to clinch the argument against Acheson and Hiss,
"since," as she says, "the case against O. J. Simpson was never
'proved." She then repeats the allegation — which by this time has
emerged in its final form as "very likely."
Errors No. 46 through 50: Coulter, still on page 24, writes that
"until the Democratic defamation team sprang to action, Chambers had
tried to limit the damage to Hiss, his former friend." The errors in
this passage are closely intertwined. "Limit the damage" is her
erroneous way of characterizing Chambers' nine year history of
repeatedly calling Hiss a Communist — in interviews with the FBI and
with State Department security officials; in open and closed hearings
before HUAC in 1948; on a nationwide radio broadcast. (This is Error
No. 46.)
Coulter then enumerates actions taken by "the Democratic defamation
team." No such team, of course, ever existed; conjuring it up is her
erroneous way of characterizing Hiss's personal and individual
response to Chambers' charges. (This is Error No. 47.) And what
activities does she erroneously attribute to the "team"? First, "Hiss
had sued" — that is, on his own initiative (and against the advice of
friends, both Democratic and Republican) he had defended himself.
(This is Error No. 48.)
Second, "His lawyers had attacked Chambers's wife and made her cry."
This is Error No. 49, another instance of Coulter preferring Chambers'
memory to the record of the Hiss-Chambers libel trial, which shows no
efforts to upset Mrs. Chambers or any sign of discomposure on her
part. Error No. 50, Coulter's charge that the defense "smeared
Chambers as a psychotic and homosexual" is a repetition of Error No.
39.
Coulter this time embellishes on that charge, alleging that "In Hiss's
written response to HUAC's report, Hiss called Chambers a 'queer' four
times." This statement seems to be an instance of scholarly
"telephone." Coulter's footnoted reference is to an assertion by Allen
Weinstein, who in "Perjury" (page 145, 1997 updated edition) says that
Hiss's "statement to [HUAC Chairman] J. Parnell Thomas — applied the
word 'queer' (a pejorative colloquialism for a homosexual then as
today) no less than four times in describing Chambers." The only
written document Hiss submitted to HUAC was a September 24, 1948
letter he wrote to Thomas defending his own record (HUAC did not
create a written report about the Hiss-Chambers dispute until December
1948), a letter that does not use the word "queer" even once — as noun
or adjective — to characterize either Chambers or anyone else. (Hiss
read portions of the letter into the Committee's record on September
25, 1948; see pages 1162 to 1167 of the hearing transcript. The full
text of the letter was printed in the Washington Post, September 15,
1948, page 2.)
Error No. 51: Coulter, on page 25, writes that after witnessing the
defense's tactics, "Chambers would no longer conceal the details of
Hiss's espionage." This seems to be her way of acknowledging — without
ever quite mentioning — that Chambers had suddenly and dramatically
altered the story he had been telling for nine years; he had
previously always denied that any espionage had taken place, and he
now not only insisted on it but offered "proof" of it. By
characterizing this sensational turnaround as "details," Coulter
skates over the fact that she has already inaccurately stated that
Chambers had told Berle about espionage in 1939 (Error No. 6), and
that he had testified to HUAC about espionage earlier in 1948 (Error
No.20).
Error No. 52: Coulter, again on page 25, writes that Chambers had
given his nephew an envelope containing "confidential government
documents," and that "among the documents were copies and summaries of
State Department papers written in Hiss's own handwriting." This is
misleading: the envelope contained 65 pages of typed copies and
summaries of State Department reports, plus four small notes in Hiss's
handwriting — jottings that referred to other State Department papers
and used personal abbreviations that only he could understand. Like
the Pumpkin Papers from the State Department, the originals of the
typed papers in the envelope (which came to be called the "Baltimore
Documents") had circulated widely within the State Department, and it
was never possible to trace them directly to Hiss.
Like the Pumpkin Papers, again, the Baltimore Documents did not
contain 'espionage-grade' information. The author of one of them,
Charles Dollard, seeing his old report printed in the newspaper, told
his wife, 'You know, if I'd taken that thing to the Washington Post
ten years ago and offered them a thousand dollars to print it, they'd
have laughed in my face' ('Laughing Last: Alger Hiss by Tony Hiss,
Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1977, page 131). As for the handwritten
notes, Hiss said he had made these notes for briefing his boss, and
had then discarded them; the scraps of paper they had been written on
were creased, and certainly gave the appearance of having been fished
out of the trash.
Error No. 53: Coulter, again on page 25, accepts without questioning
it Chambers' assertion that the Baltimore Documents had been hidden in
a dumbwaiter shaft for years. The defense in its 1952 Motion for a New
Trial, however, presented the findings of Dr. Daniel Norman, director
of chemical research at the New England Spectrochemical Laboratories,
casting doubt on this claim: "It would have been impossible for all
the typed Baltimore Documents to have been stored together over the 10
year period from 1938 to 1948. From this it follows that they cannot
have been all stored together in the envelope in which they are
alleged to have been stored." (Click here to read Norman's affidavit.)
Error No. 54: Coulter, again on page 25, states when Chambers produced
this evidence, the defense, realizing the "jig was up," brought the
Baltimore Documents to the attention of the Justice Department. This
is inaccurate: Hiss's lawyers insisted on handing the new evidence to
the Justice Department so that the government could use its vast
resources to investigate how Chambers had received these documents,
and who had been the spy who had seen and then removed the original
papers from the State Department.
Error No. 55: Coulter, still on page 25, again criticizes the Justice
Department for taking up the question of whether or not to pursue
Chambers on perjury charges. This is misleading, since Hiss and
Chambers were joint targets of the Justice Department's investigation.
Also (see Error No. 33), the Justice Department was compelled to
consider seeking a perjury indictment against Chambers since he had
now become a perjurer whether or not you believed his new espionage
accusations: he was either now a liar (and there had never been any
spying); or he had been a liar (in his nine years of denying any
participation in spying).
Error No. 56: Coulter, again on page 25, says the Truman
administration "decided to indict Chambers and throw a party for the
traitor." The Truman administration made no such decision and threw no
such party.
Error No. 57: Coulter, again on page 25, writes that "perhaps" out of
fear that the government would protect Hiss, Chambers withheld his
"most damning material from Hiss's lawyers." This is a reference to
the Pumpkin Papers films, and it ignores Chambers' own assertion that
he initially held onto the rolls of film because they hadn't yet been
developed and he didn't know what was on them.
Error No. 58: Coulter, again on page 25, writes that "Truman's
Department of Justice prepared to indict Chambers working hand in
glove with Hiss's lawyers." Coulter's footnoted reference to Allen
Weinstein's "Perjury" (page 182) does not sustain this reconstruction
of events: "While the FBI prepared perjury-indictment data on
Chambers, Hiss's lawyers continued their own vigorous investigation."
In other words, the two projects proceeded simultaneously and
independently, and were not either coordinated or sharing information.
Error No. 59: Coulter, still on page 25, writes that prior to December
2, 1948, the day that Chambers' turned the Pumpkin Papers films over
to HUAC's investigators, "puzzling leaks about the investigation began
appearing in the press." A single leak had been printed — damaging to
Hiss, its probable source was Truman's Department of Justice, contrary
to Coulter's assertion (Error No. 58) that the Justice Department was
protecting and assisting Hiss.
Error No. 60: Coulter, again on page 25, says that "members of HUAC"
asked Chambers if he had any more evidence the government had not
seen. It was Robert E. Stripling, an attorney who served as HUAC's
counsel, who asked this question.
Error No. 61: Coulter, on page 26, says that Chambers gave HUAC's
investigators microfilm. Although "microfilm" is a word that almost
everyone automatically associates with espionage, the film Chambers
turned over was actually standard 35mm film.
Error No. 62: Coulter, again on page 26, describes the contents of the
Pumpkin Papers film as "highly confidential documents from the Navy
and State Department." As explained in Error No. 26, the Navy
Department documents were publicly available handouts (with
specifications for World War I-era life rafts, among other items); the
State Department material consisted of long Trade Agreement documents
which Prof. Whealey of Ohio University has characterized as "hardly
harmful to the State Department or Roosevelt."
Error No. 63: Coulter, again on page 26, says that at least three of
the documents "had come from Alger Hiss's office." Three documents did
have Hiss's initials; this, as the defense pointed out, was more
likely to be an indication of Hiss's innocence than of his guilt,
since elementary "tradecraft," the name given to the procedures
followed by professional spies, would steer even the clumsiest agent
away from actions that could so easily be traced back to the thief
himself.
