It’s funny how people can lie when their (in this case fat) arses are squeezed firmly against a cold old brick wall. Take fat Phil Adams in today’s Australian, he is talking about the art form that is “Opposition Research”. That is the digging of dirt on the opposition politician. As if we the public don’t have a right to know all the ins and outs of the person offering himself up for election, sometimes as the leader of the nation sometimes just as a member of parliament. These people represent us, the peasants. Therefore we the peasants have a God given right to know as much as humanly possible about what makes them tick.
Enter Adams boogie man of the week, the official “dirt digger”. One of the examples of classic dirt digging Adams drools out is the old chestnut about Al Gore inventing the internet. Says Adams,
Certainly, Gore’s character was discredited in the 2000 presidential election when a Republican researcher found, in an obscure handout, the claim that Al had “invented the Internet”. This was promptly hyped into an all-out attack on Gore’s honesty, made all the more effective by his tendency to be pompous and pretentious.There was no obscure handout. Actually the comment was made on CNN’s late edition. The question was this
Wolf Blitzer asked
I want to get to some of the substance of domestic and international issues in a minute, but let’s just wrap up a little bit of the politics right now.Why should Democrats, looking at the Democratic nomination process, support you instead of Bill Bradley, a friend of yours, a former colleague in the Senate? What do you have to bring to this that he doesn’t necessarily bring to this process?
And Al Gore replied
Well, I will be offering — I’ll be offering my vision when my campaign begins. And it will be comprehensive and sweeping. And I hope that it will be compelling enough to draw people toward it. I feel that it will be.But it will emerge from my dialogue with the American people. I’ve traveled to every part of this country during the last six years. During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.
During a quarter century of public service, including most of it long before I came into my current job, I have worked to try to improve the quality of life in our country and in our world. And what I’ve seen during that experience is an emerging future that’s very exciting, about which I’m very optimistic, and toward which I want to lead.
Make of that what you will, but it was no “obscure handout” as Phil would have us believe.
Next one to be caught out telling porkies is none other than serial bullshitter Michael Moore. I bet your surprised to hear that.
Moore claims on his (just reopened) site that
“Bush’s victory was the NARROWEST win for a sitting president since Woodrow Wilson in 1916I am not an American, but I seemed to recall that the last election in which Bush defeated the hapless Al Gore was pretty close, so I did some snooping, or “dirt digging” as Phil would call it. What I found was that in 1916 Woodrow Wilson won with 277 electoral votes to Charles Evans Hughes 254 electoral votes. Wilson also won the popular vote with 9,129,606 to Hughes 8,538,221.
Now in 2000 Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore. Al Gore got 50,999,897 to Bush’s 50,456,002. Bush however won the electoral vote with 271 to Gore’s 266. So as you can see Moore is 4 years behind. This election Bush won the popular vote with 59,133,135 to Kerry’s 55,574,629 and the electoral vote with 274 to Kerry’s 252. As you can see, the win to Bush was substantial.
Moore also tells us
“The only age group in which the majority voted for Kerry was young adults (Kerry: 54%, Bush: 44%), proving once again that your parents are always wrong and you should never listen to them.He seems to be wrong again. According to Michael Crane from Political Junkie the 18 to 29 year olds voted 46% last time for Bush and 45% this time for Bush, a drop of 1% which I am more than happy to attribute to Moore’s propaganda flick.
The exalted fat one also tries to play the race card on Bush by claiming that
“88% of Bush’s support came from white voters. In 50 years, America will no longer have a white majority. Hey, 50 years isn’t such a long time! If you’re ten years old and reading this, your golden years will be truly golden and you will be well cared for in your old age.”According to the same source quoted above, the vote by race for Bush went thus
African-Americans: 8%/11%
Whites: 54%/58%
Hispanic: 41%/44%
So as you can see, Moore is wrong again. Is he a stupid white man or does he deliberately attempt to lie to the people? Note that he does not mention in that last paragraph how the African American vote actually increased by 3% from the 2000 election? That is a typically disingenuous trick Moore employs constantly.
At least he has not joined the other moonbats (yet) who claim Bush cheated and the election was rigged.
As I said, not yet.
