Just about the entire American broadcast media establishment willfully misrepresented remarks by John Kerry to falsely imply he had insulted the intelligence of the American troops in Iraq.
On the day before Halloween, one week before what promised to be a disastrous midterm election for the Republicans, all discussions of the policy failures, criminal misdeeds, and the leadership fiasco in the Iraq war were put aside because of the "botched joke" by John Kerry that was characterized as insulting the troops.
Of course it was nothing of the kind.
Kerry was insulting George Bush - not the troops. A fact that everyone with a pulse who was present at the speech in Pasadena that morning was aware. He made several jabs at Bush, including "George Bush used to be from the state of Texas, now he is from the state of denial," followed by the only two sentences the rest of America ever heard from the speech “You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.” - those present understood from the context that Kerry was talking about George Bush. His "botch" was to leave out the word "us" as in "you get us stuck in Iraq."
But none of the rest of us knew the context. The media carefully edited out the context and repeatedly and only played a 4 second clip of just those two sentences. Absolutely none included his previous sentences or made it clear that the context was Bush's lack of attention to details that led us to the Iraq fiasco.
Got that?
The entire US broadcast media participated in disseminating a carefully edited smear.
Alone in the broadcast media only Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews seemed to be able to report the truth - on cable.
The rest of the broadcast media continued to uncritically shill for the GOP.
So much for the "Liberal Media" myth, unless "Liberal" means to willfully participate in spreading false propaganda to benefit the conservative establishment. Is that what it means?
It is time for the "Liberal Media" to apologize to the troops for deliberately selling them the lie that John Kerry had insulted them.
And then you and I, dear reader, should apologize for believing them, even if just for a moment.
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