Errors No. 64 and 65: Coulter says that Allen Weinstein, in "Perjury,"
called the Pumpkin Papers "definite proof of one of the most extensive
espionage rings" in United States history. Checking her footnoted
reference (page 194) shows that she is again (as in Error No. 58)
distorting her source: Coulter's footnote says Weinstein was "quoting
the 'accurate' remarks of Representative Robert E. Stripling." But
Weinstein does not exactly endorse Stripling (who, by the way ' and
this is Error No. 65, served as HUAC's counsel and was not a
Congressman).
Weinstein, referring to a press release Stripling put together about
the Pumpkin Papers that includes the "definite proof" claim, is only
willing to say that it "more accurately" represents the known facts
than "an incorrect statement" in the same press release "declaring
grandiloquently" that U.S. government agents had been searching for
the Pumpkin Papers films for 10 years. The U.S. government had not
known of the existence of the films until the moment Chambers produced
them. Coulter has carved a definitive, stand-alone adjective
"accurate" from a carefully constructed, comparative, noncommittal
adverbial phrase, "more accurately."
Error No. 66: Coulter, again on page 26, says that Hiss lied when he
said the Pumpkin Papers did not come from his typewriter. She is
apparently confusing the State Department material that appeared on
the Pumpkin Papers films with the Baltimore Documents, typed copies of
State Department papers that Chambers produced during depositions
several weeks earlier. The pages on the Pumpkin films were photographs
of actual State Department documents that had, of course, been typed
in government offices on government typewriters.
Error No. 67: Coulter, again on page 26, says that Hiss, as part of "a
series of evasions and outright lies" in response to Chambers' new
charges, couldn't produce his old family typewriter and couldn't even
remember what make it had been. Hiss couldn't produce the typewriter
because he had given it away years before, and although he initially
couldn't remember the type of typewriter he had once owned, he
immediately began to search for it, and in court produced an old
machine — Woodstock #230,099 ' that he thought had once been his.
Error No. 68: Coulter, again on page 26, says the evidence against
Hiss was "overwhelming," and cites as an example an FBI report that it
had matched the typeface of letters typed on Hiss's typewriter with
the typeface on the copies of State Department documents produced by
Chambers. She fails to mention that the FBI declined to make any
judgment about who had typed the copies. The defense claimed that the
Hiss family typewriter had been given away long before the documents
were copied. Hiss's 1952 Motion for a New Trial showed that there were
errors in the grand jury and trial testimony of the FBI's typewriter
expert, Ramos Feehan; demonstrated that a typewriter, far from being
"unique," like a fingerprint, could be altered to match the typeface
of another typewriter; and presented expert evidence that, contrary to
Chambers' assertion, Alger Hiss's wife, Priscilla, had not typed the
copies in Chambers' possession.
Error No. 69: Coulter, again on page 26, writes that the grand jury
laughed at Hiss when he said he didn't know how Chambers was able to
type the documents. This claim, like so many that Coulter relies on,
derives solely on an assertion by Chambers. For many years there was
no way of disproving it, since the grand jury minutes of the Hiss case
remained sealed. In 1999, however, after a federal court order, more
than 4,000 pages of grand jury transcripts were made public. Careful
reading of these released records shows no indication that any of the
jurors ever laughed at Hiss.
Error No. 70: Coulter, again on page 26, says The New York Times
"wondered" how Chambers had been able to produce copies of government
documents identical to letters typed on the Hiss family typewriter.
This attempt to portray the Times as "pro-Hiss" (and therefore as
liberal) is not substantiated by any citations. Since 1948 The New
York Times has published many articles and reviews critical of, and
even hostile to, Alger Hiss.
Error No. 71: Coulter, again on page 26, says that The Nation is
"still wondering" how Chambers was able to produce copies of
government documents identical to letters typed on the Hiss family
typewriter, a position she derides since, she says, even in 1948 "it
could no longer be denied that the classified government documents had
been typed on Hiss's typewriter." Ridicule can sometimes temporarily
pull people's attention away from complexity, but the complexity
persists, since ridicule cannot erase or dissolve evidence. Ramos
Feehan, the FBI typewriter expert, testified that Woodstock #230,099
had typed both the Hiss family papers and the Baltimore Documents. But
according to defense expert Evelyn Ehrlich, whose affidavit was part
of Hiss's 1952 Motion for a New Trial, Woodstock #230,099 did not type
either the Baltimore Documents or the Hiss family correspondence (the
so-called "Hiss standards").
According to FBI investigators, Woodstock #230,099 could not have been
the old Hiss family machine (its serial number indicated it was it was
too young a machine). Journalist Fred J. Cook investigated these
matters (despite his firm conviction that Hiss was guilty), and
published his findings in The Nation in 1957 and 1962. His conclusion:
Hiss's guilt was not established beyond a reasonable doubt by the
facts presented in court by the prosecution.
Error No. 72: Coulter, again on page 26, writes that the evidence
against Hiss included "multiple independent witness identifications."
There were no multiple independent witness identifications, as Coulter
herself acknowledges on the chapter's next page (see Error No. 84),
where she calls Chambers "the sole witness against Hiss." The
Hiss-Chambers case was always the word of one man (Hiss) against the
word of another (Chambers) — or, more precisely, it was the word of
one man (Hiss) against the changing words of another (Chambers).
Error No. 73: Coulter, again on page 26, claims there were "documents
from Soviet defectors identifying Hiss as a Soviet spy." There were no
such documents.
Error No. 74: Coulter, again on page 26, says that Chambers agreed to
take a lie detector test "without hesitation," while Hiss refused.
Hiss didn't refuse, but did say he wanted to study the matter further.
Chamber's eagerness did not lead to any action on his part — he never
did take a lie detector test. (Coulter then undercuts her own point by
adding, parenthetically, that lie detector tests have since then been
"largely discredited." Presumably, if Chambers had passed a lie
detector test and Hiss had failed one — or vice versa — nothing would
have been learned or gained.)
Error No. 75: Coulter, still on page 26, says that Hiss even refused
to be administered a truth serum privately. "Alger Hiss: The True
Story," a pro-Hiss book by John Chabot Smith (Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, New York, 1976) revealed that Hiss, although steadfast in his
denial of espionage charges, was protecting a couple of family
secrets: years before his wife had had an abortion, and he was afraid
that his stepson's "undesirable" discharge from the Navy (see Error
No. 39) might become public knowledge.
Ironically, of all the five eyewitnesses in the Hiss case — Hiss and
his wife and stepson, and Chambers and his wife — Tim Hobson, Hiss's
stepson, was the only one who was ever actually examined while under a
truth serum. Hiss's lawyers questioned Hobson for two hours, and his
story under the drug confirmed his previous story that Chambers had
not been a frequent visitor to the Hiss household, either socially or
to pick up and drop off secret State Department documents. This
testimony was never offered in open court because Hiss had told his
stepson that he would rather go to jail than have the young man's Navy
discharge become part of the trial record.
Error No. 76: Coulter, on page 27, says that for the remainder of his
life, Hiss every few years "would claim to have unearthed some
mythical 'new evidence'" in his favor. Such evidence, tangible not
mythical, continues to emerge, even after Hiss's death in 1996, and
often from the government's own files: His grand jury transcripts were
released in 1999 (see Error No. 69). And records of HUAC's closed-door
hearings were made public in 2001.
Error No. 77: Coulter, again on page 27, calls Hiss's appeals of the
guilty verdict against him "ludicrous." As already noted (see Error
No. 68 and Error No. 71), Hiss's 1952 Motion for a New Trial raised a
number of substantive issues about the authenticity of the documents
and the typewriter that typed them (and also uncovered evidence which
undercut Chambers' amended claim to have left the Communist Party in
1938). Although Hiss's motion was denied, many of the doubts raised
then by the defense were confirmed more than 20 years later with the
release of Hiss's FBI files in the 1970s. The files confirmed that the
prosecution had again and again concealed exculpatory evidence from
the defense.
Error No. 78: Coulter, again on page 27, reasserts her erroneous claim
(see Error No. 25) that the National Security Agency's Venona releases
"proved indisputably" that Hiss was a spy. The FBI in more than 50
years has never been able to confirm a tentative conclusion reached in
1950 that one released Venona cable "probably" referred to Hiss, and
scholarly debate about the subject (in print and on the Web) has not
yet subsided.
