Jackson Baker is having a difficult time with the latest revelations about John Edwards. Let’s help him out.

So maybe he needs to deny the baby is his, if somebody has seriously maintained that it is. (But HAS anybody?).

The National Enquirer has alleged that Rielle Hunter’s bastard child was sired by John Edwards, but it’s unclear if Jackson Baker considers that publication an “anybody” or if he’s willing to characterize their reporting as a “seriously maintained” claim. Whether or not there are other anybodies seriously maintaining as much, Baker is getting ahead of himself and is asking the wrong question. Without some solid reporting and further evidence, such as the paternity test Edwards says he welcomes, it’s unlikely that any anybodies could seriously maintain anything. But what we have already established and verified is the end (a baby) and the means (an affair). The parties have offered an alternative explanation — that the baby was fathered by an Edwards staffer, rather than Edwards — but we know the child’s birth certificate doesn’t corroborate that story, and we also have reason to doubt the involved parties, as they have already admitted to being lying whores. (more…)

Memphis Liar Editor Bruce VanWyngarden picked the wrong day to stop sniffing glue:

The presidential race is starting to turn nasty — at least on one side. John McCain said last week that opponent Barack Obama was willing to “lose a war in order to win a campaign.” McCain also ran an ad falsely claiming that Obama canceled a meeting with wounded vets in Germany because “cameras weren’t allowed.” (This, even though McCain similarly had canceled an appearance with wounded vets this spring, also at the request of the Pentagon.)

First off, and this is an admittedly minor point, the McCain ad doesn’t make the direct claim Bruce reports. To be exact, the ad’s narrator says: “He made time to go to the gym, but canceled a visit with wounded troops. Seems the Pentagon wouldn’t allow him to bring cameras.” The ad certainly implies or suggests that BRCK BM canceled his visit because he wasn’t able to stage it as a campaign event, but the direct charge is not specified, and VanWyngarden also tampers with the quote: “cameras weren’t allowed.”

Second, I find no evidence for VanWyngarden’s assertion that McCain “canceled an appearance with wounded vets this spring.” According to CNN, “the Navy declined a McCain campaign request to speak at the Naval Aviation Museum at the naval base in Pensacola, Florida, because it is a military owned installation and is located on the base.” Unless there were wounded vets lined up to appear with McCain at the museum, VanWyngarden appears to be making a stretch.

Third, and most importantly, VanWyngarden falsely suggests that the Pentagon asked the Senators not to meet with wounded troops, when in fact it has simply asked both to make such appearances in an official, rather than a political, capacity.

The Dallas News quotes Pentagon Spokesman Bryan Whitman: “Nobody denied Senator Obama the opportunity to visit our wounded being cared for at Landstuhl. Obviously as a sitting senator he has an interest in that and can certainly visit in an official capacity… The senator’s staff was informed of the limits on what the military can do with respect to a political campaign and how we could support a senator’s visit to Landstuhl, and quite frankly I expected them to have the visit.”

According to BRCK BM’s own campaign statement, canceling the event was a decision of his own choosing:

“The senator decided out of respect for these servicemen and women that it would be inappropriate to make a stop to visit troops at a U.S. military facility as part of a trip funded by the campaign.”

I’m willing to give BRCK BM the benefit of the doubt and take him at his word on this one, but McCain’s campaign is certainly free to reach a different conclusion, particularly in light of the larger context of BRCK BM’s campaign.

VanWyngarden continues his editorial with an analysis of McCain’s appearance on CNN’s The Situation Room, in which he repeated his vow to capture Osama bin Laden or otherwise “bring him to justice.”

Blitzer asked how McCain was going manage such a feat when President Bush hadn’t been able to do it in seven years.

This is an unexpected and welcome departure from the Leftist mantra that President Bush took his eye off the ball, but unfortunately it’s the only line approaching reasonable criticism in the whole editorial.

Of course, a few days earlier, McCain had proclaimed himself worried about the situation on the nonexistent “Iraq/Pakistan border,” which would suggest he doesn’t know the area quite as well as he’d like us to think.

Yes, of course… but what VanWyngarden fails to mention is that McCain’s comment was, like the question that elicited it, about Afghanistan, which in fact does border Pakistan — suggesting not that he’s unfamiliar with the area, as VanWyngarden implies, but instead that McCain’s simply as prone as any politician to verbal gaffes and temporary geographic confusion.

Take, for example, BRCK BM, who forgot his home state of Illinois shared a border with Kentucky when talking about that state’s primary…

“Sen. Clinton, I think, is much better known, coming from a nearby state of Arkansas. So it’s not surprising that she would have an advantage in some of those states in the middle.”

… and who at one point seemed to have discovered an additional eight states:

“Over the last 15 months, we’ve traveled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in 57 states? I think one left to go.

VanWyngarden continues:

What got to me, though, was his assertion that he knew how to capture bin Laden but hadn’t bothered to share this magical information with the president, the CIA, or the Pentagon. He’s a U.S. senator, for heaven’s sake. Surely the president will take his calls.

Seems to me that McCain was dangling his secret plan to capture the world’s leading terrorist as an incentive for the American people to elect him president. “Elect me,” he appeared to be saying, “and I’ll get the bad guy.”

It’s nothing short of absurd to claim that McCain’s confidence in his own military experience, knowledge about warfare and determination to defeat Al Qaida somehow amounts to “magical information” that he has refused to share with the White House.

Yes, it’s unfortunate that McCain seems to be making the capture of Osama bin Laden a campaign promise, rather than simply expressing his desire and readiness to continue aggressively taking the fight to Al Qaida.

But at least he’s not promised to cure paralysis, a la John Edwards, or worse, control the land, sea and air, a la BRCK BM, who told the crowds in Berlin, “Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands.”

