Fool Me Once, Shame on You

(Fool Me Twice, Shame on Me)

I live and breath to bust the chops of so called “professional journalists” when they’re caught not doing their job vetting sources and verifying the veracity of the stories which they deliver to their readers.

I am extremely agitated right now at the prospect of the government and the FEC making efforts to protect the rights of these “professional journalists” to publish any crap they see fit to publish while at the same time limiting my right to free speech in my blog when it comes to political issues. As I have said before, spending a few years getting an engineering degree doesn’t make me a rocket scientist any more than having a journalism degree makes everything that one of these morons writes happen to contain any truth.

Having said all of that, I regret to inform you that the mainstream media is at it again. It seems that ABC learned nothing from CBS’s and Dan Rather’s glorious adventure into the world of basing news stories on unverified anonymous documents.

This time the document in question is a supposed memo listing so called “Republican talking points” relating to the Terri Schiavo legislation enacted by the US Congress last Sunday evening. As usual, the guys over at Powerline are all over it, but I have to wade in myself because fighting and exposing media bias is my favorite topic in the whole wide world right now.

First question. How stupid do these “professional journalists” think that we are? Here is the full wording of the “Republican talking points memo” as reported on Monday after being “leaked’ by an anonymous source to the Rawstory web site and provided to ABC news:

Exclusive

GOP Talking Points on Terri Schiavo

Memo, Obtained by ABC News, Was Circulated Among Senate Republicans

March 21, 2005 — The following memo listing talking points on the Terri Schiavo case was circulated among Republican senators on the floor of the Senate.

This is an exact, full copy of the document obtained exclusively by ABC News and first reported Friday, March 18, 2005, by Linda Douglass on "World News Tonight with Peter Jennings."

S. 529, The Incapacitated Person's Legal Protection Act

Teri (sic) Schiavo is subject to an order that her feeding tubes will be disconnected on March 18, 2005 at 1p.m.

The Senate needs to act this week, before the Budget Act is pending business, or Terri's family will not have a remedy in federal court.

This is an important moral issue and the pro-life base will be excited that the Senate is debating this important issue.

This is a great political issue, because Senator Nelson of Florida has already refused to become a cosponsor and this is a tough issue for Democrats.

The bill is very limited and defines custody as "those parties authorized or directed by a court order to withdraw or withhold food, fluids, or medical treatment."

There is an exemption for a proceeding "which no party disputes, and the court finds, that the incapacitated person while having capacity, had executed a written advance directive valid under applicably law that clearly authorized the withholding or or (sic) withdrawl (sic) of food and fluids or medical treatment in the applicable circumstances."

Incapacitated persons are defined as those "presently incapable of making relevant decisions concerning the provision, withholding or withdrawl (sic) of food fluids or medical treatment under applicable state law."

This legislation ensures that individuals like Terri Schiavo are guaranteed the same legal protections as convicted murderers like Ted Bundy.

I don’t know about you, but I find many details of this memo to be troubling.

First of all, the “memo” is unsigned and written on plain paper without the US Senate letterhead. Why would that happen if it wasn’t fake? Can I draft up my own memo containing my own talking points and fax it up to the Senate and forward a copy to ABC News? Would the Senate be obligated to distribute it?

Then there is the little detail that the Senate bill number is wrong. It’s S.539, not S.529. The legislation was ultimately passed as S. 686. I know that the media has trouble being bothered with little things like DETAILS, but how the hell are we expected to believe that this piece of trash paper is authentic when something as important as the Senate Bill Number is WRONG? Sheeshhh!

Next, the idiot that wrote this “talking points memo” can’t spell worth a damn. Notice that the name of the woman, Terri Schiavo is misspelled “Teri.” In addition, everywhere the text contains the word (sic) there is another grammatical or spelling error like “withdrawl.” Something that has not been pointed out in other blogs that stands out to me is the grammatical error in the seventh paragraph where the phrase “valid under applicably law that…” Say what?

After lighting the fire under a minor uproar over the “Republican’s using Terri as a political football,” now ABC is backing off according to Powerline:

“the memo discussed a republican bill and was distributed to repulbican senators. That's what we reported. we are obviously not going to divulge our multiple sources. I appeciate your questions, but believe you are approaching this from the wrong end. We asked numerous sources - all confirmed that senators had received the memo in conjunction with one of the bills on the floor. For three days none of those sources has given us any reason to think there is more to the memo than a particularly naked expression of the politics of Shivo case.”

So what if multiple “sources” sent the same forged document to ABC. How much time did ABC spend looking into the details and verifying where the document came from?

I know that I might appear to be “picking nits” when it comes to bringing this whole issue up, but I continue to insist that we can’t believe a damn thing that is printed in the newspaper and broadcast on TV as long as crap like this is happening.

Please join me in demanding change.