3 posts tagged “ny times”
Did you read the nasty op-ed by William Kristol in today's NY Times? Why the editors gave that intellectual featherweight valuable space in the paper I'll never know. You have the news section talking about how the McCain campaign is getting ready to go into the gutter with nasty attacks on Obama. Then, you have the editorial board write an op-ed decrying the gutter politics of the McCain campaign... and then on the opposite page, you have Kristol jumping into the gutter with both feet - and not even with any subtlety. It really was a thing of beauty. He's asking Palin about whether she'll bring up Obama and Wright after she tells him about the supposed connection between Obama and Ayers. What a reach that is... Of course Kristol doesn't seem to be interested in asking her about her husband belonging to a party that is trying to have Alaska secede from the U.S. Rich!
Well, at least the foreign press will actually use the word "lie" to describe the blatant and knowing telling of untruth...
Well, that's it. It's all over: the election, human existence, everything. It turns out that a preposterous new McCain campaign ad, which attacks Barack Obama for attacking Sarah Palin, also manages to tell a lie about an article published on a website that only exists in the first place to point out when the campaigns are telling lies, thereby creating a fatal wormhole in the space-time continuum that will shortly suck all physical matter into its gaping maw. The ad suggests that the non-partisan service Factcheck.org, at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center, has dismissed Obama's attacks on Palin as "absolutely false" and "misleading". But guess what, irony enthusiasts: that claim itself is absolutely false and misleading! Factcheck.org was talking about crazy rumours put about by so-called online internet bloggers, not criticisms levelled by Obama at all. (Perspicacious lie-spotters may also have noticed that yesterday's McCain attack ad used footage of the CBS news anchor Katie Couric apparently agreeing that criticisms of Sarah Palin had been deeply sexist; in fact, she was talking about Hillary Clinton, and the ad has since been removed from YouTube at CBS's request. You remember Hillary Clinton -- she's the one about whom a McCain supporter once asked him "How do we beat the bitch?", causing the crusading progressive feminist John McCain to chuckle and declare "that's an excellent question.")
Whereas we here in the U.S. get this double-speak from the NY Times...
Escalating its efforts to portray Senator Barack Obama as a candidate whose values fall outside the mainstream, the campaign of Senator John McCain on Tuesday unveiled a new television advertisement claiming that Mr. Obama, the Democratic nominee, favors “comprehensive sex education” for kindergarten students.
“Learning about sex before learning to read?” the narrator asks in the 30-second advertisement, which the campaign says will be shown in battleground states and on national cable. The commercial also asserts that a sex-education bill introduced in Illinois, which Mr. Obama did not sponsor and which never became law, is his “one accomplishment” in the field of education.
Both sets of accusations, however, seriously distort the record.
The Obama campaign expressed outrage over the commercial, with Bill Burton, a spokesman, describing it as “shameful and downright perverse.”
But Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for the McCain campaign, said, “the Obama campaign did not and cannot dispute a shred of the content in the ad.”
Hmmm, by reading the NY Times, you'd have to be a close reader of the article to really get the idea that the McCain campaign is lying. Did Obama propose to have sex education taught to kindergarten age kids or not? The answer is - no he did not. So then, if you say that he did... then you sir, are a liar. Plain and simple. Get it NY Times? Is that so hard???
You have got to read this front page story in the NY Times today. This just borders on farce, if it wasn't the Bush administration, I wouldn't believe that it was true... but sadly, it is only too true. I can tell you, the Joseph Heller's of the future will have no shortage of material to write the 21st century Catch-22...
How does a 22 year-old get a $300 million defense contract to supply arms to the Afghan army? First, make sure you're not zinged with a felony when police find your fake ID. Then hire a licensed masseur to be your VP. Find some shady arms dealers, make the lowest bid and voila -- you're in business with the Bush administration.
As the Times found out, AEY fulfilled that contract by dealing with a variety of shady arms dealers (one Czech, one Swiss) to get their hands on ammo stockpiles in the old Eastern bloc. And as far as ensuring the quality of the munitions? Here's how it went in Albania:
Albania offered to sell tens of millions of cartridges manufactured as long ago as 1950. For tests, a 25-year-old AEY representative was given 1,000 cartridges to fire, according to Ylli Pinari, the director of the arms export agency at the time of the sale.
No ballistic performance was recorded, he said. The rounds were fired by hand.
Not surprisingly, the Afghan army has been unhappy with the product. AEY shipped the decades-old ammo in cardboard boxes -- apparently to save money on shipping charges. And the Times reports that the boxes arrived in Afghanistan spilling out of the boxes, "revealing ammunition manufactured in China in 1966." It's illegal to deal in Chinese arms.
[T]he company has provided ammunition that is more than 40 years old and in decomposing packaging, according to an examination of the munitions by The New York Times and interviews with American and Afghan officials. Much of the ammunition comes from the aging stockpiles of the old Communist bloc, including stockpiles that the State Department and NATO have determined to be unreliable and obsolete, and have spent millions of dollars to have destroyed.
It just keeps getting better though... the story goes into the dude's the 22 year-old CEO's personal life, and it is just insane. He was under 21 when he started defense contracting, and was going out with a fake ID, and was caught. He only avoided a felony charge for fraud by doing a diversion program. It should be noted that the felony conviction would have made him ineligible to contract with the Defense department. He was also involved in numerous domestic disputes with various girlfriends which got the police called on him, including stalking, and physical violence. Wow, an incompetent asshole, sounds like a good fit for the Bushies!
