Clark and the Conservative Spin Machine

[Sayhey]

It appears that Wesley Clark has a few Republican spinners working overtime. Read the following account of a phone call Clark received about Saddam and 9/11 and how the Republicans are trying to spin it.

Despite new information, a number of conservative pundits continue to spin the widely-debunked story of a phone call Democratic presidential hopeful General Wesley Clark says he received shortly after Sept. 11.

The source of the controversy is an appearance Clark made in June on NBC's "Meet the Press." Clark told host Tim Russert that "there was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001 starting immediately after 9/11 to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein." When Russert asked "By who? Who did that?" Clark stated that:

Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11. I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, "You got to say this is connected. This is state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein." I said, "But--I'm willing to say it but what's your evidence?" And I never got any evidence. And these were people who had--Middle East think tanks and people like this and it was a lot of pressure to connect this and there were a lot of assumptions made. But I never personally saw the evidence and didn't talk to anybody who had the evidence to make that connection.

As we demonstrated earlier this month, a careful reading shows that Clark never claimed the phone call in question came from the White House, and he has been consistent in his position, telling Sean Hannity on July 1 that the call came from "a fellow in Canada who is part of a Middle Eastern think tank".

A September 18 article in the Toronto Star lends support to part of Clark's claim. According to the Star, the call was placed by Thomas Hecht, founder of the Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies, which is based in Israel but has an office in Montreal. Hecht told the Star that he did not pressure Clark, though he did give Clark information he had obtained from Israel connecting Saddam to the attacks. Hecht also claims he made the call on September 12 or 13, not September 11. Though the character of the call remains disputed, the Star report verifies key details from Clark's version of events.

Yet the original story - that Clark claimed the call came from the White House, and then dissembled about it - has proven to be too good not to repeat. On September 18 (the same day as the Toronto Star story), the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial [subscription required] claiming that "As a formal candidate, General Clark will also no longer be able to get away with such evasions as his declaration earlier this year that he was pressured by the Bush Administration to link the 9/11 attack to Iraq. He got a call, he implied initially, 'from people around the White House.'" The Journal continues, "Later he changed that to someone from a Canadian think tank. Then: 'No one from the White House asked me to link Saddam Hussein to September 11.' Then it was the Canadian think tank again." The Journal implies that Clark has changed his story repeatedly, when in fact exactly the opposite is true.

Even after the publication of the Star story, prominent commentators have continued to suggest that Clark is lying about the call, distorting or omitting the relevant evidence. Robert Novak wrote in a syndicated column first published on September 21 that "Clark attributed one comment to a Middle East 'think tank' in Canada, although there appears to be no such organization." And, as Bob Somerby of the Daily Howler has pointed out, New York Times columnist William Safire made a similar attack on Monday, calling Clark a "boot-in-mouth politician" and writing that he "began by claiming to have been pressured to stop his defeatist wartime CNN commentary by someone 'around the White House'; challenged, he morphed that source into a Canadian Middle East think tank, equally fuzzy."

Rush Limbaugh extended the spin on Monday, claiming that "Clark said on Meet the Press that he got a call from the White House asking him to link Iraq to 9/11 ... It turns out he got a call from somebody up in Canada, some think tank, but never got a call from the White House. He lied about that, made it up." Limbaugh references an article by Michael Continetti on the Weekly Standard's website. Continetti claimed that "Last June, the latest Democratic candidate for president implied that he 'got a call' on 9/11 from 'people around the White House' asking the general to publicly link Saddam Hussein to the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon." After that misleading characterization of Clark's comments, he goes on to twist the information from the Toronto Star report to paint Clark as a liar:

While it turns out Clark did receive a call "on either Sept. 12 or Sept. 13," the call wasn't from the White House. It was from Israeli-Canadian Middle East expert Thomas Hecht, who told the Toronto Star that he called to invite Clark to give a speech in Canada.

