“[I]n April, I will be back with a new weekly series called Bill Moyer’s Journal, thanks to some of the funders in this room. We’ll take no money from public broadcasting because it compromises you even when you don’t intend it to — or they don’t intend it to.”

Bill Moyers’ startling admission that taking government money “compromises” journalism came at the close of his lengthy (12 printed pages) and highly-acclaimed keynote speech last Friday, and it invalidated nearly everything he had been saying over the previous hour. But you would have been hard-pressed to find anyone at the Media Reform Conference who would stop applauding long enough to consider the implications.

I happened to meet Moyers, the host of several PBS shows and former White House Press Secretary under President Johnson, the night before his speech. He exchanged a few brief words with us before posing for a photo (detail above) with one of my colleagues. After that, he excused himself to go write his speech. If I had known its contents in advance, I would have had plenty more to say. But since he bolted right after delivering it the next day, I didn’t get a second chance.

Some reviews: “great speaker,” “very impressive and inspiring,” “witty, smart and well-spoken,” “powerful,” “the runaway rock star of the day,” “the fluidity of a presidential candidate.”

The audience rewarded Moyers with several rousing, standing ovations.

Not bad for a speech short on facts but full of innuendo; riddled with inaccuracies, faulty statistics, silly accusations, and contradictory statements; seasoned with props to numerous Marxists; containing lines that may well have been plagiarized (”borrowed” or “sampled,” if you prefer); and constructed around a central conceit that even some of his supporters consider “borderline offensive.”

In Part 4 of this series, we will take a closer look at the speech and go line-by-line through most of it (read Part 1 and Part 2). But, for now, let’s just hit two of the most memorable lines.

There’s no better place to start than at the beginning. Moyers opened his speech by quoting one of the Founders, who happens to be a personal favorite of mine (as some of you know):

Benjamin Franklin once said, “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner.”

“Liberty,” he said, “is a well-armed lamb, contesting the vote.”

Now, I have to give a quick shout out to Mary Mancini of Liberadio, a Leftist radio host in Nashville who was kind enough to dedicate her last broadcast to your’s truly.

Mancini comments on the beginning of the speech, between a few “Moyers ‘08″ doodles: “He entered to a standing ovation and cited Ben Franklin, always a safe bet when you want a zinger of a quote.”

Always a safe bet, hmm… not so much.

Or maybe it would be if you went ahead and, um, made sure it was actually a quote by Franklin and not a misattribution.

I mean, give it about five seconds of thought and you might consider that the supposed source of the quote was, you know, instrumental in setting up the very institution this quote criticizes.

You really think Franklin said “Liberty is a well-armed lamb, contesting the vote”?

Really?

The quote is attributed to a journalist named James Bovard who wrote it in 1994, about 200 years after Franklin’s death.

Next up we have the now-famous “surge” line. Being in the audience after he said that, it was as if the messiah had returned to Earth to gather up his flock. The clouds separated, the hallelujah chorus revealed itself, and a big white halo formed around his head. They loved that line like their own child. To quote my brother, they loved it so much they wanted to marry it, except this audience doesn’t believe in marriage, so what can you say?

Moyers was trying to make a point about the Bush administration’s “Orwellian” relationship with media, allowing it to insert HALLIBURTON carefully crafted political slogans into the mainstream consciousness NO BLOOD FOR OIL, and thereby AFFIRMATIVE ACTION tilt public opinion into their favor LOCKBOX.

They have even managed to turn the escalation of a failed war into a “surge,” as if it were a current of electricity through a wire, instead of blood spurting from the ruptured vein of a soldier.

Now that’s absurd. Without digging any further, it’s just outright absurd. There’s no better word to describe what he’s done there.

If the point is to define a term absent some manipulative suggestion, you can’t criticize the spin and then immediately stretch it into an even more nonsensical shape of your own liking.

Can’t you see it now?

President Bush: “Today I’d like to announce that I’m calling for a surge, and by that I mean blood spurting from the ruptured vein of a soldier. Now, I’ll be happy to take your questions.”

In reality, Bush’s so-called “surge” address… didn’t include the word surge. It’s hard for the White House to manipulate and spin a term if they don’t use it.

Meanwhile, it was being used by another Media Reform Conference attendee, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN), who included this line in his very first U.S. House speech, “Mr. Speaker, by the way: I’ve noticed in my office — I think we need a surge protector. Can you get one up there?”

Heh, heh, heh… I can’t stop laughing, really. That Cohen is a laugh factory, I tell you what.

But White House Press Secretary Tony Snow was hit with several questions about the term in a press briefing prior to the speech. Here’s the exchange:

Q Well, what’s the difference between an escalation and a surge?

MR. SNOW: Well, why don’t we talk about characterizations once we have a plan?

Q Because I think it’s part of a conversation that’s going on right now.

MR. SNOW: I understand that, and, guess what — it’s a conversation, as I’ve said before, that is a bit in a vacuum and I’m not going to get into the business of preemptively characterizing something that we have not released in full detail.

Q But, somehow, “escalation” has become this Democratic word — the Democratic Party language.

MR. SNOW: Well, ask the guys who do their focus groups. They’re going to have an answer for it. Look, the President is talking about a way forward, and rather than getting involved in trying to assess a description of a plan that has yet to be released publicly and, therefore, about which I am not in a position to characterize publicly, it seems a little silly for me to start quibbling about adjectives without discussing what they purportedly describe, don’t you think?

Q Well, the President apparently told Gordon Smith and others yesterday that the 20,000 troop increase/surge/escalation is part of the deal. So that’s why I’m asking specifically about — we are going to see some kind of increase.

MR. SNOW: Rather than looking for a one-word handle, look at the policy. And, actually, this is your challenge — you guys do words for a living; figure out — rather than trying to ask Democratic or even Republican lawmakers what the proper descriptive term is, you figure it out.

The reporter says “escalation” has “somehow” become the favored term of the Democratic Party. That somehow was unveiled by the Washington Post:

By releasing the sternly worded letter, Democratic leaders hoped to jump ahead of Bush and set the agenda for the weekend talk shows. Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said the party wants to address even the terminology of the White House plan, defining it not as a “surge” but as an “escalation.”

So it turns out the Orwellian masterminds were actually the Democrats. Now revisit what Moyers says and admire his ironic use of the preferred Democratic term by way of accusing Republicans of that very behavior: “They have even managed to turn the escalation of a failed war…”

The nerve.

The Commercial Appeal includes a slightly-altered form of Moyers’ surge quote in an article characterizing the presentation as a “fiery speech.”

Fiery, yes, and a total failure.

Because not only was the line absurd, ironic and ridiculous… it was likely stolen (borrowed, sampled, plagiarized).

Baltimore Sun, January 4, 2007, Garrison Keillor: “The word “surge” keeps cropping up, as if we were fighting the war with electricity and not human beings.”

It looks like Moyers took the line from his fellow conspirator in public broadcasting, without attribution.

But, hey, at least he gave credit to Benjamin Franklin! Oh, wait…

To be continued.

UPDATE: Go to part four