The Dean Scream

Thanks to reader TM who brought this interesting article from the Miami Herald to our attention: Murder by media: The Dean Scream

You’ve seen the clip. After Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” at the Super Bowl, it’s the most famous news video of 2004. Dean is addressing campaign supporters after he lost the Iowa party caucuses in January. He’s screaming for no apparent reason, practically shrieking, ticking off the states where he’s vowing to continue the race. His face is red, his voice breaking. He looks deranged. It’s a portrait of a man out of control. It’s documentary evidence that Dean lacks the temperament for high office.

In fact the Dean Scream was a fraud, probably the clearest instance of media assassination in recent U.S. political history.

Last year, a young cable news producer attended one of our twice-yearly Ethics Institutes at Washington and Lee University, in which students and journalists gather to discuss newsroom wrongdoing. He brought two clips.

The first was the familiar pool footage of Dean in Iowa. The candidate filled the screen, no supporters were visible. Crowd noise was silenced by the microphone he held, which deadened ambient sounds. You saw only him and heard only his inexplicable screaming.

The second clip was the same speech taped by a supporter on the floor of the hall. The difference was stunning. The place was packed. The noise was deafening. Dean was on the podium, but you couldn’t hear him. The roar from his supporters was drowning him out.

Dean was no longer scary, unhinged, volcanic, over the top. He was like the coach of a would-be championship NCAA football team at a pre-game rally, trying to be heard over a gym full of determined, wildly enthusiastic fans. I saw energy, not lunacy.

Is it not hard to see why Charles Johnson, a fanatical supporter of George W Bush and his bloodthirsty Republican Party, would seek to distort the image of one of the Democratic Party's leading lights in the run-up to the election? Accurate reporting, LGF observers know, is not something Charles is interested in when there's a war to be won...

Continue reading the article

Pro-Bush demonstration in Germany

Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs brings you the news that nobody else dares publish. Today it's the revelation that there were hundreds, thousands, no hundreds of thousands of pro-Bush demonstrators thronging the streets of the German city of Mainz when George Dubya visited. He even has a link to pictures of a few sorry souls standing in the snow looking dejected/being comforted by the local police.

Luckily, we here at LGFWatch have the real story on that pro-Bush demo. See for yourself...

Who said this?

"I just long for the day I wake up and find that the Saudi royal family are swinging from lamp-posts and they've got a proper government that represents the people of Saudi Arabia."

a) George 'W stands for War President' Bush

b) John 'I love despots' Negroponte

c) 'Red' Ken Livingstone

Visit TFT to find out

We got mail from a lizard!

Charles likes to get other people to do his dirty work for him, so today he whispered in Thomas Taylor's ear and told him to send us a blast of his worst insults. The result?

thomastaylor58@bellsouth.net wrote:

"You guys are dipshits"

Way to go Thomas. You've got a long and illustrious career on the LGF message board ahead of you.

Now on to more serious matters: hear the one about the soldiers, sent to bring freedom and democracy to far flung corners of the earth, who just couldn't keep themselves from preying on passing females? Let's see what Charles has to say about them.

Charles Johnson: thuggery is better than peaceful protest

When it comes to such basic democratic rights as freedom of speech, the right to protest and the right to protection from violence, Charles 'let freedom reign' Johnson knows where he stands: squarely on the side of those who oppose such rights.

Solidarity with Israel: For Communism!

Lizard Lunacy Watch Roundup

Good to see we're not alone in keeping tabs on those crazed lizard spawn at LGF:

News Junky makes some astute comments about Charles' Google paranoia

and

Catalyzer Journal sums LGF up nicely:

"Just as superfluous use of any word cheapens its meaning, so too does that of 'hate', as in 'hate site' or 'hate group', but in the case of LGF its application seems more than warranted."

Word up!

What is Google up to?

This is the question Charles Johnson poses to his readers, but as you would expect it's just a rhetorical question because CJ already 'knows' what Google News is up to: they're discriminating against upstanding right-wing blogs like LGF (ehm, because it's a one man partisan effort and virtually news-free) and Powerline (oh wait, Powerline IS listed on Google News), and Michelle Malkin (whose blog also appears to be a one-person outfit devoid of news {the clue is in the title, oh Lizard Lord}) and, ehm, Daily Kos, that other well-known right-wing weblog.

Here's a simple solution that should keep all those moaning bloggers and Google happy: why doesn't Google just set up Google Views, a place to collect all the stuff posted to weblogs, from the mundane to the interesting? You'd have a disclaimer that these are NOT news professionals, that many of the items are distorted and biased, but you could still rank entries on http://views.google.com by popularity, relevance, date etc...

Come on Google, you know you want to do it.

:-)

Charles Johnson backs down

After a successful email campaign by our faithful horde of lizard-eating minions, Charles Johnson officially backs down on his claim that Britain is moving towards dhimmitude and apologises unreservedly to LGF readers for leading them astray.

Oh, wait a minute, now Charles has retracted his apology! In fact, he claims he never claimed that Holford claimed the RE exam board wanted British kids to "bow down to the Evil Prophet of Death(TM)".

Funny guy, that Johnson. Loves taking credit for things that have nothing to do with him, but strangely shy when it comes to taking responsibility for his mistakes.

Fisking LGF

Anyone who has spent any time on Charles Johnson's weblog Little Green Footballs knows that the information disseminated there is at best hyperbolic, at worst outright falsehood. So it comes as no surprise that one of the latest postings, titled 'British Dhimmitude Watch', proved to be another load of hogwash.

