The data provided by Gen. Petraeus on sharply declining Iraqi casualty rates is certainly open to analysis, debate, and challenge. We plan to take a closer look at them in a future post. However, MoveOn.org does not provide adequate factual support for its larger assertion that Petraeus is "constantly at war with the facts" and is "cooking the books" for the White House. In the absence of fresh evidence, we award MoveOn.org three Pinocchios.
Friday, September 21, 2007
General Betray Us
The Washington Post fact checks MoveOn.org's ad about Petraeus:
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2 comments:
Heh. MoveOn has said that they received half a million dollars in donations in the day following the resolution condemning them, their largest single day ever. MoveOn 1, Senate 0. Let's have more of those (non)sense of the Senate resolutions!
FTR, I am not a MoveOn member. I participated for a while a few years ago, but they began participating in things that in my opinion were a waste of my time. And there are Democrats whom I respect... Wesley Clark is one... who say they are distracting from the "real" issues with their inflammatory ads.
But I'm not so sure. TV is the name of the game these days... read Gore's latest book if you believe otherwise... and an ad has to be offensive to someone to rise above the decibel level put forth by the right-wing noise machine. I'd say MoveOn most certainly succeeded in doing that; indeed, one might even say they co-opted the RWNM in gaining additional publicity.
As for Michael Dobbs, he needs to think about the inanity of fact-checking a primarily POV ad. And he needs to think long and hard about slamming MoveOn for the "back of the head - front of the head" distinction which the Post itself published, and did not correct before the MoveOn ad rolled. Prescience is too much to expect, don't you think?
I think the Betray Us ad is very much on the same level as the shit ads the Republicans have run. I posted this link to the WaPo because I found it interesting they were holding MoveOn to a standard they haven't held the Republicans to. We are learning a few of their nasty tricks, as you say, Steve, it's all about decibels and soundbites.
Maybe that's why the Republicans are squawking so loudly?
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