Powerline picks up on the whole James Watt bogus quote that I’ve been writing about the past week. Powerline also notes that Moyers misquoted Zell Miller.
Moyers’ piece claimed,
The only Democrat to score 100 percent with the Christian coalition was Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, who recently quoted from the biblical book of Amos on the Senate floor: “The days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land.” He seemed to be relishing the thought.
And why not? There’s a constituency for it. A 2002 Time-CNN poll found that 59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the book of Revelations are going to come true…. Drive across the country with your radio tuned to the more than 1,600 Christian radio stations, or in the motel turn on some of the 250 Christian TV stations, and you can hear some of this end-time gospel. And you will come to understand why people under the spell of such potent prophecies cannot be expected, as Grist puts it, “to worry about the environment. Why care about the earth, when the droughts, floods, famine and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the Bible?
Look, those Christians are so nutty, they want famines. Except Miller was not talking about a literal famine. As Powerline notes,
But the quote attributed to Senator Miller had nothing whatever to do with the environment. Here is the full quote, as recited by Senator Miller: “The days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land. Not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the word of the Lord.” The subject of Miller’s speech was not environmental policy, but Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction.
All from the same Bill Moyers who a couple years ago was whining about the threat that media-misinformed voters posed to our democracy. But this is pretty prophetic,
It often happens in democratic countries that many men who have the desire or directed toward that light, and those wandering spirits who had long sought each other the need to associate cannot do it, because all being very small and lost in the crowd, they do not see each other and do not know where to find each other. Up comes a newspaper that exposes to their view the sentiment or the idea that had been presented to each of them simultaneously but separately. All are immediately in the shadows finally meet each other and unite.
Take out the word “newspaper” and substitute “weblog” and you’ve got a perfect description of the current state of affairs. Powerline is almost certainly correct that pre-Internet these two small misquotes would have almost certainly never been corrected, and Moyers would have gotten away with bersmirching both Watt and Miller.