Ever eager to smear the Islamic religion and its followers, Charles is also keen to paint Europe as a continent descending into servitude to a 'death cult' (his words) that is slowly infiltrating every aspect of public life. In this example, Charles picks up a post on the website of a certain David Holford, an American teaching religious education in a British school, and claims that

"Religious Education students in Britain must now include the letters "pbuh" ("peace be upon him") in parentheses every time they write the name of Mohammed"

The only evidence he provides, apart from the link to Mr Holford's website, is the scan of a specimen paper from the relevant exam board’s web site which "actually uses Arabic script for the blessing" (shock horror!).

Did CJ bother to verify this story? Did he contact the exam board? Did he speak to Holford or any other RE teachers in Britain about this? Did he bother to read more of the exam paper? No on all counts, because if he had he would have found out that, while the exam papers do put little Arabic 'pbuh's' behind the word Mohammed, they also blank out the 'o' in G-d in the Judaism exam questions. And does the exam board require that teachers make their pupils write 'pbuh' after every instance of Mohammed? No, they don't, and no pupil would get extra marks for doing so.

Finally, what does Mr Holford have to say about all this kerfuffle? Well, having removed the post to which CJ links, Holford now says that

"[T]he underlying information was related to me by a work colleague as being how she was told to inform students in response to my query about this, I have not had an opportunity to check this further with my department or with OCR."

This is to say that Charles Johnson takes the unchecked interpretations of one blogging RE teacher as fact and posts them on his website as an example of Britain falling on its knees before Islam/political correctness (take your pick).

Is this the guy they called Charles 'fact-check' Johnson? Fact-check my ass!

PS: For an insight into the damage done by CJ's ignorance, look at these charming responses to his post on the LGF message board:

#13 bigel 2/14/2005 09:26AM PST

I understand that these same religious students will be made to write the intials (DTTENZJ) after they write the world "Israel".

DTTENZJ = Death To The Evil Neocon Zionazi Joooooooos

#14 Joel 2/14/2005 09:26AM PST

The Prophet Mohammed pig shit be upon him.

#17 trigger girlie 2/14/2005 09:27AM PST

Maybe we should just stop complaining and watch Euro..Eurabia slowly descend into the pits of Islamofascist hell.
To tell the truth, I can't wait for the day to come when we can say: "told you so!" The sooner, the better, and the bigger the impact will be.

#32 doppelganglander 2/14/2005 09:31AM PST

Over my cold dead body would any child of mine conform to this asinine requirement. What's next, making the English girls wear the veil so the Muslim boys won't rape them?

*spit*

#44 zombie 2/14/2005 09:37AM PST

[...] What we've really got to do is get to the bottom of this "exam board." Can some minor bureaucrats really enforce demon-worship nationwide? What kind of madness is this?

Charles Johnson: lynch mob leader AND hypocrit

What do our weary eyes see on LGF this weekend? First a stinging attack against the Daily Kos and Atrios blogs for their role in uncovering the Gannon scandal. Apparently the initiative and resourcefulness shown by these two 'leftie blogs' is too much for Charlie, who accuses them of using "below-the-belt tactics".

Boohoo, below the belt? This from the man who regularly accuses professors/journalists/the entire mainstream media/individual lawyers/school pupils/the ACLU/rival bloggers/politicians/etc of being 'anti-American', mentally ill, or in league with the devil? This from someone who states that the United Nations are one big pedophile ring?

What a freaking hypocrit.

And then dear Charles has the gall to reject the accusation that his hate campaigns resemble the campaigns of Senator Joe 'I hate commies' McCarthy. Can anyone tell us what alternate universe these lizards are living in?

Lefty Blogs Dig Up Scandal, Charles Johnson can't ignore it

Heehee, Charles' attempt to dismiss the Gannon scandal would be shocking if it weren't so funny. First he pretends he (and everyone else on the planet) has no idea who Jeff Gannon is (despite him having quoted Talon News on his blog in the past), then he tries to pass this story off as an insignificance about a falsely issued press pass - ignoring the fact that this guy is a plant from the GOP to feed toady questions to the prez.

Then there's the little matter of Gannon having had access to classified material.

World yawns? Well maybe they're yawning in talk radio country, but the blogosphere isn't yawning.

LGF on Gannon scandal

Hmmm, while Charles Johnson focuses all his energy on getting rid of a professor at an obscure US university, the main story of bloggers uncovering fraudsters at the moment is that of Jeff Gannon, White House plant. What do you expect Charles is going to say about this story? Nada, we think ;-)

Throwing ol' Johnson under the bandwaggon

I think it is time to be frank about some things. Charles Johnson knows absolutely nothing about Iraq. I wonder if he has even ever read a single book on Iraq, much less written one. He knows no Arabic. He has never lived in an Arab country. He can't read Iraqi newspapers or those of Iraq's neighbors. He knows nothing whatsoever about Shiite Islam, the branch of the religion to which a majority of Iraqis adheres. Why should we pretend that Charles Johnson's opinion on the significance and nature of the elections in Iraq last Sunday matters? It does not.

Charles Johnson was a cheerleader for the unprovoked, unilateral US attack on Iraq. The reason he repeatedly gave was that Iraq was a) close to having a nuclear weapon b) Johnson's friend's pet lizard was at an airport drinking beer during 9/11 and c) because the Arabs are all alike...

It wasn't us!