Charles Krauthammer's  column today in the Washington Post ("Return of the Real Obama," 9/23/11) reveals the Barack Obama, who's apparently been hidden away for the past few years:

In a 2008 debate, Charlie Gibson asked Barack Obama about his support for raising capital-gains taxes, given the historical record of government losing net revenue as a result. Obama persevered: "Well, Charlie, what I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital-gains tax for purposes of fairness."

A most revealing window into our president's political core: To impose a tax that actually impoverishes our communal bank account (the U.S. Treasury) is ridiculous. It is nothing but punitive. It benefits no one--not the rich, not the poor, not the government. For Obama, however, it brings fairness, which is priceless.

That was, indeed, a memorable moment--but not in the way that Krauthammer thinks. The real problem was that the question Charles Gibson asked was premised on a falsehood. As  FAIR pointed out at the time, Gibson was

pressing Obama about his plan to raise capital gains tax rates to levels of the early 1990s--a position that struck Gibson as bizarre, since lowering these taxes increases government revenue:

In each instance, when the rate dropped, revenues from the tax increased. The government took in more money. And in the 1980s, when the tax was increased to 28 percent, the revenues went down. So why raise it at all, especially given the fact that 100 million people in this country own stock and would be affected?

This question rests on two false assumptions. The capital gains tax is paid by a small percentage of the population. As Citizens for Tax Justice pointed out (3/16/06), "The wealthiest 10 percent of taxpayers enjoyed 90 percent of the capital gains eligible for this special tax break." Gibson's reference to the 100 million Americans who own stock is irrelevant, since this tax is applied to the sales of stocks and real estate--not the act of having a retirement account.

Gibson's other point--"History shows that when you drop the capital gains tax, the revenues go up"--might be popular in certain conservative circles, but the evidence to support it is thin. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities pointed out (7/12/07), there is little causal relationship between the capital gains tax cuts and increased federal tax revenue. Economist Jason Furman of the Brookings Institution pointed out the the "Joint Committee on Taxation and Treasury both score raising capital gains taxes as raising revenues" (New Republic, 4/16/08).

Displaying the same allergy to actual democracy shown by Joe Klein (FAIR Blog, 2/3/11), Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer (2/4/11) calls, like Klein, for a military regime in Egypt to impose a "period of stability" for "guiding the country to free elections"--the kind of "free elections" in which the military will "guarantee" that the right people "prevail."

The breathtaking hypocrisy of Krauthammer's column--which begins "Who doesn't love a democratic revolution?"--is on view in this passage:

Our paramount moral and strategic interest in Egypt is real democracy in which power does not devolve to those who believe in one man, one vote, one time. That would be Egypt's fate should the Muslim Brotherhood prevail. That was the fate of Gaza, now under the brutal thumb of Hamas.

Aside from the fact that Krauthammer is borrowing a phrase from apologists for apartheid South Africa (e.g., Thomas Sowell, Chicago Tribune, 8/17/85), he really ought to be aware (thanks to the "Palestine Papers" leaked via Al-Jazeera) that the United States has demanded that Palestine not hold elections--threatening to cut off all aid if they did so (Guardian, 1/24/11).

Right-wing pundits have come out vociferously against the idea that they, their colleagues and the political movement they identify with have anything to answer for in the wake of the Tucson massacre.

David Brooks (New York Times, 1/11/11) asserted that "the evidence before us suggests that [shooting suspect Jared] Loughner was locked in a world far removed from politics as we normally understand it," rejecting as "vicious charges" the notion that the gunman "unleashed his rampage because he was incited by the violent rhetoric of the Tea Party, the anti-immigrant movement and Sarah Palin." George Will (Washington Post, 1/11/11) bitterly denounced the "political opportunism" of "charlatans" who subscribe to the "superstition that all behavior can be traced to some diagnosable frame of mind that is a product of promptings from the social environment." Charles Krauthammer (Washington Post, 1/12/11) insisted that "there is no evidence that he was responding to anything, political or otherwise, outside of his own head," marveling that those who suggest otherwise would make a charge "so reckless, so scurrilous and so unsupported by evidence."

It's comforting to think that evil-doers exist in a vacuum, and the evil that they do has no relation to anyone else.  Dismissing Loughner as a lone nut, however, is much more difficult when one considers the startling number of incidents of political violence in the last few years. From a lengthy list of violent events and reckless rhetoric compiled by the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, I've excerpted the cases that involved gunfire or other overtly deadly acts; the complete timeline includes numerous other episodes in which police disrupted violent plans before they were carried out:

July 27, 2008--Jim Adkisson shoots and kills two people at a progressive church in Knoxville, Tennessee, wounding two. Adkisson calls it "a symbolic killing" because he really "wanted to kill…every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg's book," but was unable to gain access to them....