Errors No. 79 and 80: Coulter, again on page 27, reasserts two
intertwined and equally erroneous claims: that despite repeated
warnings, Roosevelt continued to promote Hiss. Roosevelt did not
personally promote Hiss to any position (see Error No. 14). Nor was he
warned repeatedly about Hiss (see Errors No. 11 and 15).
Error No. 81: Coulter, again on page 27, writes that Roosevelt
"notoriously handed over Poland to Stalin" at the Yalta Conference in
February 1945. Poland, as Yalta historians agree, was not Roosevelt's
(or Churchill's) to hand over — the Russians had effectively handed it
to themselves by driving out the Nazi occupiers. Prominent
conservatives, such as former President Herbert Hoover and Senator
Arthur Vandenberg (R.-MI), who later served as Chairman of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, enthusiastically supported the Yalta
agreements, one of whose principal pro-American accomplishments was to
enlist Russia in the war against Japan. (The atomic bomb was not yet
known to work, and the Pentagon had already estimated that an invasion
of the Japanese home islands would cost a million lives.)
Error No. 82: Coulter, again on page 27, says the person who advised
Roosevelt when he was handing over Poland to Stalin was Alger Hiss.
Even if Roosevelt had been in a position to hand over Poland, which he
wasn't (see Error No. 81); and even if Hiss had been sent to Yalta
because Roosevelt wanted him there, which he hadn't (the Secretary of
State had brought Hiss along as a last-minute replacement for another
man see Error No. 14); and even if Hiss had been a spy (which he
denied, as did Whittaker Chambers for nine years between 1939 and
1948), Hiss at Yalta was a junior official who had no means or
opportunity to wield Svengalian influence over either Roosevelt or the
rest of the Allies, who notably included Churchill, who as Prime
Minister of Great Britain personally endorsed the Yalta agreements.
Error No. 83: Coulter, again on page 27, writes that "the Soviet spy
bequeathed us the United Nations" in his position as secretary general
of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, in Washington, D.C., in 1944, where
the final agreements were made regarding the U.N., and a year later as
secretary general of the United Nations Organizing Conference in San
Francisco, where the U.N. Charter was drafted and adopted. Hiss is
again being posthumously endowed with more power than he had attained.
A conference secretary general is a manager, a note taker, and an
implementer, not a policy-maker.
Many historians point out that the United Nations stems from a dream
first outlined at an international peace conference convened in
Holland in 1899, and was the product of global cooperation, not a
scheme foisted on the world by Stalinist intelligence agencies. The
chief drafter of the U.N. Charter was Leo Pasvolsky, a "White
Russian," anti-Communist émigré and naturalized American who worked in
the State Department. At San Francisco, representatives of 50 nations
signed the Charter, becoming the organization's founding members; the
U.S. Senate ratified the Charter by a vote of 89-2. (For more on this,
see the 'United Nations Studies at Yale' Web site at
www.yale.edu/unsy/Oralhist/krasno/intro.html)
Error No. 84: Coulter, still on page 27, repeats her erroneous
assertion (see Error No. 33) that the Department of Justice "tried to
indict not Hiss but Chambers." This is also the passage where Coulter
contradicts her own erroneous claim (see Error No. 72) that Chambers'
testimony was supported by "multiple independent witness
identifications": at this point Coulter maintains that had the
Department of Justice indicted Chambers, "the Truman administration
would have destroyed the sole witness against Hiss."
Error No. 85: Coulter, on page 28, writes that in 1962 CBS broadcast a
program called "The Political Obituary of Richard Nixon." The program
aired on ABC.
Error No. 86: Coulter, again on page 28, writes that Hiss was
reinstated to the Massachusetts Bar in 1972. He was reinstated in
1975.
Error No. 87: Coulter, again on page 28, repeats her erroneous
assertion (see Error No. 32) that "Liberals would never give up on a
man who spied for Stalin against America." Liberals have always been
deeply divided about the question of Alger Hiss's guilt.
Error No. 88: Coulter, on page 29, writes that Hiss was convicted of
perjury in 1951. Hiss was convicted on January 21, 1950.
Error No. 89: Coulter, again on page 29, implies that the Washington
Post is part of an unbreakable chain of liberal defenders of Alger
Hiss's innocence. "Liberals," she says, "would never give up on a man
who spied for Stalin against America." As evidence that the Post is
loyal to this cause, she mentions that the newspaper in 1992 "ran a
news item stating three times that there was 'no evidence' that Hiss
was a Soviet agent." Careful reading of the cited article ("Stalin
Biographer Offers Latest Twist in Hiss Case: No Evidence Diplomat
'Collaborated' with Soviets," by Jeffrey A. Frank, The Washington
Post, October 31, 1992, page a3) leaves a very different impression.
The article's subject is not Hiss's innocence but "assertions this
week" — to use Post staff writer Jeffrey A. Frank's own words — "by a
Russian historian that Soviet intelligence archives show no evidence
that Hiss spied for the Soviet Union." The Russian, Gen. Dmitri
Volkogonov, who was Boris Yeltsin's military advisor, the overseer of
all Soviet intelligence files, and the author of a debunking biography
of Stalin, had announced the day before that "Not a single document,
and a great amount of material has been studied, substantiates the
allegation that Mr. A. Hiss collaborated with the intelligence
services of the Soviet Union." Volkogonov's statement was making
front-page news all over the country that week, but Frank, far from
accepting the Russian's "claims," as he characterizes them, at face
value, immediately seeks opposing views, and reports that
"Volkogonov's findings are being sharply disputed."
Frank then interviews and quotes one Hiss defender, Victor Navasky,
publisher of The Nation, and two Hiss opponents, historian Allen
Weinstein and columnist William F. Buckley, Jr. Frank even gives
Buckley the last word: "Now and then, you run into a book in which you
see that Dreyfuss isn't really innocent, or Socrates is really
guilty."
Error No. 90: Coulter, continuing her efforts to demonstrate that
"Liberals would not give up' on Hiss, cites, again on page 29, a 1992
New York Times piece in which, she says, "the writer mused" that
Soviet archives might solve the question of Hiss's guilt. She then
quotes from this same piece ("Was Oswald a Spy, and Other Cold War
Mysteries," by David Wise, The New York Times, November 13, 1992) in
footnote number 51 ' and the quote itself undercuts her notion that
the piece displays a pro-Hiss bias: "The list of cold war mysteries
that might — or might not — be answered ... is lengthy.... Was Alger
Hiss a spy, Volkogonov's assurances notwithstanding?"
Error No. 91: Coulter, again on page 29, reasserts for the second time
(see Error No. 25 and Error No. 78) her erroneous claim that the
National Security Agency's Venona releases have finally established
Hiss's guilt — although this time, instead of saying that the releases
"proved indisputably" that Hiss had been a spy, she more sweepingly
says that they "established that Hiss was a Soviet agent to everyone's
satisfaction except direct relatives of Alger Hiss."
Error No. 92: Coulter, again on page 29, continues attacking The New
York Times as a defender of Hiss's innocence: "The New York Times
instinctively trots out the theory that Hiss was innocent. It's some
psychological block liberals have. Their minds are fine, but the woman
wells up in them." Coulter presumably has not read a New York Times
editorial, "Revisionist McCarthyism," published October 23, 1998, in
which the newspaper speaks negatively of Hiss.
Error No. 93: Coulter, still on page 29, again assails The New York
Times, this time for "ritualistic proclamation that all Soviet spies
were innocent." On June 19, 2003, the 50th anniversary of the
execution of the Rosenbergs — to take one example — the Times
published a solemn, measured editorial, 'Remembering the Rosenbergs,'
which declares that "It now seems clear the Rosenbergs were neither as
innocent as they proclaimed nor as guilty as the government alleged."
The editorial acknowledges that released Venona cables show "that
Julius was an atomic spy," adding that "the same cables strongly
suggest that Ethel played little or no role." The paper points out
that "Their trial was flawed — Ethel's brother later admitted he lied
on the witness stand." The Rosenberg case, the editorial concludes,
"still haunts American history, reminding us of the injustice that can
be done when a nation gets caught up in hysteria."
Error No. 94: Coulter, again on page 29, writes that after the trials,
Chambers was nearly unemployable. He was given, by his own account,
such a large amount of money when he resigned from Time, that he
didn't need to look for work. He then wrote a best-selling book,
"Witness," which was syndicated in the Saturday Evening Post. Sales
from the book took care of him for the rest of his life.
