Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Foster suicide vs. Cheney shooting

I would have thought that someone else might have pointed this out by now, but I had not read it anywhere else when it occurred to me this morning that the MSM's hyperventilating over the Cheney shooting was providing us with another perfect parallel of the TANG vs. SwiftVet type.

I googled "cheney shooting foster suicide" and immediately saw that some others had beaten me to this insight. One was Michelle Malkin's reference in a Wash Times opinion piece: "Funny thing is, I can't recall the mainstream media melting down over the 30-hour delay — presided over by Hillary Clinton, according to internal records — in releasing the late White House counsel Vincent Foster's suicide note to authorities and her own husband. Can you?"

I think that Michelle misses the better point here. More critical than the delay in releasing the note was the long delay which preceded any announcement of Foster's death. That delay is critical because it was then that his office was combed through by Clinton aides and files removed. The Clintons delayed because they needed the time to cover up criminality and obstruct an investigation. Cheney's delay was completely innocent.

The difference in MSM reactions to these two events, however, has been extremely valuable to those who claim that the news media is partisan (not just biased). They form an excellent pair of references in the same way that the Texas Air National Guard non-story about Bush's service in the military during Vietmam made a close parallel with the Swift Vet exposure of John Kerry's dishonesty about his military service in Vietnam.

In each of these parallels, the Democrats were involved in serious dishonesty and the Republicans were not. Yet in both cases, the MSM went beserk pointing fingers at the GOP and showed no interest in reporting on the far more serious stories involving Democratic dishonesty.

Hard to write off as innocent. Wouldn't it be nice to have someone like Paul Mirengoff ask MSM editors to explain the disparate treatment? Of course, with someone like Paul to press the follow-up questions and pin down the spin, they would be insane to grant such an interview.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Something that I'd always noticed was that whenever Bill or Hillary talked about the Vince Foster suicide, they'd be very precise about the language they used when they answered a question about taking things out of Foster's office. They would always go to the trouble of making their answer extra long by saying that nothing was removed from Foster's office "the night he died". Regardless of how the question was asked, they'd always include that last part. I figured that things were probably removed at 12:01AM the day after Foster died. Of course, once we got to see Bill in action during the contortions of the Monica testamony, it became very obvious how he attempted to manipulate language to techniquely not lie.

7:40 PM, February 22, 2006  

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