Michael Steele's Revisionist History

I am sure that many of you have heard about the fighting that has been going on between the RNC Chair Michael Steele and the conservative radio personality Rush Limbaugh. In case you are late to this story here is an intentionally brief summary:

- Rush Limbaugh made the comment that he hopes President Obama will fail.
- Limbaugh is criticized for saying this but stands by his comments saying that if Obama succeeding means going against the principles that he believes, then of course he hopes Obama fails and he would think that many Republicans want Obama to fail as well.
- RNC Chairman Michael Steele goes on CNN, says that he is the head of the Republican Party and that Limbaugh is an entertainer. He also says that Limbaugh can be "incendiary" and "ugly". Here is the video of this exchange:




After this exchange, Limbaugh retaliated saying that Steele is not the head of the Republican Party. Steele then apologized to Limbaugh by saying:

“My intent was not to go after Rush – I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh...I was maybe a little bit inarticulate. …There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership.”

Now, there is some revisionist history taking place as Michael Steele is claiming that he never attacked Limbaugh in the first place. He claims that he said that there were other "people out there" who may think that Limbaugh is incendiary and ugly, but that he never meant that to be his viewpoint. Watch:




In case you want to hear the exact language from Steele's CNN appearance that directly contradicts his most recent claims that he "never attacked" Limbaugh, just go watch it again for yourself. I also enjoy how Steele and others within the Republican Party are now saying that it is the Democrats and the left who are distracting America by bringing attention to all of this. Steele mentions in his final clip that the left are implementing some kind of plan that they have wanted to enact for a while...to distract Americans from the real issues by bringing up this controversy. Sure, that's it.

It's not only Steele either. Check out this exchange between MSNBC's David Schuster and former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleisher. Fleisher comes out on the offensive with his talking point about Obama acting "childish" and Schuster tries to show Fleisher just how hypocritical this claim is. It takes effort to not go insane when these items get flipped on the head on such a consistent basis and as part of a strategy to falsely revise history:

The Dishonesty of the Wall Street Journal

If you are looking for your daily dose of inaccuracy and dishonesty, you need look no further than today's editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. This discussion centers around President Obama's prime-time press conference the other night and his practice of calling on reporters from a pre-arranged list. From the piece (emphasis mine):

The problem wasn't the lighting in the East Room. The President was running down a list of reporters preselected to ask questions. The White House had decided in advance who would be allowed to question the President and who was left out.

Presidents are free to conduct press conferences however they like, but the decision to preselect questioners is an odd one, especially for a White House famously pledged to openness. We doubt that President Bush, who was notorious for being parsimonious with follow-ups, would have gotten away with rescreening his interlocutors. Mr. Obama can more than handle his own, so our guess is that this is an attempt to discipline reporters who aren't White House favorites.

I don't take exception to questioning the practice of preselecting reporters who get to question the President, I take exception to the WSJ's false statement that President Bush would not have gotten away with this practice. One would only need to do a small amount of research before realizing that President Bush also preselected reporters to call on during his press conference. Just the other night on The O'Reilly Factor, former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer blatantly stated that this was the practice:




Not only did President Bush make it an accepted practice to preselect who he would call on, but as noted in this article, the Bush Administration even scripted a whole press conference in the lead-up to the Iraq War to assure that no questions would be asked from the likes of TIME magazine or The Washington Post.

For the Wall Street Journal to suggest that Bush could have never "gotten away with rescreening his interlocutors" is misleading at best and flat-out dishonest at worst.