Error No. 95: Coulter, on page 30, writes that Democrats were "so
upset" with Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (R.-WI) that "liberals had to
invent the myth of 'McCarthyism.'" On December 2, 1954, McCarthy was
censured by a Republican controlled Senate by a vote of 67 to 22. The
leader of the Senate proceedings against McCarthy was Sen. Ralph
Flanders (R.-VT).
Error No. 96: Coulter, on page 31, writes that Sen. McCarthy said he
was holding a list of 57 card-carrying Communists in the State
Department during the Wheeling, West Virginia speech that inaugurated
his anti-Communist campaign in 1950. According to the Wheeling
Intelligencer's report on the speech, McCarthy said he was holding a
list of 205 names. Over the following week, in subsequent speeches,
the number declined from 205 to 57 and then to four, and the
allegation itself shrank from "card-carrying Communists" to "bad
security risks" and then to "Communist sympathizers." No one ever saw
the list.
Error No. 97: Coulter, still on page 31, again has trouble with the
actual date of Hiss's perjury conviction (see Error No. 88), this time
assigning it to January 25, 1950. Hiss was convicted on January 21,
1950.
Error No. 98: Coulter, still on page 31, writes that the public was
"aghast" at Secretary of State Dean Acheson's support for Alger Hiss
after his conviction, and reports that "the entire country was in a
cauldron of rage." The country remained calm, even though, as Coulter
correctly notes, Rep. Richard M. Nixon (R.-CA), Chambers himself, and
a conservative Republican senator from Indiana denounced Acheson for
his comments.
Error No. 99: Coulter, on page 32, asks whether Democrats, after
Hiss's 1950 perjury conviction, would "ever give a damn about Soviet
spies swarming through the government?" Curiously, she omits any
mention of President Truman's massive and stringent Loyalty Program,
which, as even the "World Almanac for Kids Online" Web site points
out, "required all federal employees to submit to screening by loyalty
boards." In foreign policy, the Truman Doctrine, later called
"containment," "was aimed," as the same Web site points out, "at
blocking Communist expansion anywhere in the world." (See
http://www.worldalmanacforkids.com/explore/presidents/truman_harrys.html)
Errors No. 100 and 101: Coulter, again on page 32, writes that
"Chambers could only claim a few sparse victories," and that "Among
them was the indictment of a Soviet spy at the Commerce Department,
William Remington." In the first place (this is Error No. 100),
Remington's accuser was Elizabeth Bentley, not Chambers.
In the second place (this is Error No. 101), there is considerable
evidence that Remington, who was murdered in Lewisburg Penitentiary
where Hiss, too, was incarcerated, was, like Hiss, innocent of the
charges against him and ill-used by the justice system. According to
Gary May, Remington's biographer ("Un-American Activities: The Trials
of William Remington," Oxford University Press, New York, 1994) and a
history professor at the University of Delaware, Remington, after
being cleared by government loyalty boards, was indicted for perjury
by a grand jury whose foreman was secretly helping Bentley prepare her
memoirs.
Michael
This bitch was fired from her job at MSNBC when she attacked a disabled Viet Nam
veteran on the air, screaming, "People like you caused us to lose that war."
Fact-checking Ann Coulter: http://www.whatliberalmedia.com/apndx_1.htm
Michael
>>>No one has -- I haven't read the (entire) "Treason" book yet, but I
>
> have
>
>>it
>>
>>>here and will
>>>read it (eventually.)
>>>
>>>Do you have any specific errors to report?
>
>
> "Greg" <gra...@surferie.net> wrote in message
> news:vq2ugvc...@corp.supernews.com...
>
>>Read Franken's book, he'll explain Coulter to you.He's got 2 chapters on
>>her.
>
>
> That's (you don't have any yourself) what I thought.
>
> I will have to go to the bookstore and read it there
While your at it, take a look at the book "What Liberal Media?" by Eric Alterman
-- I have heard Franken
> who is neither very smart nor was he ever very funny so it certainly makes
> no
> sense to buy his book.
>
> If you knew of something we presume you would quote a SPECIFIC and
> SUBSTANTIAL ERROR in her book....
>
> We're waiting.....
>
> Come on, there must be ONE...
http://www.whatliberalmedia.com/apndx_1.htm
Michael
Gabrielle Rapagnetta wrote:
--
"There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes,
Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing,
result from marijuana use. This marijuana can cause white women to seek sexual
relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others... The primary reason to
outlaw marijuana is its effect on the degenerate races."
---Excerpt from the testimony of Harry J. Anslinger, director at the Federal
Bureau of Narcotics, before the U.S. Senate in 1937.
Crash
> "Roy Blankenship" <bia...@prodigy.net> wrote in message news:<9F2ob.16921$L64....@newssvr32.news.prodigy.com>...
> > You must be deaf and blind. You don't have to read ANYONE to know that we
> > just got totally fucked by this administration............
>
> That depends on your definition of "fucked".
Clinton, instead of saying "That depends what the
definition of is, is," should have said,
"Don't you know what the definition of
is is, you dumb shit!?"
That would have been less open to interpretation
by dumb shits who don't know the difference
between "is" and "was."
Harry
You have to remember, this was a book, and dittoheads are extremely
proud of never reading anything. I suspect most of them to be
illiterates. Rush has to read them their daily dosage of the Weekly
Standard and Drudge.
Herb Martin
of her book --
when I get around to reading it.
When I asked for errors, I was entirely serious in wanting to know if they
existed.
(Having asked for months, finally bought the book, it was beginning to seem
no
one had found any -- or maybe bothered reading it. <grin>)
Thank you.
--
Herb Martin
Herb Martin
Alterman
Been there and done that -- Alterman is wrong and knows it; watch his
non-verbals
when he appears on TV, he knows it's a lie and smirks about it.
--
Herb Martin
Herb Martin
"We
> tried to get him, we didn't have the technology, now we do." I watched him
> say it on TV. Get it right next time.
That is NOT the full quote but consider that if it were it would be
disingenous
(at best) -- a specialty of Clinton -- as it was never a matter of
TECHNOLOGY,
but merely willingness to accept the Sudanese offer.
--
Herb Martin
Herb Martin
chips. :)
No, I actually wanted the list. I haven't read the book yet but this list
will
help me read it critically.
You perhaps are in the habit of believing the lies you wish to believe -- I
don't
follow that policy but action check (at least some) of the footnotes and
compare
sources.
Now, we will see if these are true or false, lies or mistakes, substantial
or irrelevant.\
It isn't really that hard if you try.
--
Herb Martin
Sfurn
"Herb Martin" <ne...@LearnQuick.com> wrote in message
Misleading quotation and sourcing of claims
Coulter engages in a series of deceptive practices in quoting people and
sourcing her claims. Most commonly, she distorts the authorship of articles
she's citing. Throughout the book, she attributes outside book reviews,
magazine profiles and op-eds to media outlets as if they were staff-written
news reports, feeding the perception of bias on the part of these
institutions. These include a New York Times Week in Review article by
historian Richard Gid Powers cited as "According to the Times..." (p. 6); a
Washington Post book review by Patricia Aufderheide described as "the
Washington Post said..." (p. 97) and "The Washington Post called..." (p.
98); and a New York Times Magazine article by reporter Leslie Gelb cited as
"the New York Times reported..." (p. 171). At one point, she cites a single
Washington Post magazine article by journalist Orville Schell four separate
ways (implying multiple stories to the casual reader), in one case calling
it "a two-part, four-billion-column-inch Washington Post story" in which
"the Post said..." (p. 92).
Coulter also repeatedly cites quotations out of context from the original
source material, implying that reporters reached conclusions that were
actually presented by sources quoted in the piece. In one particularly
dishonest case, she claims that the New York Times "reminded readers that
Reagan was a 'cowboy, ready to shoot at the drop of a hat'" after the
invasion of Grenada (p. 179). However, the "cowboy" quote is actually from a
Reagan administration official quoted in a Week in Review story who said,
''I suppose our biggest minus from the operation is that there now is a
resurgence of the caricature of Ronald Reagan, the cowboy, ready to shoot at
the drop of a hat.''
Coulter goes on to denounce the New York Times for putting terms like "evil
empire" in quotes, which she claims "expressed contempt for the idea of
winning the Cold War." However, the article she cites as proof of the use of
quotation marks is actually directly quoting Reagan saying the term. (p.
