Replacing BDS With RDS
Philip Klein notes the rapidly increasing level of hate being directed at Rudy Giuliani by the American Left. It shows all of the signs of a new variant of Bush Derangement Syndrome. Call it Rudy Derangement Syndrome or RDS. The left is going bonkers on Giuliani lately even to the extent of Keith Olbermann and Arianna Huffington flat out lying about something Giuliani said - despite having a video clip that showed exactly what Giuliani actually said. That's pretty deranged.
The Giuliani hate fest has also infiltrated the airwaves, where Keith Olbermann has made bashing Rudy a daily feature on his show. Last Monday, an Olbermann segment entitled "Rudy Giuliani: The next Dick Cheney?" was about Mr. Giuliani's penchant for "secrecy" and "proclivity for executive power…"
This was followed up on Tuesday with a segment that began with a graphic featuring Mr. Giuliani, President Bush in the background and the words "Bush on Steroids"–a reference to John Edwards's comment that Mr. Giuliani shares Mr. Bush's love of "crony capitalism."
The segment revealed, just as with Mr. Bush, the media have no problem broadcasting factual errors when targeting Mr. Giuliani. Mr. Olbermann misquoted Mr. Giuliani as saying that Democrats wanted to invite Osama bin Laden to the White House. In actuality, Mr. Giuliani didn't say Osama, he said Assad, as in Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, one of the leaders whom Barack Obama did in fact say he would be willing to meet with in Washington with no preconditions within the first year of his administration. Making the incident even more absurd, Mr. Olbermann ran the video clip of Mr. Giuliani's remarks on his show, and it was clear that Mr. Giuliani said "Assad." How clear? The transcript appearing on the official MSNBC Web site for Mr. Olbermann's show had Mr. Giuliani saying "Assad" in the video clip.
Nevertheless, Mr. Olbermann asked his guest Arianna Huffington to comment on whether the former mayor was being hyperbolic or lying.
"Well, he's lying and also every day he reveals more and more of himself," Ms. Huffington said. "And you can see that he really has the soul of a thug and the disposition of a tyrant."
Ms. Huffington repeated the false Giuliani-Osama quote, and later in the interview, she added: "He's kind of channeling Rush Limbaugh. He's making the lunatic fringe mainstream."
And Mr. Olbermann wondered, "Has it reached a level yet where we should be considering examining whether or not this is compulsive lying that there is something endemic to [Giuliani]? Or [is] this specific purpose-driven lies?"
One might ask the same about Mr. Olbermann. Even though the Associated Press issued a correction to its story that misquoted Mr. Giuliani following a report on AmSpecBlog, as of this writing, Mr. Olbermann has not corrected his erroneous segment. His spokeswoman did not return three calls or an email sent from The American Spectator asking whether the news channel planned to correct the error, and if not, to explain its corrections policy.
Accusing someone of lying by telling a lie doesn't exactly prove your point, does it? There are many other examples of the left's suddenly frenzied Rudy hate-a-thon. As Klein points out, the steady spew of hate actually helps Giuliani square things with the Republican base. So the tactic is highly counterproductive for the left.
By syn, Monday, 5 November , 2007 @ 9:42 am
Interesting, I have a drawing made in the late 1990’s done by a NY lefty who depicted Rudy as a Nazi in uniform. In other words, Rudy was deemed Hilter before Bush ever was President.
Republican base aside, American voters should not kid themselves into believing that when Bush leaves office all the derangement will end.
In fact the deranged will get more vocal, more theatrical and even more vicious than they were over the last seven years.
By Mwalimu Daudi, Monday, 5 November , 2007 @ 3:34 pm
If people think that MSM attacks on Republicans have been filthy up to this point, you ain’t seen nothing yet! With the approval ratings of the Democrat-controlled Congress so low you need an electron microscope to find them, the MSM has begun to realize that Democrats’ stay in power might come to resemble what Thomas Hobbes spoke of in his famous dictum about the life of man: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
It’s the “short” part that has Olbermann, Huffington and the rest of the MSM in its current panic.