Tag: MoveOn.Org

MoveOn.Org’s Bush=Hitler Ad

There’s been a lot of hype lately about the role of the Internet in this and future elections. MoveOn.Org shows the major downside of the Internet — namely that independent political sites gain audience by being on the extremes which is going to be embarassing to candidates who associate with them.

The Republican National Committee, for example, is smartly doing all it can to make a big deal out of the Bush=Hitler ad that was posted to the MoveOn.Org web site and then later pulled. As far as I can tell, this isn’t a case of just some random idiot posting the ad, but rather an editorial decision by someone with MoveOn.Org to post the ad and then later remove it. This is part of MoveOn.Org’s ad contest which is backed up by serious money (including matching funds from George Soros).

The RNC wants all of Democratic candidates for president to renounce the ad. Certainly some Democratic presidential candidates have been more closely associated with MoveOn.Org than others. For example, Howard Dean’s organization actively campaigned to win MoveOn.Org’s endorsement, and called the publicity stunt an example of the best sort of participatory democracy,

We want to thank everyone who helped make this victory possible. To the volunteers and Dean supporters across the country, thanks for all of your work. To the 139,360 who supported me, thanks for casting the first votes to take our country back. You have demonstrated that you really do have the power.

This primary was participatory democracy at its finest. This week’s vote was not about money-other campaigns devoted far more resources to this primary than ours did-and it was not about special interest groups buying access to government. This primary, the first online primary of the modern age, was about individual Americans influencing the process directly. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans researched this race, voted, and told their friends to vote.

You have to wonder if Dean’s going to appreciate being asked about every inane thing that MoveOn.Org comes up with. But his endorsement of MoveOn.Org makes that all-but-inevitable.

Ultimately, Democrats and their supporters seem to have learned nothing at all from the Republican mistakes of the Clinton years. Republicans then snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by turning legitimate criticism of the Clinton administration into an irrational, all-consuming hatred of the President which made them look like extremists. The best commentary I’ve heard about Dean yet is that he is not a repeat of McGovern, but rather the second coming of Newt Gingrich.

Same Old Al Gore

Al Gore gave a speech today hosted by MoveOn.Org which included easily debunked claims about Saddam Hussein and 9/11,

In any case, what we now know to have been false impressions include the following:

(1) Saddam Hussein was partly responsible for the attack against us on September 11th, 2001, so a good way to respond to that attack would be to invade his country and forcibly remove him from power.

That’s simply not true. The administration said there was evidence that Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda, and pointed out Hussein’s praise for the 9/11 hijackers and other terrorists. It did not say that it had evidence that Iraq played a role in 9/11. As Bush said in his State of the Union Address,

Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda. Secretly, and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own.

Donald Rumsfeld offered a concise explanation of what the Administration should have been pushing more in months leading up to the war instead of fixating on the idea that Iraq posed an immediate threat with its weapons of mass destruction program,

The objective in the global war on terror is to prevent another attack like September 11th, or a biological, nuclear or chemical attack that would be worse, before it happens. We can say with confidence that the world is a better place today because the United States led a coalition of forces into action in Iraq.

Gore compounds his misstatement by repeating a false claim about the recently released report on 9/11,

For example, according to the just-released Congressional investigation, Saddam had nothing whatsoever to do with the attacks of Sept. 11. Therefore, whatever other goals it served — and it did serve some other goals — the decision to invade Iraq made no sense as a way of exacting revenge for 9/11.

The UPI originally made this claim in a July 23 article, and later was forced to retract it on July 29 after the report had been released and did not contain any information about Iraq. According to UPI,

Prior to the report’s publication, a person who had read it told UPI that it showed U.S. intelligence agencies had no evidence linking Iraq to the 9-11 attacks or to al-Qaida. In fact, the issue is not addressed in the declassified sections of the report.

One other person who has seen the classified version of the document told UPI subsequently that the Iraq issue is not addressed in the still-classified section, either. “They didn’t ask that question,” the person said.

Notice, by the way, that the UPI was apparently used by a source to plant a false story ahead of the release of the 9/11 report. And it worked — the main thing the former Vice President seems to know about the report is this false story.

I understand the need for journalists to maintain confidential sources, but when a source intentionally misleads in order to plant false stories the media should identify the source.

When the veracity of Bush’s statements about Iraq’s efforts to acquire uranium were called into doubt, the press demanded that the White House reveal who inserted those words into the State of the Union speech. When a corporation gets caught misleading investors, journalists demand that the source of the corruption be revealed and investigated, and often go as far as publishing confidential internal memos and e-mail to expose the wrongdoer.

But when the UPI runs a completely bogus story from an anonymous source, there’s absolutely no public accountability for that individual.

Sources:

U.S. Renews Claims of Hussein-Al Qaeda Link. Greg Miller and Bob Drogin, Los Angeles Times, January 30, 2003.

9/11 spurred war, Rumsfeld says.Stephen Dinan, The Washington Times, July 9, 2003.

More Scheer myth-spreading. Brendan Nyhan, Spinsanity.Com, August 6, 2003.

Former Vice President Al Gore Remarks to MoveOn.org. Al Gore, New York University, August 7, 2003.

President Delivers “State of the Union”. White House, January 28, 2003.