158) Later, she condemns the Times for its response to Reagan's invasion of
Grenada. "The Times rages that Reagan was 'Making the World "Safe" for
Hypocrisy,'" she writes, not mentioning that the quote is the headline on an
op-ed by a Times columnist, not an editorial. (p. 179)
She also denounces a New York Times obituary of Joel Barr for saying he was
"suspected of passing secret information" to the Soviets, writing that
"Dozens of Soviet cables had identified Barr as a Soviet spy" as though this
information was not provided to Times readers. (p. 53) But the obituary
actually states that "John Haynes, the co-author with Harvey Klehr of a
forthcoming Soviet history to be published by Yale, said that the
intelligence reports show that Mr. Barr and Mr. Sarant 'were among the
K.G.B.'s most valuable technical spies'" -- the same experts she cites in
the footnote backing up her claim!
And in a passage focused on contemporary politics, Coulter misrepresents a
personal attack against her as one on all "people who support ethnic
profiling of airline passengers" (p. 261), saying Senator Richard Durbin,
D-IL, called such people "troglodytes 'crawling on [their] bell[ies] in the
mud at a right-wing militia training camp in Idaho." (brackets hers) In
fact, Durbin wrote the following in a letter to a Springfield, Illinois
newspaper (notice how Coulter pluralized his wording with brackets to
obscure the reference):
I often wonder whether Ann Coulter's political views are just a pose.
Having seen her on television, she is bright, witty and appears to be the
product of a good education and good grooming. There is nothing about her
which suggests she has spent any time crawling on her belly in the mud at a
right-wing militia training camp in Idaho.
But when she opens her mouth or logs on her computer, Dr. Coulter is
transformed into a political creature that could take Pat Buchanan's breath
away.
Durbin goes on to denounce her views on ethnic profiling, but to suggest
that his crack represents his view of everyone who supports her stance on
the issue is patently false.
Utter falsehoods and egregious factual misrepresentations
Coulter makes at least five factual claims that are indisputably false.
First, she writes "When the United States made an alliance with mad mullahs
in Afghanistan against the USSR, no sensible American would go sign up with
the Taliban." (p. 51) However, the Taliban did not form a militia until
1994, several years after the Soviet Union's withdrawal from Afghanistan
(1989) and its subsequent collapse (1991).
Later, she denounces Congressmen Jim McDermott, D-WA, David Bonior, D-MI,
and Mike Thompson, D-CA, for their trip to Iraq in late September 2002,
asking, "Weren't any Democrats the tiniest bit irritated that members of
Congress were meeting with a tyrant as the U.S. prepared to attack him?" (p.
225) The group did not meet with Saddam, who is obviously the tyrant in
question, though they did meet with Iraqi officials.
Coulter also offers this supposed quotation from Clinton: "Bill Clinton, the
man who deployed the best fighting force on the globe to build urinals in
Bosnia, actually said of Muslim terrorists, 'They have good reason to hate
us ... after all, we sent the Crusaders to try and conquer them.'" (p. 229)
Clinton never said this according to searches of Google and the Nexis news
database, nor do any sources repeat this quotation. The only clue to its
source is its slight resemblance to a passage in a November 2001 speech at
Georgetown University in which Clinton discusses a story from the Crusades
and its enduring relevance today in far more nuanced terms. Given that the
speech has been widely distorted in the media, it would not be surprising if
this is Coulter's supposed source (she provides no footnote for the quote).
In one bizarre case, she misrepresents the reasons for Carter's Nobel Prize,
stating that it was awarded "for his masterful negotiation of the 1994 deal
[the Agreed Framework with North Korea], though, in candor, he got the prize
for North Korea only because the committee couldn't formally award a prize
for Bush-bashing, which was the stated reason." (p. 233) But the Nobel
committee's award announcement cites the award as recognizing Carter's
"decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international
conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic
and social development," of which North Korea was only a part. In the
presentation speech at the Nobel ceremony, his work on the North Korea issue
was not even mentioned.
Lastly, she claims that Ramsey Clark, the former Attorney General under
President Johnson, "argued that Iran should be able to 'determine its own
fate'" after returning from a meeting with the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran in
1979. "[D]etermine its own fate" is presented as a direct quote, but it
turns out to be a quote from an abstract of a New York Times article, not a
quote from Clark. In fact, it is an abstract paraphrase of the reporter's
summary of Clark's statement summarizing the views of the Ayatollah! (The
quote "determine its own fate" does not appear in any article in the Nexis
news database along with Clark's name and Iran.)
In several other cases, Coulter thoroughly twists and misrepresents her
source material to support her ideological agenda. Most of these are related
to her claims that the media engages in "total suppression" of the religion
of Muslim terrorists who kill people. (p. 279) She criticizes the New York
Times for a March 5, 1993 headline about the first World Trade Center
bombing, which read "Jersey City Man Is Charged in Bombing of Trade Center,"
saying the Times was "[e]merging as al-Qaeda's leading spokesman in
America." (p. 279) However, the first paragraph of the article states that
the man was "described by the authorities as an Islamic fundamentalist." In
addition, on the same day, the Times ran an 1100 word article titled
"Suspect in Bombing Is Linked To Sect With a Violent Voice" detailing how
Mohammed A. Salameh "is said by law-enforcement officials to be a follower
of a blind Muslim cleric who preaches a violent message of Islamic
fundamentalism from a walk-up mosque in Jersey City."
She also condemns the Times for its reporting on an Egyptian immigrant named
Hesham Hadayet who went on a shooting rampage at an El Al terminal in Los
Angeles. "In the past," she writes, "Hadayet had complained about his
neighbors flying a U.S. flag, he had a 'Read the Koran' sticker on his front
door, and he had expressed virulent hatred for Jews. The Times reported
straight that his motive for the shooting may have been 'some dispute over a
fare.'" (p. 279-280) In fact, all three of those facts about Hadayet came
from the initial Times story on him, which straightforwardly presented two
possible motives for his actions as a hate crime against Jews or a terrorist
attack (El Al is the Israeli national airline). The quote "some dispute over
a fare" came in a separate story that day based on an interview with
Hadayet's uncle, who, the reporter summarized, "said his normally
well-mannered nephew was always prickly about being taken for a fool by
customers, and so he expected that some dispute over a fare had erupted at
the El Al counter." This is clearly not written as though it is the
reporter's opinion that it is true. It is pure conjecture and described as
such (the uncle "expected" that it was a dispute).
In addition, Coulter denounces coverage of the sniper case, saying "you need
a New York Times decoder ring" to find out "John Allen Muhammad was a
Muslim. The only clue as to the sniper's religion was the Times's repeated
insistence that Islam had absolutely nothing to do with the shootings." (p.
281) But on the same day that the suspects' capture was first reported,
another "clue" might have been two separate stories that prominently
described Muhammad as a Muslim. Two days later, the Times ran an entire
story about the role of religion in the shootings, though it framed the
issue mostly in psychiatric terms and did not speculate about the potential
influence of extremist Islamic beliefs. In all four of these cases, it
simply was not clear what the suspects' motives were from the facts
available to the reporters writing in the earliest possible moments of the
investigation. Would Coulter have them simply presume to know, as she claims
to, that the the suspects' actions were driven by their religious beliefs?
And finally, in a similar accusation, Coulter claims the Times "barely
mentioned" the release of decrypted Soviet cables (the Venona Project),
saying "[i]t might have detracted from stories of proud and unbowed victims
of 'McCarthyism.'" The Times actually ran a 1000 word story on the
declassification of the Venona cables. It did not run on the front page, but
neither did the stories in the Washington Post, USA Today, Newsday or the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer (among others). Among major newspapers, only the
Los Angeles Times put the story on its front page.
In short, Ann Coulter has once again revealed herself as one of the most
destructive forces in American politics, repeatedly making outrageously
irrational arguments and demonstrably false claims. Treason is the
culmination of a dismaying trend toward factually misleading and
inflammatory books from pundits such as Michael Moore, Sean Hannity and
Michael Savage (Salon Premium subscription or viewing of ad required for
Savage column). These authors may delight partisans and make their
publishers rich, but their work impoverishes our political discourse.
http://spinsanity.org/columns/20030630.html
Happy?
Somehow I think you'll say this is not good enough for you....