April 4, 2009--Neo-Nazi Richard Poplawski shoots and kills three police officers responding to a 911 call to his home in Pittsburgh. His friend Edward Perkovic tells reporters that Poplawski feared “the Obama gun ban that’s on its way” and “didn’t like our rights being infringed upon.” Perkovic also commented that Poplawski carried out the shooting because “if anyone tried to take his firearms, he was gonna stand by what his forefathers told him to do."...

April 25, 2009--Joshua Cartwright, 28, a member of the Florida National Guard, shoots and kills two Okaloosa County sheriff's deputies attempting to arrest him on a domestic abuse charge. Cartwright is killed in an enusing gun battle with police. Cartwright's wife reports that he was "severely disturbed" that Barack Obama had been elected president. Okaloosa County Sheriff Edward Spooner states that Cartrwight was "interested in militia groups and weapons training."...

May 31, 2009--Scott P. Roeder shoots and kills Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider, in the foyer of Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas. The FBI lists Roeder as a member of the Montana Freemen, a radical anti-government group. In April 1996, he had been pulled over in Topeka, Kansas, for driving with a homemade license plate.  Police found a military-style rifle, ammunition, a blasting cap, a fuse cord, a one-pound can of gunpowder, and two 9-volt batteries in his car....

June 10, 2009--James W. von Brunn, a convicted felon and a “hardcore Neo-Nazi,” walks into the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and shoots and kills a security guard. Von Brunn believed that Western civilization was going to be replaced with a “ONE WORLD ILLUMINATI GOVERNMENT” that would “confiscate private weapons” in order to accomplish its goals....

July 13, 2009--Gilbert Ortez, Jr. kills a police deputy in Chambers County, Texas, with an assault rifle. Police were responding to reports that Ortez or his wife had fired shots at utility workers in the area. Police searching Ortez's mobile home after a 10-hour standoff find more than 100 explosive devices; Nazi drawings and extremist literature; and several additional firearms....

December 23, 2009--Warren "Gator" Taylor takes three people hostage at a federal post office in Wytheville, Virginia. He is armed with four guns, including a .40-caliber Glock pistol, despite a criminal record that includes convictions for lewd and lascivious behavior with a 13-year-old and attempted second-degree murder (Taylor shot his ex-wife three times in a parking lot in 1993). Taylor fires at least three rounds before the stand-off ends, including one at the station's fleeing postmaster. One of Taylor's hostages reports that he was angry about taxes and "the government taking over the right to bear arms."...

February 18, 2010--Joseph Stack of Austin, Texas, flies a single-engine plane into an office building containing nearly 200 IRS employees, killing one and wounding 13. In a suicide note, Stack lays out his grievances with the federal tax agency, stating, "The law 'requires' a signature on the bottom of a tax filing; yet no one can say truthfully that they understand what they are signing; if that's not 'duress' than what is. If this is not the measure of a totalitarian regime, nothing is ... Violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer."...

March 4, 2010--John Patrick Bedell, a California resident, travels to Arlington, Virginia, and opens fire on police officers at the entrance to the Pentagon. Bedell is armed with two semiautomatic firearms and "many [ammunition] magazines." Bedell injures two officers before he is killed by return fire. Reports reveal Bedell to be a Truther who believed that the U.S. government had been taken over by a criminal organization in a 1963 coup. In an Internet posting, he writes, "This organization, like so many murderous governments throughout history, would see the sacrifice of thousands of its citizens, in an event such as the September 11 attacks, as a small cost in order to perpetuate its barbaric control."...

March 23, 2010--After Mike Troxel of the Lynchburg Tea Party and Nigel Coleman of the Danville Tea Party post the home address of the brother of Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA) and urge supporters to "drop by," someone deliberately cuts a propane gas line at the house. Rep. Perriello is targeted by the Tea Party activists because of his vote in favor of health care reform. Perriello's brother and his wife have four children under the age of eight....

April 7, 2010--Brody James Whitaker, 37, is apprehended and arrested on charges including two counts of aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer, aggravated fleeing, and attempting to elude. The charges stem from an incident on March 25, 2010 in which police attempted to pull Whitaker over for a traffic violation on I-75 in Sumter County, Florida. Whitaker led officers on a high-speed chase, fired shots at them from a 9mm handgun and escaped capture. During his arraignment hearing, Whitaker questions the authority of the judge and states, "I am a sovereign. I am not an American citizen." ...

