Thursday, October 21, 2004
Sinclair
I've followed the Stolen Honor controversy pretty closely, and even got some friends in the Baltimore & St. Louis area to make some calls to Sinclair media advertisers. And I've never, but never thought the Swift Boat Vets were anything but smear artists of the lowest kind. I figured Stolen Honor would be like the SBV ads--trying not to say anything provably untrue, but implying a lot. It turns out, though, that Stolen Honor actually is pretty straightforward about balls-out lying, though. Here's a paragraph from Dana Stevens's review in Slate:
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This brings me to my nomination for Moment Least Likely To Appear in Friday's broadcast: the brief segment in which producer and narrator Carlton Sherwood, with a straight face and without a shred of evidence, calls John Kerry a war criminal. And not in some symbolic, metaphorical way; he accuses him of decapitating, testicle-eletrocuting, and rape. Those are but some of the atrocities that Kerry describes in a well-known clip from the Congressional hearings of 1971: "They [the soldiers] told the stories … at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals … and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam." Immediately after this clip, Sherwood appears onscreen and asks: "Did I just hear that right? Was I, or my fellow Marines, being accused of the same atrocities John Kerry had committed?" Did I just hear that right? After rewinding this moment half a dozen times, I had to believe it: A film destined for the airwaves of national television on the eve of the election was coolly asserting that the Democratic candidate was a rapist and a ball-wiring baby killer. You'd think that would have come up in the debates: "My opponent has no plan for saving Social Security. Plus, he wired all those balls in Vietnam."Unbelievable. Read the whole thing, as Glenn Reynolds will probably not say about this article.
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