Herb Martin
> magazine profiles and op-eds to media outlets as if they were
staff-written
> news reports, feeding the perception of bias on the part of these
> institutions. These include a New York Times Week in Review article by
> historian Richard Gid Powers cited as "According to the Times..." (p. 6);
a
Sorry but if you print it in your newspaper you are responsible for it.
Someone else has posted specific candidate errors and when I read the book
I will use that to follow along.
--
Herb Martin
gr...@internet.charitydays.co.uk
_______________________________________________
http://www.anncoulter.org/default.htm
_______________________________________________
Sfurn
"Herb Martin" <ne...@LearnQuick.com> wrote in message
About the answer I expected --- except you did not fully respond but instead
snipped the other parts that you could not flip off with your non-answer.
Your argument means that any lie Bushco says but is then repeated by any
media makes them responsible for it?
-------------------
Sorry but I Herb Martin posted errors .
All of those words are contained in your reply.
You must admit you posted them therefore you are responsible for them. See -
you can take anything out of context & make up something completely
different.
------------------
Now are you simply deleting the other sections because you can't attack them
as someone's problem?
How is Coulter taking out the important part (that this was actually a quote
from a Reagan official) the paper's responsibility?
Coulter also repeatedly cites quotations out of context from the original
source material, implying that reporters reached conclusions that were
actually presented by sources quoted in the piece. In one particularly
dishonest case, she claims that the New York Times "reminded readers that
Reagan was a 'cowboy, ready to shoot at the drop of a hat'" after the
invasion of Grenada (p. 179). However, the "cowboy" quote is actually from a
Reagan administration official quoted in a Week in Review story who said,
''I suppose our biggest minus from the operation is that there now is a
resurgence of the caricature of Ronald Reagan, the cowboy, ready to shoot at
the drop of a hat.''
Or this: When it WAS in the article --- but she fails to tell the reader &
instead she acts like it was Treasonously not!
She also denounces a New York Times obituary of Joel Barr for saying he was
"suspected of passing secret information" to the Soviets, writing that
"Dozens of Soviet cables had identified Barr as a Soviet spy" as though this
information was not provided to Times readers. (p. 53) But the obituary
actually states that "John Haynes, the co-author with Harvey Klehr of a
forthcoming Soviet history to be published by Yale, said that the
intelligence reports show that Mr. Barr and Mr. Sarant 'were among the
K.G.B.'s most valuable technical spies'" -- the same experts she cites in
the footnote backing up her claim!
Or this: where she actually alters the text she was quoting to attempt to
make a false point!
Can you explain how that is the paper's fault?
Did you even read the whole post?
I doubted your sincerity because of the tone of your question --- I think
you were being disingenuous.
Herb Martin
instead
> snipped the other parts that you could not flip off with your non-answer.
> Your argument means that any lie Bushco says but is then repeated by any
> media makes them responsible for it?
Glad you expect me to be using the more specific list someone provided to
actually read the book critically.
Of course that doesn't jibe with your disappointed that I rejected your
non-specific
charges.
The other message (somewhere above in the thread) is quite specific and can
actually be verified or rejected based on fact.
You have heard of fact, right?
--
Herb Martin
Agathena
Herb Martin wrote:
>>she's citing. Throughout the book, she attributes outside book reviews,
>>magazine profiles and op-eds to media outlets as if they were
>
> staff-written
>
>>news reports, feeding the perception of bias on the part of these
>>institutions. These include a New York Times Week in Review article by
>>historian Richard Gid Powers cited as "According to the Times..." (p. 6);
>
> a
>
> Sorry but if you print it in your newspaper you are responsible for it.
It is not a scholarly reference for a quote. Only in an editoral is
AC right to say the NYC said it. If a quote is taken from a quote within
an article that must be stated. If it is in a book review that must be
stated. If the NYT quotes Saddam Hussein, that does not mean it support
his views.
Oh, I'm sure you knew that. It is incredible to see just how many
mistakes, errors and lies Ann Coulter produces. If I quote any of them
it does not mean I am responsible for them.
( oh what's the use.)
Sfurn
"Herb Martin" <ne...@LearnQuick.com> wrote in message
1. I see you again snipped the specific charges listed.
2. Do you know what specific means?
3. Why didn't you bother to a search for this evidence yourself if you truly
wanted to know the answers?
4. Why do you snip what doesn't fit your answers?
Sfurn
"Agathena" <nos...@thisaddress.com> wrote in message
news:06fd5f9dd484c0cb...@grapevine.islandnet.com...
Yeah --- Herb had an answer without a real question!
Typical of the unknowing & proud of it.
Crash
In <t3iob.10127$W84....@twister.austin.rr.com>
On Fri, 31 Oct 2003 00:31:21 GMT, "Herb Martin" <ne...@LearnQuick.com>
wrote about:
Re: NEW! - A big Fat LIST of BUSH LIES
> Herb Martin
Can we assume you think stringing together a
few calm sentences makes up for your
"The worm Corn is the liar. He has nothing"
idiocy? Frankly pal, I think most people would
find:
> > pot kettle black - idiot big-government tailwagger bootlick
> > blow me little punk
...to be far more eloqent. And those taken in
by your attempt to sound rational?
Well? ?
Keep them. They will vote Republican anyway. Shit,
they believe Rush Limbaugh, Duhbya & Co fer god's sake.
Feelsgoodism, free lunches, and doggie instincts.
Keep 'em.
Herb Martin
>
> 2. Do you know what specific means?
>
> 3. Why didn't you bother to a search for this evidence yourself if you
truly
> wanted to know the answers?
>
> 4. Why do you snip what doesn't fit your answers?
1) I don't see anything specific from YOU.
2) Specific means such as the other poster (actually) offered and which I
will use.
3) I have been searching for it (since several months) and so far only
idiots like you
posted non-specific crap until the other poster offered something that
could
actually be checked -- and appears to have been compiled by someone who
actually READ the book
4) Once you lie or mislead I lose interest in your crap.
and you stupid crap is stil above in the thread for anyone who wants
it -- you seem
to think that because my answer doesn't repeat your crap it isn't
still there, or still crap.
--
Herb Martin
Herb Martin
> his views.
This last is correct. If someone is quoting someone else, then it is
imperative
that the quote not be attributed to the publication but include the context.
If some publication says something in a book review AS THE PUBLICATION,
or as NEWS, the rules of truth and attribution apply to that publication as
the source.
(Now it would be different if the book review is [again] quoting the book.)
--
Herb Martin\
Herb Martin
> > REAL SIG since even your are embarrassed by your posts.
> > Herb Martin
>
> Can we assume you think stringing together a
> few calm sentences makes up for your
> "The worm Corn is the liar. He has nothing"
> idiocy? Frankly pal, I think most people would
> find:
Actually, Corn has the same lies you see all over the Internet -- even Bill
Clinton
gives President Bush more credit than these lies must assume to even be
uttered.
If you wish to post some specific lie, I will be happy to refute it.
Corn is a LIAR.
--
Herb Martin
ShrikeBack
> (ShrikeBack) wrote about:
> Re: NEW! - A big Fat LIST of BUSH LIES
>
>
> > "Roy Blankenship" <bia...@prodigy.net> wrote in message news:<9F2ob.16921$L64....@newssvr32.news.prodigy.com>...
>
> > > You must be deaf and blind. You don't have to read ANYONE to know that we
> > > just got totally fucked by this administration............
> >
> > That depends on your definition of "fucked".
>
> Clinton, instead of saying "That depends what the
> definition of is, is," should have said,
> "Don't you know what the definition of
> is is, you dumb shit!?"
Okay. But let's go back to the golden age of talk radio, and dig
up the original top of the pops quote from "J", as some call him.
Answer…I never had sex with that woman…Monica Lewinski.
Question…Is oral sex sex?
Answer…It depends on what your definition of is is.
> That would have been less open to interpretation
> by dumb shits who don't know the difference
> between "is" and "was."
So, you're saying that once upon a time, oral sex was sex
but it isn't sex anymore. I suppose you go along with Marilyn
Manson's categorization of it as being more like a handshake.
I'll bet "J" had himself a big laugh while puffing on a
big fat Cuban cigar when Rush's oxycontin story hit the news.
Do you like Rush?
It all depends on what your definition of "Rush" is.
Sfurn
"Herb Martin" <ne...@LearnQuick.com> wrote in message
> > stated. If the NYT quotes Saddam Hussein, that does not mean it support
> > his views.