May 20, 2010--Jerry Kane, Jr., 45, and his son Joseph Kane, 16, fatally shoot two Arkansas police officers with AK-47 assault rifles during a routine traffic stop on Interstate 40 in West Memphis. The Kanes are killed during an exchange of gunfire with police in a Walmart parking lot 90 minutes later. Jerry Kane, an Ohio resident and anti-government activist, had a long history with police and had recently spent three days in jail for driving with an expired license plate and no seat belt. Kane considered himself a "sovereign citizen" and ran a business that centered on debt-avoidance scams....

July 18, 2010--California Highway Patrol officers arrest Byron Williams, 45, after a shootout on I-580 in which more than 60 rounds are fired. Officers had pulled Williams over in his pick-up for speeding and weaving in and out of traffic when he opened fire on them with a handgun and a long gun. Williams, a convicted felon, is shot several times, but survives because he is wearing body armor. Williams, a convicted felon, reveals that he was on his way to San Francisco to "start a revolution" by killing employees of the ACLU and Tides Foundation. Williams' mother says her son was angry at "Left-wing politicians" and upset by "the way Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items."...

July 30, 2010--Camp Hill prison guard Raymond Peake, 64, is charged with robbery and the murder of Todd Getgen. Peake allegedly shot Getgen to death at a local shooting range and stole Getgen's custom, silenced AR-15 rifle. Investigators follow Peake to a storage unit when they find three firearms: Getgen's AR-15 rifle, a scoped Remington rifle that had been reported stolen from the range in May, and a second AR-15 rifle. Thomas Tuso is also arrested and charged with conspiracy, receiving stolen property and other crimes. Peake tells police that he and Tuso had been stealing guns "for the purpose of overthrowing the federal government."...

August 17, 2010--Patrick Gray Sharp, 29, opens fire on the Department of Public Safety in McKinney, Texas, and unsuccessfully attempts to ignite gasoline and ammonium nitrate in a trailer hitched to his truck. Sharp is armed with an assault rifle, a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol, and a 12-gauge shotgun. He is killed after an exchange of gunfire with police arriving on the scene. Miraculously, no one else is hurt. Sharp's roommate, Eric McClellan describes him as "a great guy" and states, "We're Texans. We have a right to bear arms."...

September 1, 2010--James Jay Lee, 43, takes hostages at the Discovery Communications building in Silver Spring, Maryland, while armed with two starter pistols and four improvised explosive devices. After pointing a gun at one of the hostages, he is shot and killed by police. Lee, a radical environmental activist, had previously issued 11 demands through a webpage that Discovery was to meet "immediately." The demands involved the content of programming on the Discovery Channel. Lee had also declared on his MySpace page, "It's time for REVOLUTION!!!"...

October 22, 2010--Texas Department of Corrections officers searching for a missing person, Gill Clements, 69, are confronted by a neighbor while on Clements' property in Henderson County. Howard Tod Granger, 46, points an AK-47 semiautomatic assault rifle at one of the officers, who recalls, "He told us to get off the property or he would kill us all." Later that afternoon, officers return to Granger's home with a search warrant and an armored vehicle filled with 13 SWAT members. Granger opens fire on the vehicle, discharging at least 30 rounds before authorities shoot and kill him. Police find guns and "many rounds of ammunition" in Granger's house. They also find the body of Clements, buried in a shallow grave on Granger's property....

January 8, 2011--Jared Lee Loughner, 22, shoots U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) and 19 others at a "Congress in Your Corner" event at a Safeway supermarket in Tucson, Arizona. He kills six, including federal Judge John Roll, and wounds 14, including Giffords, who is shot in the head. Loughner has an extensive history of mental illness and substance abuse, yet is able to purchase two handguns and a high-capacity ammunition magazine legally at Sportsman's Warehouse on November 30, 2010. In a YouTube video posted in December 2010, Loughner states, "You don’t have to accept the federalist laws.... Nonetheless, read the United States of America's Constitution to apprehend all of the current treasonous laws."

These individuals no doubt have a range of relationships to reality, and their ideologies may likewise vary from Tea Party orthodoxy to idiosyncratic conspiracy mania. (One person on the list appears to be a genuine ecoterrorist.) But it's hard to deny that this seems like a remarkable amount of political violence in a little more than two-and-a-half years. (This impression is bolstered statistically by reports that the Secret Service has had to deal with a 400 percent increase in threats against the president, that U.S. Marshals are facing double the number of threats against judges and prosecutors, and that Capitol Police found that threats against congressmembers tripled in the first quarter of 2010.)

