September 19, 2007

Another Small Lie By The VEEP

(h/t to TPM)

This was from Tuesday:
Like most Americans, I admire the integrity and the candor that General Petraeus showed in his hearings before Congress. And the attacks on him by MoveOn.org in ad space provided at subsidized rates in The New York Times last week were an outrage.
And this is what the Times said about the ad last Friday:
Catherine J. Mathis, a spokeswoman for The New York Times Company, said the advertising department does not base its rates on political content. She also said the department does not disclose the rates it charges for individual advertisements. But she did say that “similar types of ads are priced in the same way.” She said the department charges advocacy groups $64,575 for full-page, black-and-white advertisements that run on a “standby” basis, meaning an advertiser can request a specific day and placement but is not guaranteed them.
I heard Mike Pintek make the same false claim about the Times subsidising the Moveon.org ad. I wonder if he'll, you know, correct his error.

Yea, I doubt it too.

Anyway, considering the poll done by Fox News immediately after General Petraeus' testimony (the one that found only 35% of those polled found the General's report "truthful and objective") there's actually TWO lies in Cheney's paragraph. Look again, he started with:
Like most Americans, I admire the integrity and the candor that General Petraeus showed in his hearings before Congress.
Imagine that, Dick Cheney lying.

7 comments:

  1. What is amazing is a ad on "standby" for 9/11 did not get bumped.

    Freedoms Watch Letter To NY Times

    FYI, the NYT is still refusing to guarantee Freedoms Watch that their new ad will run this Monday, the same day that MoveOn.Org’s new anti-Bush, anti-victory tv ad campaign begins. But somehow, they’ll have us believe that by sheer luck of the draw, MoveOn.Org got a coveted September 11 spot for their Petraeus/Betray Us ad, while there just wasn’t room that day for Freedoms Watch’s ad. The NY Times’ blatant censorship and vigorous treason campaign is appalling.

    You may believe everything that the New York Times prints. Some of us are more skeptical.
    Such as according to the New York Times, Mike Nifong had a case.

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  2. Wrong again, Mein Heir. (You must get so tired of that.) Libs don't believe everything the NYT prints. The Times had Judith Miller working for them for quite a few years, remember? Scooter's girlfriend? Currently a fellow at a right-wing think tank? That Judith Miller.

    And she's just one of the Wingnuts that gets published in the Times. David "Robert Gates has been a godsend" Brooks, Tom "The world is flat" Friedman, Eric "I am a fervent pro-lifer, and I like Rudy Giuliani." Johnston, the list goes on and on.

    "Anti-victory"???? That's humorous in a macabre sort of way. Bush/Cheney stabbed the Victory Gerbil to death five years ago. While they were at it, they killed about 4,000 brave American soldiers, and wounded about 30,000 more.

    Ask most Iraqis what victory means, and they'll tell you it means the day the Americans leave.

    There will be no victory in Iraq. There will be only disaster, worse disaster, and cataclysm.

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  3. Well, gee, Heir, I didn't see anybody on the right complaining when the NYT was running stories parroting Administration's talking points about WMD in Iraq in the run up to the war.

    Then it was, "The NYT reported that Saddam is gonna blow up the United States tomorrow with them big nukes he's got. See, we told ya'!"

    But now that Iraq continues to be a disaster, the surge has failed, the economy is in the tank, foreclosures are skyrocketing, the number of people without health insurance has gone up a few more million, and the country's infrastructure continues to crumble, the right desperately needs something to try to distract everybody from the mess Republicans have made over the past 7 years (well, the infrastructure is a bi-partisan mess). So, hey, lets focus on this ONE ad that correctly states how President Petraeus -- that's what he is at this point, isn't he? -- has continually mischaracterized things in Iraq. It's a travesty! It's treasonous! Never mind that the administration has broken the army, sent troops with PTSD and serious physical injuries back into war, given billions of dollars to contractors for failed work, even provided the weapons insurgents have used to kill American soldiers, that ONE newspaper advertisement just can't be tolerated.

    Fortunately, the distractions just won't work anymore. Except for the most feeble-minded fools or hardened partisans, nobody's buying the faux outrage anymore. It's crap. Please send it down the appropriate receptacle and move along.

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  4. the surge has failed, the economy is in the tank, foreclosures are skyrocketing, the number of people without health insurance has gone up a few more million, and the country's infrastructure continues to crumble
    ...and the democrats are in charge of Congress.
    Sounds like you are one of the "hardened partisans" "parroting ... talking points".

    SS, do you believe the New York Times excuse for cut rate of the Moveon Ad?

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  5. ...and the democrats are in charge of Congress
    ...and they did all that damage in just 8 months! And the congressional Republicans aren't frustrating attempts to make things different. And Bush hasn't vetoed any efforts to set time limits.

    Don't get me wrong -- the Dems are impotent pussies, all right. But it's because they can't or won't alter the destructive Bush/Cheney policies.

    SS, do you believe the New York Times excuse for cut rate of the Moveon Ad?
    Why do they need an excuse? I don't know the details on this ad, but as I understand it, they gave Rudy the same rate as the Petraeus ad.

    OTOH, the "blatant censorship" and "vigorous treason campaign" charges are simultaneously deeply paranoid and delightfully laughable.

    BTW, congrats on another OT rant! Since you don't address the main topic, we'll just assume that you agree that Cheney lies with some regularity. It's great to see you with at least one sensible position.

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  6. From Business Week:

    The (wrongheaded) politicking over this situation is frankly too tedious for me to get into beyond saying: sorry, people, the Times does not give lefties a bigger discount. But in this Reuters piece, Jeff Jarvis puts his finger much closer to the real issue:

    "The quandary the Times gets stuck in is they don't want to admit you can buy an ad for that rate, no matter who you are," Jarvis said, noting that with print advertising revenues in decline newspapers generally did offer big discounts.

    An advertising rate card is a many-splendored, multi-faceted thing, but what those rates actually are in the real world . . . well, that's something media outlets would like to keep under wraps. Any moderately savvy observer of magazines knows that the ad revenue figures provided on this page by the industry's own trade group--based on magazines' rate cards--significantly overstate reality.

    I should note here that Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis confirmed to me what MoveOn.org already said about said ad--that it cost $65,000, and that it was in keeping with the going rate for 'open' political advocacy ads--that is, ads for which the Times has discretion on when to run them. And that she couldn't divulge what the Giuliani campaign paid for its ad in today's Times, since the Times doesn't discuss the price of individual ads. (Exception granted since MoveOn already told everyone what they paid.)

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  7. No answer again, Mein Heir?

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