>
> This last is correct. If someone is quoting someone else, then it is
> imperative
> that the quote not be attributed to the publication but include the
context.
>
> If some publication says something in a book review AS THE PUBLICATION,
> or as NEWS, the rules of truth and attribution apply to that publication
as
> the source.
Gee --- that's exactly what was being done in the information I posted...
Thank You.
Sfurn
"Herb Martin" <ne...@LearnQuick.com> wrote in message
Seems my idea is right --- you'll deny anything you agree with...
typical
beber
all the way to the bank at you, either for reading her or paying
attention to her.
John Starrett
Most newspapers print both conservative and liberal columnists for the
benefit of their readership. Do you claim then that these papers are
advocating both points of view?
--
John Starrett
John Starrett
Give it up, Herb. There is simply no way to defend Coulter as a paragon
of truth, which is what you seem bent on doing.
--
John Starrett
el pelon
Coulter ain't no lady.
Herb Martin
> >
>
> Give it up, Herb. There is simply no way to defend Coulter as a paragon
> of truth, which is what you seem bent on doing.
>
I am not trying to defend Coulter as a "paragon of Truth" -- if there is any
defense intended at all it is from pure slander and innuendo and perjorative
propaganda instead of facts....
I LIKE the post by the individual who gave some (100+?) specific candidate
mistakes or misrepresentations -- that can be checked.
And I will check at least some of it until it is clear either she or the
poster's
list is full of crap.
I haven't even read her book but the criticism of her comes largely from
others
who haven't read it either.
--
Herb Martin
Herb Martin
> benefit of their readership. Do you claim then that these papers are
> advocating both points of view?
No, it would need to be a pattern. And it would be more egregious if
that pattern were not on the EDITORIAL PAGE where opinion is
conventionally separated from the facts in the rest of the publication.
--
Herb Martin
Herb Martin
>
>
> Seems my idea is right --- you'll deny anything you agree with...
> typical
>
> >
> > Corn is a LIAR.
No, I am making a prediction from having seen Corn on TV (he has
nothing) and having read the "list inside the dust cover" which is NOTHING
but Corn lies.
One would presume Corn leads with his "best stuff" and that is corn crap.
--
Herb Martin
Gabrielle Rapagnetta
>
>Actually, Corn has the same lies you see all over the Internet -- even Bill
>Clinton gives President Bush more credit than these lies must assume to
>even be uttered.
>
>If you wish to post some specific lie, I will be happy to refute it.
Okay. How about:
"I first got to know Ken Lay in 1994."
--Ken says otherwise.
Or this one:
"I was the first president ever to have advocated a Palestinian
state."
--Clinton beat him to it.
James Monroe
wrote:
>> Right Herb, and Coulter, Hannity, O'Reilly, Hume, Limbaugh are the most
>
>I don't speak for any of them (and never listened to Limbaugh much)
One thing I've always found interesting:
They tell us that Limbaugh has around 20 million listeners, yet no one
ever admits listening to him.
Interesting.
Herb Martin
> state."
> --Clinton beat him to it.
I heard this the other day -- Did Clinton ever during his presidency say
this publicly and explicitly; please quote the speech as it is possible that
the claim of "first" is incorrect.
(There is a difference between private opinion, and official Presedential
addresses or statements.)
--
Herb Martin
Gabrielle Rapagnetta
>> "I was the first president ever to have advocated a Palestinian
>> state."
>> --Clinton beat him to it.
>
>I heard this the other day -- Did Clinton ever during his presidency say
>this publicly and explicitly; please quote the speech as it is possible that
>the claim of "first" is incorrect.
"There can be no genuine resolution to the [Middle East] conflict
without a sovereign, viable Palestinian state that accommodates
Israel's security requirements and demographic realities."
-Bill Clinton, January 7, 2001, in a speech given at the Israel
Policy Forum Gala in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel.
Very public. Very explicit.
Herb Martin
> without a sovereign, viable Palestinian state that accommodates
> Israel's security requirements and demographic realities."
> -Bill Clinton, January 7, 2001, in a speech given at the Israel
> Policy Forum Gala in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel.
>
> Very public. Very explicit.
Seems so to me -- it might be argued that this was not stated as policy
of the United States or a call for such.
--
Herb Martin
Gabrielle Rapagnetta
Oh, to be sure! But what Bush said wasn't policy either. Both of
those guys were talking out their asses.
Although what Clinton said was most likely true -- there will not be
peace in the Middle East without a Palestinian state. He knows it,
Bush knows it, but will any American president actually make it a
policy goal? Probably not anytime soon. That region is destabilized
for a reason (a bad reason).
B
So you haven't read it monkey-boy?
Not surprised, it has big words in it and requires some level of cognitive
thought which is way beyond your intellectual capacity.
Stick to Coulter and Faux News they are more your level.
You are without doubt one of the more stupid fuckwits that infest this
group and *that* is a very low standard.
You can stick your head back up bush's ass now.
B.
----== Posted via Newsfeed.Com - Unlimited-Uncensored-Secure Usenet News==----
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Sfurn
"Herb Martin" <ne...@LearnQuick.com> wrote in message
news:K%hpb.21661$W84....@twister.austin.rr.com...
ROFLMAO --- you are soooooooo predictable...
>
> --
> Herb Martin
>
>
B
You have been DEFENDING something you HAVEN'T even read?????
You HAVE to be about 12, no adult could be this stupid and survive.
LMAO.....
Jez
"ShrikeBack" <hewpi...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:59b8bc96.03103...@posting.google.com...
> "Roy Blankenship" <bia...@prodigy.net> wrote in message
news:<9F2ob.16921$L64....@newssvr32.news.prodigy.com>...
> > news:Su1ob.5812$W84...@twister.austin.rr.com...
> > > > "Before [Republicans] get too giddy, however, they ought to
> > > > glance at a recent book, THE LIES OF GEORGE W. BUSH, by
> > > > David Corn....He carefully documents many charges. Some examples:
> > >
> > > The worm Corn is the liar. He has nothing.
> > >
> > > --
> > > Herb Martin
> > >
> >
> > You must be deaf and blind. You don't have to read ANYONE to know that
we
> > just got totally fucked by this administration............
>
> That depends on your definition of "fucked".
3 million unemployed sounds pretty 'Fucked'
--
Ho hum
Jez
"Few of us can easily surrender our belief that
society must somehow make sense. The thought
that the State has lost its mind and is punishing so
many innocent people is intolerable. And so the
evidence has to be internally denied."
- Arthur Miller
Herb Martin
> impose peace on the Middle East? Let's be real: The Palestinians are
> forced to live in those camps by their Arab hosts. With more land
> than the US and trillions of dollars in oil revenues the Arabs could
> set them up in palaces anywhere in the region. The only thing keeping
> the Palestinians in those camps are the guns and bayonets of Arabs,
> not Israelis. As long as that's true, there's nothing we can do to
> resolve the problem.
Correct. We (the US, the Arabs) could have given every palestinian $100,000
and a plane ticket to a new apartment in Cairo, Riyadh, Damascus, Algiers,
etc.
and spent less money -- the ARABS do NOT want them.
The Arab neighbors PUT them there -- not the Israelis. The ARABS neighbors
keep them there.
After 50 years it is NO LONGER a "refugee camp".
--
Herb Martin
ShrikeBack
> "ShrikeBack" <hewpi...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:59b8bc96.03103...@posting.google.com...
> > "Roy Blankenship" <bia...@prodigy.net> wrote in message
> news:<9F2ob.16921$L64....@newssvr32.news.prodigy.com>...
> > > "Herb Martin" <ne...@LearnQuick.com> wrote in message
> > > news:Su1ob.5812$W84...@twister.austin.rr.com...
> > > > > "Before [Republicans] get too giddy, however, they ought to
> > > > > glance at a recent book, THE LIES OF GEORGE W. BUSH, by
> > > > > David Corn....He carefully documents many charges. Some examples:
> > > >
> > > > The worm Corn is the liar. He has nothing.
> > > >
> > > > --
> > > > Herb Martin
> > > >
> > >
> > > You must be deaf and blind. You don't have to read ANYONE to know that
> we
> > > just got totally fucked by this administration............
> >
> > That depends on your definition of "fucked".
>
> 3 million unemployed sounds pretty 'Fucked'
Please note that he wrote "fucked by this administration".