As the statements of Limbaugh and Continetti demonstrate, the confusion over the call Clark received has now become a media myth with a life of its own.

The story is at:

link (http://www.spinsanity.org/columns/20030925.html)

It looks like Rove is trying the same tactics he used on Gore; sieze on any statement that can in anyway be characterized as false and use it to paint your opponent as a liar. It's already getting dirty folks!

[zimv20]

rove would do anything to keep power. anything.

[IJ Reilly]

Didn't Wesley Clark invent the Internet?

I heard that somewhere...

[mcrain]

No, he got a BJ in a tank and got some "material" on a blue dress.

[zimv20]

Originally posted by mcrain
No, he got a BJ in a tank and got some "material" on a blue dress.

don't you mean "matériel?" :-)

[Sayhey]

It's possible with a little editing that the right honorable Rev. Falwell could have Clark running drugs and murdering Vince Foster. I'm sure he must have a lot of his video tapes laying around that he could still make a buck on.

[jefhatfield]

or maybe it was clark wearing the blue dress:p

[Sayhey]

Here is an update by the same source on the continuing story of conservative spin. Now Michael Moore has got into spreading the same false information with a liberal spin.

How media myths are created:
The continuing saga of the Wesley Clark phone call narrative
By Brendan Nyhan
October 15, 2003

The recall campaign may be over in California, but entertainment values are increasingly defining political coverage nationwide. With reporting emphasizing personality over substance, pundits and partisans are now working harder than ever to manufacture negative media narratives about candidates. Following the dramatic success of such a campaign against Vice President Al Gore in 2000, the latest target is Democratic presidential contender General Wesley Clark, who is being tagged as an inveterate liar based on statements that were at worst simply unclear.

The distortions began even before he entered the race. In June, Clark alleged that there was "a concerted effort during the fall of 2001 starting immediately after 9/11 to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein." When asked who participated in the effort, he said, "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over." Clark then discussed a call he said he received on Sept. 11, 2001 from someone who pressured him to link the attacks with Saddam. In context, as we have pointed out, Clark was not alleging that the call itself came from the White House, though his statement was somewhat ambiguous.

In late June, when Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons claimed Clark had said the call came from a Bush administration official, Clark quickly called him to correct the record. On the Fox News Channel's "Hannity & Colmes" on July 1, he stated, "I personally got a call from a fellow in Canada who is part of a Middle Eastern think tank who gets inside intelligence information. He called me on 9/11." Later in July, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman misconstrued Clark's statement, and Clark again clarified his comments in a letter to the Times dated three days after Krugman's column (although it did not run in the Times for several weeks). Finally, in late August, Clark again referred to the Canadian think tank official on MSNBC's "Buchanan & Press". Although he did not name the official, the Toronto Star identified the man in question as Thomas Hecht, the founder of a think tank based in Israel that has an office in Montreal.

Though Clark has consistently clarified his story and corrected the record, the ambiguity of the original statement and repeated misinterpretations by sympathetic liberals (the latest to do so is Michael Moore in his new book Dude, Where's My Country?) has provided an opportunity for his political opponents.

By late August, with Clark looming as a possible presidential contender, conservative pundits raced to accuse him of changing his story about the famous phone call. The Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal editorial page (subscription required), radio host Rush Limbaugh and columnists George Will, William Safire, Robert Novak and Ann Coulter all accused Clark of inconsistency and dissembling based on out of context and misleading evidence. Will went so far as to alter the order of Clark's original quotes, while Coulter misrepresented the question to which Clark responded with his "all over" statement. The Weekly Standard also claimed that no such Canadian think tank existed, which was later proven to be incorrect.

Most recently, the charge was repeated by Newhouse News columnist David Reinhard, who distorted Clark's statement in similar fashion, claiming "Clark said that, on 9/11, 'people from the White House . . . from people around the White House' told him to tie Saddam Hussein to the attacks."

