Matt Drudge: still a GOP stooge

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Every once in a while, I enjoy pointing out just how absurdly moronic Matt Drudge is. I know, it's not particularly newsworthy, and really, it's a demonstration that I have a firm grasp of the obvious. But, every once in a while it bears repeating. Why? Because his Website is one of the most visited on the Web.

For some reason, the GOP and its shills like Drudge still seem to have a fetish for Al Gore. Perhaps its because of Gore's success and the inroads he's making in raising the warning flag about global warming. Who knows? But, the misinformation and attacks are like the Energizer bunny - They keep coming... well, you know the rest.

The above image is a screen capture from the Drudge Report a few days ago, featuring a prominent story about Gore's energy consumption. What a joke. The link goes to a story Here, by the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, a blatantly right-wing funded organization. (I wrote about it Here when these morons tried to embarrass Gore just hours after his ground-breaking movie, An Inconvenient Truth, won several Oscars.)

Gore's energy consumption habits aren't really of interest to me or anyone else other than the most rabid GOPers. And, of course, his energy consumption only tells part of the story. Here's a guy criss-crossing the globe trying to make a difference with global warming, in addition to the fact that he buys green energy, and he has solar panels installed on his very large home, yet he's getting his balls busted by partisan hacks who don't have anything better to do.

Meh - enough of it - I guess I'm no better than they are, but it's worth pointing out that Drudge will do whatever he can to smear prominent Democrats, and this is just another example.

I'll never tire of pointing out that the idea of a "librul media" is unadulterated bullshit. Drudge is one of the most visited sites on the Web (and many news networks report what his Website says, like it's news! And not just Fox News, either), Fox News is the most watched cable news channel during most time slots, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation is the largest media conglomerate in the U.S., and the top three radio personalities are all GOP shills. Oh yea, we have a "librul media" alright.

No wonder the right is panicked about the possibility of a Democratic Congress re-instituting the Fairness Doctrine.

I'm pleased that Obama has talked publicly about enforcing the Sherman Antitrust Act if he becomes president. It's about time - no president has enforced it since Reagan effectively gutted it when he became president. It's still a law that's on the books, it's in the public interest, and it's about time that some of these huge corporations be broken up, specifically our mass media conglomerates.

About that liberal media...

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I wonder how Republicans will spin this one? Every Republican, and I do mean every one, was anti-CBS back in 2004 when Dan Rather, ahem, rather foolishly went public with a story impugning Bush's National Guard "service."

Anyway, The Drudge Report has been pimping the Hillary story all day; it's nearly 3 p.m., and it's been up since 8 this morning. (Don't click unless you want to give him the hits.) Funny how I didn't notice McCain's numerous gaffes last week featured nearly as prominently, but that figures. If you click on the image above for a larger view, you'll notice that the insipid Drudge boasts one of the most visited sites on the Web. I hate to acknowledge it, but facts are facts - it's tough to overstate his influence on the mass media, going all the way back to the Monica Lewinsky scandal. And the mainstream media simply laps it up; multiple times I've heard talking heads on cable news networks, including CNN, say "The Drudge Report is reporting..." as if that alone constitutes news. Never mind the fact that his track record is no better than The New York Times or any of the so-called media outlets. It's also a very poorly kept secret that the Republican National Committee talks with Drudge on a regular basis and gives him talking points.

Republican reaction to Hillary's latest puffery about a trip to Bosnia is pretty predictable, actually. It's the tried-and-true GOP play book - when the media reports something unfriendly regarding a Democrat, the media's simply doing it's job, but when the media pops a blister of Republican malfeasance, Repubes whine about "the liberal media." It's another reason we have to be so thankful for Richard Nixon's legacy. Thanks, Dick.

I tire of hearing tales about "the liberal media," but I won't stop writing about it, because it can and must be debunked.

Bad Iraq news continues; Look! Over here! A Gore speech from '92

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It's interesting that the right-wing smear machine is already gearing up for Al Gore's potential candidacy. Of course, GOP shill Matt Drudge leads the way. The screen capture above is from The Drudge Report this past Tuesday. Of course, he's highlighting an Al Gore speech from 1992, part of which is below.

This speech is interesting to watch. Our country's past with Iraq and Saddam Hussein is a complicated one, and by complicated I don't mean that President Clinton is completely innocent, but he's far from the guiltiest, either.

What I found particularly poignant was Gore's Cliff-Note-tour of our country's involvement with Iraq in the 1980s. I won't get into it too much more in this piece, other than to say I've read the exact same things Gore speaks of in this video clip, lest anyone think Gore was merely spouting campaign rhetoric (the video dates from 1992).

Richard Clarke, who worked counter-terrorism under presidents Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton and Dubya, discussed in detail how Saddam brutally murdered hundreds of thousands of Iranians and Iraqis during that decade, all of which were under Republican, um, "leadership" in the White House. These facts often don't fit into the well-worn rhetoric of Republicans - that Saddam was a "brutal dictator" who "murdered his own people." Clarke details all of this and more in his stunning tome Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror, a book I highly recommend.

Sidney Blumenthal also covers our relations with Iraq in the 1980s (but less than Clarke) in his outstanding book, The Clinton Wars. Blumenthal served as President's Clinton senior political advisor during his second term.

The bottom line here is that America (Read: Ronald Reagan, and later, Bush Sr.) didn't feel the need to do anything about Iraq until the flow of oil was threatened by Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. I can still remember, with my own two ears, Bush Sr. on television declaring that "We are going to war to defend our way of life." Seems patently absurd now, doesn't it? If it doesn't, it should.

If you read about Kuwait, it's anything but a democracy, too.

Now that the neocons' grand experiment has failed MISERABLY in Iraq, setting our foreign policy back 25 years, people like Drudge are busy digging up video tape from 15 years ago in a lame, half-baked attempt to smear a undeclared candidate for president INSTEAD OF rightfully criticizing Bush's Iraq policy of perpetual war.

It's easy for someone like Drudge to dig up old video of Gore, ignoring the events of the past 15 years. What it does NOT take into consideration is what happened following Desert Storm; sanctions, no-fly zones and close monitoring during the 1990s had Saddam mostly boxed in - he had no nuclear program, and, we now know, no WMDs.

Over 3,500 hundred Dead Americans later, to say nothing of the $500+ billion in American dollars spent in Iraq, but Drudge chooses to not talk about that; instead, a Gore speech from 15 years ago takes priority.

What a pathetic canard, even for Drudge.