Hackery Dickery Duped

People just don't know and won't believe that the President doesn't legislate.

This tax cuts brouhaha is another "death panel" debate. It's when someone takes a concept, labels it and spins it like a top. We all know the origin of the "death panel" meme and how, eventually, it resulted in a good and viable concept - end of life care - being scrapped.

Well, this year's model is the Bush tax cuts. HuffPo DELIBERATELY ran with a storyline that was nothing more than out-and-outright libel: deliberately misquoting a high-ranking White House official and writing an article surrounding that misquote that was a tissue of lies as well as a gaggle of supposition, innuendo and second-guessing. HuffPo, pointedly, stated that the White House was "CAVING" on the tax cuts.

It was a non-story spun into a panic, and the sheeple bought it. Countless numbers of petitions started, Facebook pages springing up, people CONDEMNING the President. This happened on Thursday. The previous Saturday in his weekly address, the President solidly affirmed, yet again, that the Bush tax cuts would be made permanent for families earning less than $250K and individuals earning less than $200K. He also CONFIRMED that it was impossible to allow such tax cuts for the rich to become permanent.

NOWHERE, other than Huffington Post, did this story appear. The Daily Beast and Talking Points Memo picked it up, but with a link to HP, as if they didn't want to claim it. It was the "real" newspapers who broke its credence: Greg Sargent in The Plum Line, his WaPo blog, actually followed the story up, calling up Axelrod and speaking to other White House communications people.

Axelrod totally disclaims he either said or implied anything about the WH caving on the tax cuts. Sargent printed this and his own opinion was that the White House was telling the truth, and that Huffington Post was doing the spinning. Later the NYT reiterated that.

At a press conference in Japan, the President was inundated with questions about this, including a particularly smartass one from Savannah Guthrie (and someone should tell this woman that the President of the United States needs to be addressed with RESPECT) about how he was "negotiating" these tax cuts, which prompted him to reply shortly that he negotiated in Washington and not in Japan.

Pretty obvious that everyone believes an irresponsible cub reporter and a has-been political hack trying to score points and promote his boss lady's anti-Obama agenda rather that the President, himself.

And to add insult to injury and to PROVE a point I've laboured long and hard, it's bad enough that some so-called Progressives are referring to Obama as the "affirmative action" President, but one person in particular blamed all of this on David Axelrod, whom she called the "fat, drunken Jew."

Of course, HuffPo wants Obama to be forced into making the top-tier tax cuts permanent. Are you kidding? Madam will be rolling in clover; besides, how many times does one need to be told that Huffington Post is a faux Progressive site.

Yesterday, the same authors published an "update" on the original article, quoting Obama's definitive denial of their premise, but its gist was highly suggestive, with a dismissive air that implied the President wasn't to be believed. The big red tabloid banner which graced the site yesterday proclaimed that George Bush lifted huge portions of his recently-published book from other sources. In other words, he plagiarised. That's rich for Huffington, considering she was sued in a very BIG and very PUBLIC way years ago when she was Miss Stanisopoulos, living in Britain off the coattails of the late Bernard Levin and trying desperately to be accepted as a part of the British political media intelligentsia, for plagiarism. In fact, that high-profiled case at the High Court signaled her departure from the United Kingdom for our shores, where - it appears - we are a bit more gullible and shallow when it comes to Greeks causing shifts and rifts.

Today, however, various other authors who wrote about and studied the Bush Administration, including Bob Woodward, the unofficial Presidential muckraker who wrote four books on the Bush regime, slapped Huffington Post in the chops on this "exclusive," saying that Bush would have had access to NSC documentation and memos, as would others who have written about the regime; but most professionals who have read his book deny that there is any plagiarism as such.

A lot of people opine that Huffington Post is fast becoming Drudge for Progressives. I prefer to think of its editor-in-chief as the reincarnation of P T Barnum's belief that there's a sucker born every minute, thus proving that certain elements of the Left are as gullible as the Right.