The supposed White House call was the first sign of a trend, as other Clark statements are now being distorted. Colorado Governor Bill Owens and Denver University President Marc Holtzman told Newsweek that Clark said to them, "I would have been a Republican if [White House political advisor] Karl Rove had returned my phone calls." Clark claims the statement, which was made last January, was a joke. And though Newsweek's reporting suggested that any calls were made by associates rather than Clark himself, the Weekly Standard reported that Rove said he had never talked to Clark and that his phone logs showed no calls from Clark - all of which became evidence to suggest that Clark was again lying. (Syndicated columnist Jonah Goldberg even falsely claimed that Clark made the statement in mid-September - the same week he declared his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination.) And blogger Josh Marshall has shown how a statement Clark made about Iraq policy under President Clinton was recently distorted almost beyond recognition in a New York Sun story quoting several conservative pundits and think tank experts.

The attacks on Clark echo the successful effort to brand former Vice President Al Gore a liar during the 2000 campaign, which was largely driven by the Republican National Committee and conservative pundits. In most cases, the RNC or the media took semi-ambiguous verbal statements from Gore out of context and misconstrued them to trash him as a liar. Once established, the "Gore as liar" narrative dominated reporters' perceptions of the Vice President and produced some of the most misleading and dishonest reporting and commentary seen in the post-Watergate era, including false allegations that Gore said he invented the Internet, that he lied about being the inspiration for "Love Story" and that he claimed to have discovered the Love Canal toxic waste scandal. (The less dominant but still powerful "Bush is dumb" narrative produced similar results, including the famous "Bushisms" series from the online magazine Slate, which frequently misconstrues statements from the president or takes them out of context.)

The goal of these attacks is clear: to establish Clark as the latest in a long line of Democratic liars, manufacturing a narrative of dishonesty and branding his every statement as suspect in the eyes of the media. Or, as the Standard put it, "He's a slippery character whose public statements remind you of a fellow Rhodes scholar from Arkansas."

Even if the allegations are disputed, the controversy is itself a victory, for it suggests to voters that there may be some merit to the charges. Inevitably, like every politician, Clark will make self-aggrandizing, misleading and ambiguous statements during the campaign (as with his contradictory statements about whether he would have supported the resolution authorizing military action in Iraq, which he recently claimed did not represent any change in his position). The media has a responsibility to scrutinize each of these cases fairly rather than simply adopting the "Clark is a liar" narrative they are being fed by the partisan press.

link (http://spinsanity.org/columns/20031016c.html)

[Thanatoast]

kinda on topic

i got to see first-hand a broadcast of sean hannity the other day. he was broadcasting from our main auditorium at school. the place was filled with a cheering crowd (i'm in texas at school).

anyways, he managed to get ted kennedy on the phone. he said "senator kennedy, i wanna ask you one question. when you spoke on the senate floor last week you called president bush a liar, and i find that despicable."

see any question there?

to which kennedy responded, "president bush *is* a liar, he said there were weapons of mass destruction in iraq and we knew where they were and there are none and we haven't found any"

about halfway through his answer the crowd booed fervently and hannity proceeded ask him the same "question".

after kennedy realized he was getting nowhere, he bugged out. hannity totally had the crowd eating out of the palm of his hand. he said, "ladies and gentlemen, ted kennedy, for the first and last time ever on the sean hannity show."