Huh. Sounds like he’d rather win a campaign than capture Osama bin Laden. Either that, or the “maverick” is full of, uh, non-straight talk.

The Memphis Liar certainly knows a thing or two about “non-straight talk.”

Cross-posted at MemphisLiar.com.

The New York Times rejected John McCain’s Op-Ed on Iraq, a rebuttal to one they published that was penned by BRCK BM.

One reason the Times was forced to reject McCain’s editorial is that it clearly puts shame to their endorsement of him in the Republican primary:

Mr. McCain was one of the first prominent Republicans to point out how badly the war in Iraq was being managed. We wish he could now see as clearly past the temporary victories produced by Mr. Bush’s unsustainable escalation, which have not led to any change in Iraq’s murderous political calculus. At the least, he owes Americans a real idea of how he would win this war, which he says he can do.

One need only skim McCain’s Op-Ed to discover how profoundly wrong the Times editors were about the surge, even as they endorsed the man who helped initiate it.

Ironically, rejecting McCain now is probably the best gift they could have given him.

UPDATE: Welcome, Times editors! (more…)

My sophomore post at Newsbusters highlights the NY Times’s contentious decision to expose the CIA interrogator responsible for getting information out of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

Most interesting are the comments the post is generating (22 and counting), especially one by sean robins examining how the Times defends its double standard with an “incredible sleight of hand,” distinguishing between a story’s “subjects” (named, over the CIA’s objection) and its “sources” (some of the agent’s colleagues, who remain unnamed).

Similarly, Founding_Father wonders “exactly how many times in the last 8 years [the Times] has used ‘anonymous’ sources, or withheld names” from other articles:

[W]hat were the circumstances surrounding it. Were they all intelligence officers or sexual assault victims? How many times do they use “washington insider” instead of using the names?

The Times editors claim that publishing the agent’s name “was necessary for the credibility and completeness of the article,” but they failed to do what was necessary for the safety and security of this nation and its public servants. Furthermore, by doing so, over the objection of the CIA and the agent’s legal counsel, the Times has dealt yet another critical blow to its own credibility as an organization, especially in light of its Valerie Plame hysteria.

Elsewhere: Gateway Pundit, Hot Air…

The sharp folks over at NewsBusters.org have welcomed me as a contributor, picking up my recent post on the Daily Show. I’m thrilled to be joining such a remarkable group of professionals and look forward to writing more media criticism in the near future.

At this year’s Media Reform Conference, Bill Moyers was invited to open his hole again. Since he’s still showing his face in public, I can only assume Moyers never got around to reading my exhaustive four-part rebuttal to his speech in Memphis last year. Freepress expects to have this year’s transcript available early next week; I think I’ll hold off for that rather than suffer through the 40 minute video multiple times. It humors me that they posted a segment from Keith Olbermann’s MSNBC show at the top of the “conference videos” page. Not to mention the fact that, you know, the whole point of the conference is patently absurd… that’s a little funny, too.

I just caught part of the Daily Show for the first time in probably a year; now I remember why. Tonight Jon Stewart accused the news media of ignoring the Senate Intelligence Committee Phase II report. He specifically claimed their was no coverage at Foxnews.com and CNN.com. Here’s another link you’ll probably want to ignore, Jon.

Besides lying about the news coverage, Stewart also falsely charges that then-Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) and the Republicans intentionally delayed the report:

“Obviously, there were some holdups, some script delays, from Republicans who didn’t want this report released to the public.”

But as the Minority Views document makes clear, the report was deliberately held up by the Democrats:

“The Phase II effort has indeed resulted in a partisan exercise and requests made by the Democrats of the then-Republican Committee leadership from 2004 to 2006 for the inquiry itself and for unnecessary interviews and documents were clearly intended as roadblocks to prevent the inquiry’s completion and to allow bogus charges of “obstruction” intended to help the Democrats’ political goals.

…

We find the refusal to include all relevant intelligence and the inclusion of information pubilshed after the delivery of statements to be particularly ironic since in a letter on November 14, 2005, then-Vice Chairman Rockefeller, along with Senators Levin and Feinstein, wrote to the Majority and Minority Leaders explaining that they had “insisted that the Committee compare statements of government officials against all intelligence information prepared for circulation and relevant to the subject matter at issue, provided it was it [sic] available at the time the statement was made.

This appeared to be considered a worthwhile task when the burden of collecting all of the available intelligence form the end of the Gulf War through the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom fell to Republican Members and their staff, but when the Democrats took charge, including only some of the intelligence was deemed acceptable. Perhaps forcing the Republican staff to review over 40,000 documents was just a request intended to delay further publication of the Phase II effort and allow the continuation of charges of “obstruction.”

…

The only reason we can imagine why the Democrats would not undertake interviews that they had repeatedly requested in the last Congress, is that the interviews were another tactic at delaying the report and allowing more false charges of “obstruction.”

See also Senator Roberts’ Phase II fact check.

Stewart also mocks a 2005 sound bite by Sen. Roberts talking about wanting to speed it up. Obviously, Stewart rips Sen. Roberts’ statements from context:

The Daily Show video segment is embedded below the fold: (more…)

Imagine my delight when I discovered this sign while out walking the dogs. I still can’t believe it. Back story here.

Heh: Commercial Appeal editorial cartoonist Bill Day’s obese, balding, crowbar-wielding bigot stereotype is back.

It’s as (unintentionally) funny as last time.

(I appreciate James Surdi for bringing this to our attention.)

The Shorenstien Memo is an interesting read; a Hillary Clinton supporter complains about media bias in favor of BRCK BM. I especially like the included charts where Sen. McCain fares even worse (of course, God help you if your candidate is a conservative Republican).