Jez
Well, there's been 3 million jobs lost because of this administration...
Jez
"Herb Martin" <ne...@LearnQuick.com> wrote in message
John Starrett
>>>You have heard of fact, right?
>>>
>>
>>Give it up, Herb. There is simply no way to defend Coulter as a paragon
>>of truth, which is what you seem bent on doing.
>>
>
>
> I am not trying to defend Coulter as a "paragon of Truth" -- if there is any
> defense intended at all it is from pure slander and innuendo and perjorative
> propaganda instead of facts....
OK, I like that. Good for you.
> I LIKE the post by the individual who gave some (100+?) specific candidate
> mistakes or misrepresentations -- that can be checked.
>
> And I will check at least some of it until it is clear either she or the
> poster's
> list is full of crap.
>
> I haven't even read her book but the criticism of her comes largely from
> others
> who haven't read it either.
>
Fair enough. I *have* read her book, and her research and documentation
are, in my opinion, shoddy. If she turned this in to me as a research
paper, I would fail her.
--
John Starrett
-----= Posted via Newsfeeds.Com, Uncensored Usenet News =-----
http://www.newsfeeds.com - The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World!
-----== Over 100,000 Newsgroups - 19 Different Servers! =-----
Crash
Ann Coulter's book once again destroyed.
Mr. Obvious asks:
"What was your first clue that a book
defending McCarthyism might be a load of crap?"
Herb Martin said about:
Re: Coulter errors & lies here for the taking....
> > 1. I see you again snipped the specific charges listed.
> > 3. Why didn't you bother to a search for this evidence
> > yourself if you truly
> > wanted to know the answers?
> >
> > 4. Why do you snip what doesn't fit your answers?
> 1) I don't see anything specific from YOU.
> 2) Specific means such as the other poster (actually) offered
> and which I will use.
So you refuse to answer on the grounds that
anothe poster wrote it.
So where is your reply to the "other poster?"
> 3) I have been searching for it (since several months) and so
> far only idiots like you
> posted non-specific crap until the other poster offered something that
> could
> actually be checked -- and appears to have been compiled by someone who
> actually READ the book
> Herb Martin
Herb Martin
No, the recession started while Bill Clinton was in office, then the IT
bubble burst, then the business scandals like Enron which were largely
conducted during the previous administrations, the 9/11, and then the
War on Terror including Afghanistan and Iraq and yet the President's
tax cuts are DOING THE TRICK to fuel the economy and are even
beginning to put some of the jobs back.
Some of those jobs are lost forever due to the foreign trade policies
(or failures to create proper policies) have lost those jobs to overseas.
Tax cuts work -- ask the Democrat Zell Miller, or even Bill Clinton said
last week that were HE in office he would have made the tax cuts LARGER,
MUCH LARGER as President Bush actually requested from Congress.
--
Herb Martin
James Monroe
wrote:
>> Well, there's been 3 million jobs lost because of this administration...
That's not all that's Clinton's fault; I think he was on that Grassy
Knoll in Dallas back in '63.
Also, back when Cain and Abel got into it...that was Clinton's fault,
too.
All the rest of us are cool. It's all Clinton's fault.
Herb Martin
> >last week that were HE in office he would have made the tax cuts LARGER,
> >MUCH LARGER as President Bush actually requested from Congress.
>
> That's not all that's Clinton's fault; I think he was on that Grassy
> Knoll in Dallas back in '63.
>
> Also, back when Cain and Abel got into it...that was Clinton's fault,
> too.
>
> All the rest of us are cool. It's all Clinton's fault.
Not really, some of it is, but most of it cannot be attributed to ANY
President.
That's pretty much the point when one of these idiots tries to blame the job
loss
or recession on President Bush who DEFINITELY didn't cause it (he wasn't
in office yet) and who is actually taking the action (tax cuts) that both he
and
his opposition party predecessor AGREE will fix the problem.
Apparently the real world evidence now agrees with this expectation as well.
--
Herb Martin
ShrikeBack
What gives you the idea that they were lost "because of this
administration"? Post hoc, ergo propter hoc? Note that there
was a stock market crash of enormous proportions before this
administration assumed power. Note that at the company where
I worked, and a good many others, the layoffs began in January
2001, not so long after the stock plummeted into the abyss.
Note too, that during this same period of time, Germany experienced
an even worse recession. Is this administration to blame for those
poor unemployed Germans too (who were losing jobs at a rate of 100
every hour at one point)?
Note too how many Democrats try to demogogue on the deficit spending
issue, as though they had never heard of Keynes.
Diogenes
>>Well, there's been 3 million jobs lost because of this administration...
>
>
> No, the recession started while Bill Clinton was in office, then the IT
> bubble burst,
A contributing factor to both the bubble and the burst was the Y2K scare.
In the years leading up to 2000 many upgrades and equipment replacements
were done earlier than would have otherwise been done to get 'y2k
certified'. Then sales dropped as industry already had 'new equipment'.
Similar type thing happened in the oil industry service sector boom then
bust in the 1980s.
blac...@bellsouth.net
wrote:
>On Tue, 04 Nov 2003 23:48:43 GMT, "Herb Martin" <ne...@LearnQuick.com>
>wrote:
>
>>> Well, there's been 3 million jobs lost because of this administration...
>>
>>No, the recession started while Bill Clinton was in office, then the IT
>>bubble burst, then the business scandals like Enron which were largely
>>conducted during the previous administrations, the 9/11, and then the
>>War on Terror including Afghanistan and Iraq and yet the President's
>>tax cuts are DOING THE TRICK to fuel the economy and are even
>>beginning to put some of the jobs back.
>>
>>Some of those jobs are lost forever due to the foreign trade policies
>>(or failures to create proper policies) have lost those jobs to overseas.
>>
>>Tax cuts work -- ask the Democrat Zell Miller, or even Bill Clinton said
>>last week that were HE in office he would have made the tax cuts LARGER,
>>MUCH LARGER as President Bush actually requested from Congress.
>
>That's not all that's Clinton's fault; I think he was on that Grassy
>Knoll in Dallas back in '63.
Wasn't Clinton in the Garden of Eden banging Eve while Adam played
with the apple ?
Jez
"Herb Martin" <ne...@LearnQuick.com> wrote in message
about a 4.2Trillion Social-security fund that some how evaporated after
Bush's first year...
Or was it 3 months?
Can't recal at the moment...
Jez
"Crash" <see.m...@theBeach.edu> wrote in message
news:vqg65gc...@corp.supernews.com...
>
> Ann Coulter's book once again destroyed.
>
'Lies..and the lying liars who tell them...
.....A fair and balanced look at the Right....'
Just wondering 'cos it's really very funny.. and well worth a read.
Diogenes
You probably DID hear that myth.
The Social Security Fund never has any more than is needed for current
benefit payments, plus a stack of government IOUs, as ALL surplus funds are
required, by law, to be 'invested' in special issue federal government
securities (goes into the General Fund as 'income').
The IOUs are there just like they've always been, plus the news ones being
racked up as the SS surplus is 'invested' in special issue federal
government securities, just like they've always been.
ShrikeBack
The funny thing is, blaming the recession on Bush is a lot like this.
It seems the influence of the Bush Administration is so great it can
cause a stock market crash before they even assumed power. That's
power; the power to cause something in the past. You might as well
give up and accept the mark now, while prices are low.
Sfurn
"Diogenes" <Diog...@lamplight.net> wrote in message
news:3FA885EF...@lamplight.net...
True -- but it also means that Bushco's deficits are even larger than
stated...
John Starrett
<snip>
> Wasn't Clinton in the Garden of Eden banging Eve while Adam played
> with the apple ?
<snip>
That's a common myth. Clinton was the snake.
ShrikeBack
> blac...@bellsouth.net wrote:
>
> <snip>
> > Wasn't Clinton in the Garden of Eden banging Eve while Adam played
> > with the apple ?
> <snip>
>
> That's a common myth. Clinton was the snake.
There is a certain phallic imagery there.
Diogenes
EVERY deficit since Johnson has been bigger than stated.
Sfurn
& probably even before then... but the "crowing" will be repeated by the
party faithful nonetheless --- which does not make it right...
Diogenes
You must not have read the previous parts. The point was that it changed
when Johnson put Social Security "on budget" and fudged up the accounting.
Sfurn
Poorly worded --- I meant deficits in general have been under-reported
(because of off-budget items etc.)