:crowd cheers:

"and here's our next caller..."
"hello, sean. why didn't you ask the senator where he parked his oldsmobile?" (reffering to his drunk driving incident)

:crowd cheers: (this is the same crowd that white-washes bush's drunk driving escapades)

"and now it's time for a commercial..."

hannity and the talk show host he was with had managed to insult ted kennedy and make him look like a fool, while proving absolutely nothing and in fact, being caught in their own lie. i was totally amazed. they were too, because they grinned real big and shook hands. it couldn't have come off any better if they had planned it.

when they came back on the air they said , "you know, i think maybe the conservatives in this country should think about taking off the gloves. we should get a media personality who's willing to lower themselves to the levels of the liberal media and beat them at their own game of lies and deception."

i left at that point before i was thrown out for yelling "hypocrite!" at the top of my lungs. and then being lynched by the mindless mob in the theater.

it's funny, hannity refers to these shows as his "hannitizing" of america. i think he must be laughing his ass off that he's hannitizing-->sannitizing-->brain washing the people, and they eat it up.

just a first hand account of how the conservative media is evil.

here's (http://rope.wbap.com/video/sean_ted_aud.wma) a link to the kennedy phone call.

[Durandal7]

Clark's biggest problem will not be the "evil conservative media" but the rival Democrats running for the nomination. As soon as Clark pulls ahead in the polls he will come under fire from the seven career politicians desperate to seize power. It is probable that the "evil conservatives" could kick back and watch the Democrat candidates tear each-other to shreds if they wanted to.

[vniow]

Originally posted by Thanatoast
i left at that point before i was thrown out for yelling "hypocrite!" at the top of my lungs. and then being lynched by the mindless mob in the theater.

You rock.

Pity you don't have the audio to that anywhere...

[Sayhey]

Originally posted by Durandal7
Clark's biggest problem will not be the "evil conservative media" but the rival Democrats running for the nomination. As soon as Clark pulls ahead in the polls he will come under fire from the seven career politicians desperate to seize power. It is probable that the "evil conservatives" could kick back and watch the Democrat candidates tear each-other to shreds if they wanted to.

The scenario you describe is already happening and not only to Clark. Dean has experience the sharp barbs of his fellow Democrats as well. That is all to be expected and in the end it won't make a lot of difference. What can is if the Republicans get a free ride in painting a picture of their rivals.

And it is not the "evil conservative media" that is at fault for the above story. It is the Rove orchestrated campaign using conservative pundits and talking heads. There is a difference between the two. Unfortunately, too many legitimate correspondents of whatever political background are too lazy to check their facts and just repeat the latest spin.

[Thanatoast]

Originally posted by Sayhey
And it is not the "evil conservative media" that is at fault for the above story.
Ah ha! So you admit that there IS an evil conservative media! :eek: ;)

And if the "legitimate" correspondents are so lazy they don't check the facts before they report them, can't we lump them under "evil" too? Just this once?

Besides, isn't it considered bad form to report third-hand info? "USA Today reported on a story broadcast on CNN yesterday that my brother told me about that Al Gore said that he invented the internet." Doesn't anyone think to ask Al Gore, or the reporter who conducted the original interview?

As for Clark, (what's this? on topic? huh?), i think he needs to be just as loud as his detractors at pointing out what he really said, and carry a copy of the aritcle around with him, and provide http links, and possibly an audio recording as well. You know, physical evidence to shut down the liars with. Merely telling them they're wrong and why doesn't work. You've got to beat them over the head with it, preferably to unconciousness.

[Sayhey]

Originally posted by Thanatoast
Ah ha! So you admit that there IS an evil conservative media! :eek: ;)

And if the "legitimate" correspondents are so lazy they don't check the facts before they report them, can't we lump them under "evil" too? Just this once?

Besides, isn't it considered bad form to report third-hand info? "USA Today reported on a story broadcast on CNN yesterday that my brother told me about that Al Gore said that he invented the internet." Doesn't anyone think to ask Al Gore, or the reporter who conducted the original interview?

As for Clark, (what's this? on topic? huh?), i think he needs to be just as loud as his detractors at pointing out what he really said, and carry a copy of the aritcle around with him, and provide http links, and possibly an audio recording as well. You know, physical evidence to shut down the liars with. Merely telling them they're wrong and why doesn't work. You've got to beat them over the head with it, preferably to unconciousness.

LOL, Thanatoast, I love the last paragraph. You should frame it and send it to Clark.