Some Reporters Are Keeping Their Hands Clean While Other “Journalists” Fill Their Sites with Poor Writing and Manure
By SusanUnPC on August 19, 2008 at 5:48 PM in Abortion, Barack Obama, John McCain
Via Mark Halperin’s blog, The Page:
WSJ reports the Land of Lincolner’s “voice is a bit raspy, his eyes are a bit red, and he walks with a hankie or tissue on hand, quickly burying it in a pocket before shaking hands.”
Adds a Washington Times reporter said she felt compelled to use Purell after shaking his hand Tuesday. [Ewwwww.]
Also filthy and disgusting is the swift-boating of John McCain by the likes of Andrew Sullivan (“Swift-boat? Moi?“) — tracked by the essential site, Memeorandum.com — and now Talking Points Memo (and this is deeply disappointing to me as a former faithful reader). Here is the large headline at the top of TPM:
“Solzhenitsyn Scholar: Cross-In-Dirt Gulag Story Never Happened“
They are trying to prove that John McCain’s deeply moving story about the guard drawing a cross in the sand is stolen from a book.
What is despicable about Sullivan and TPM’s underhanded efforts is that the ENTIRE reason is that they know — in their guts — that Barack Obama was an abysmmal failure at Saddleback on Saturday night. They concocted this story to divert attention from Obama’s weak, tepid answers and from McCain’s overwhelming command of the evening. (Now that the “he cheated” diversion has fallen apart, they’ve moved on to another concocted scheme. What will they think of next?)
Thankfully, John McCain’s blogger Michael Goldfarb has talked to a fellow inmate at the hellish prison camp in North Vietnam, and Col. Bud Day — whose ordeal was so “gory” that Mr. Goldfarb is unwilling to describe it in full — confirmed the veracity of Sen. McCain’s account:
After a brief conversation with Col. Bud Day, I can confirm that Col. Day is most likely the toughest man alive in addition to being the most decorated Air Force veteran in history. Some of the details Day shared with the McCain Report are too gory to reproduce here, but he did confirm that “not long after we all got back together [in the camp],” McCain told him the story of the prison guard who drew a cross in the dirt one Christmas.
I don’t know about you, but I’ll take the word of a fellow inmate at the hellish prison camp over the petty theorizing of Sullivan et al.
Goldfarb links to the Wikipedia entry on Col. Bud Day, and to the description of the Medal of Honor that he was awarded. Here is that entry in full:
Rank and organization: Colonel (then Major), U.S. Air Force, Forward Air Controller Pilot of an F-100 aircraft. Place and date: North Vietnam, 26 August 1967. Entered service at: Sioux City, Iowa. Born: 24 February 1925, Sioux City, Iowa. Citation: On 26 August 1967, Colonel Day was forced to eject from his aircraft over North Vietnam when it was hit by ground fire. His right arm was broken in 3 places, and his left knee was badly sprained. He was immediately captured by hostile forces and taken to a prison camp where he was interrogated and severely tortured. After causing the guards to relax their vigilance, Colonel Day escaped into the jungle and began the trek toward South Vietnam. Despite injuries inflicted by fragments of a bomb or rocket, he continued southward surviving only on a few berries and uncooked frogs. He successfully evaded enemy patrols and reached the Ben Hai River, where he encountered U.S. artillery barrages. With the aid of a bamboo log float, Colonel Day swam across the river and entered the demilitarized zone. Due to delirium, he lost his sense of direction and wandered aimlessly for several days. After several unsuccessful attempts to signal U.S. aircraft, he was ambushed and recaptured by the Viet Cong, sustaining gunshot wounds to his left hand and thigh. He was returned to the prison from which he had escaped and later was moved to Hanoi after giving his captors false information to questions put before him. Physically, Colonel Day was totally debilitated and unable to perform even the simplest task for himself. Despite his many injuries, he continued to offer maximum resistance. His personal bravery in the face of deadly enemy pressure was significant in saving the lives of fellow aviators who were still flying against the enemy. Colonel Day’s conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty are in keeping with the highest traditions of the U.S. Air Force and reflect great credit upon himself and the U.S. Armed Forces.[2]
Again — for the umpteenth time — this blog does not endorse, and has no plans to endorse, Sen. John McCain. But we abhor the tactics of Sullivan and TPM.
It will come to no surprise to any of you that the origins of this ugly attack came from a Daily Kos diary. Writes TPM:
There’s been a ton of buzz on the web for the last day or so — beginning with this Daily Kos diary — suggesting that John McCain patterned his story about a Vietamese captor drawing a cross in the dirt before him on a similar episode from Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s time in the Soviet gulags.
But it turns out that this episode probably never happened to Solzhenitsyn at all, and according to a Solzhenitsyn biographer it appears nowhere in his published writing. Columbia University professor Michael Scammell, the author of Solzhenitsyn: A Biography, says the episode “never happened,” and didn’t appear in Solzhenitsyn’s book, Gulag Archipelago, either.
This only solves a piece of the mystery, but it’s a key piece. It doesn’t necessarily rule out the possibility that McCain or his biographer, Mark Salter, picked up the tale that this happened to Solzhenitsyn elsewhere and embellished it for their own purposes.
…
May I also add that I am surprised to read a poorly written phrase, “a ton of buzz,” at a blog that I once considered essential daily reading.
Excuse me? A “ton of buzz”? No real journalist would be caught dead writing a phrase like that.
What has become of TPM?
Is Josh Marshall no longer editing his writers’ work? Have his standards fallen that far?
Indeed, had I been Marshall, I would have replaced “a ton of buzz” with “a ton of manure.”
And then I would have killed the story.
by Ronald Scott
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