Wednesday, November 17, 2004

Media fiction

This is why most of us think the Associated Press and the MSM that own them are such incorrigible liars that they will never reform themselves. Mark Sherman, AP writer, on Tom Daschle bidding Democrats goodbye, is a maudlin story with almost no truth.

Daschle is "classy" and "generally unassuming." I guess he missed all those C-SPAN conferences that Daschle held with the press almost daily where he belligerently preened before fawning reporters who dutifully posed with open reporter pads. They were meant as rally-the-troops talks but were reminiscent of Pat Boone singing the stirring lyrics of "Exodus." The voice was shrill and weak and there were no ideas, no great strategies, no focus. Just meanness.

Sherman also fawningly reports this which has got to make you laugh outloud:
Daschle talked about campaign stops where he met people whose problems reminded him of why he first came to Congress 25 years ago, said a Democratic aide. One 75-year-old woman he met wakes up every day at 4:30 a.m. for a job at McDonald's, he said; she needs the extra money because she spends most of her Social Security check on prescription medicines.

I guess that's why Daschle, along with his fellow Democrats, voted to increase the tax on Social Security income, penalizing those senior citizens who elected to supplement their income with part-time jobs, jobs they had to give up or give up even more in social security. At a local nursing home, they lost most of their part-time help, women who worked in the gift shop three mornings a week, two women who worked in the office who helped in filing and in processing paperwork. It was money they needed.

But the Associated Press writer wasn't assigned the task of telling the truth, admitting a humiliating defeat of the Democrat minority leader, nor pull up Lexus-Nexus stories about the registration on the Indian reservations tied directly to the Democrat party, look none too closely at Dasche's chumminess with the Argus Leader or with a friendly judge who attempted to intervene in the election.

All stories kept in our common memory by -- Google and bloggers.

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