Even more strikingly, this violence corresponds to a period that has seen a major change in the boundaries of political rhetoric from both pundits and politicians. A major media figures like Glenn Beck (Fox News, 2/20/09) can now fantasize about "citizen militias in the South and West taking up arms against the U.S. government"--and he could declare that government officials bent on forcibly vaccinating his children are going to "meet Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson." People with regular slots on major networks didn't use to talk this way. Nor did major-party Senate candidates declare that "people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies." (See the Coalition's complete list for many other examples of media and political figures evoking violence in explicit, non-metaphorical statements.)

People who insist that the Tucson massacre has nothing to do with any of this are engaged in a desperate and dangerous denial.

Newsweek's Evan Thomas visited Germany recently, and came away thinking the United States is headed for some serious trouble. The country is falling apart--polarized, susceptible to populist demagoguery and so on. Forces on both sides are to blame; they're not all bad ("I think the Tea Partiers, despite their contradictions, are not all wrong about Big Government," he writes), but some should be singled out for criticism:

Cable-TV and talk-radio personalities and bloggers have risen up to speak for the people. But as they pander for clicks and ratings, their standards of factual accuracy are often low. This is not by any means just a right-wing phenomenon. As my friend Charles Krauthammer points out, it was an article of faith on the left that George W. Bush deliberately lied about WMD to get us into the Iraq War. Never mind a complete absence of evidence.

Wait--did he just cite Charles Krauthammer in an appeal for rigorous factual analysis? Because that would be funny!

The idea that Bush never "lied" requires one to adhere to a weird definition of lying. By any reasonable standard, Bush made an array of charges about Iraq that were false;  some he should have known were false, since the administration was rejecting intelligence that did not conform to its desired conclusion. And the Downing Street memo revealed that the British thought the Bush administration was determined to go to war no matter what: "The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," as the memo put it.  But that's not a lie, right?

Thomas thinks that what is needed is less of this Internet-fueled inaccuracy and more old-fashioned, Evan Thomas-style journalism--though he worries it may be too late:

But the old and weary (and increasingly cowed) mainstream media, of which I have been a charter member for more than 30 years, may not be as successful as it used to be at exposing the sort of distortions that can fuel mindless rage. Whether those distortions come from the far right or far left, the consequences could be disastrous: a protectionist who sets out to shield workers from foreign competition and wrecks the free-trade regimen that has made America prosper; a law-and-order vigilante who comes to office after a terrorist attack with a program to suspend cherished individual liberties to keep America “safe”; a soak-the-rich populist who kills economic growth in the name of helping the little guy.

Set aside for a minute the idea that a "protectionist" who critiques "free trade" agreements or a populist who raises taxes on the wealthy are disasters in the making (unless the media summon the power to stop such creeps). Let's talk about something already happened--like, say, the Iraq War. A reckless administration, determined to invade another country no matter what, cited false intelligence; surely old-fashioned reporters like Evan Thomas rose to stop this madness? Nope. They wrote things like this:

Saddam could decide to take Baghdad with him. One Arab intelligence officer interviewed by Newsweek spoke of "the green mushroom" over Baghdad--the modern-day caliph bidding a grotesque bio-chem farewell to the land of the living alongside thousands of his subjects as well as his enemies. Saddam wants to be remembered. He has the means and the demonic imagination. It is up to U.S. armed forces to stop him before he can achieve notoriety for all time.

Well, at least he's not a blogger accusing Bush of lying. That'd be really irresponsible.

Responding to a "stupid" critique of his May 1 column defending the use of terror in "ticking timebomb" scenarios, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer (5/15/09) asserts that there has too been a real-life example of such a situation:

On October 9, 1994, Israeli Cpl. Nachshon Waxman was kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists. The Israelis captured the driver of the car. He was interrogated with methods so brutal that they violated Israel's existing 1987 interrogation guidelines, which themselves were revoked in 1999 by the Israeli Supreme Court as unconscionably harsh. The Israeli prime minister who ordered this enhanced interrogation (as we now say) explained without apology: "If we'd been so careful to follow the [1987] Landau Commission [guidelines], we would never have found out where Waxman was being held."

Who was that prime minister? Yitzhak Rabin, Nobel Peace laureate. The fact that Waxman died in the rescue raid compounds the tragedy but changes nothing of Rabin's moral calculus.

Krauthammer's column leaves out a key point of his argument, which is that Hamas was threatening to kill the captive unless Israel released 200 prisoners--that's the ticking time bomb.

It's certainly true that the fact that the Israeli prisoner was killed does not change Rabin's, or Krauthammer's, moral calculus.  Because the calculation is this: The value of the life of one individual from a group we identify with so far outweighs the human rights of a disfavored group that even the chance of saving him justifies torture.

Hamas made the same calculation from the opposite perspective: For them, threatening the life of one Israeli was worth it if it meant a chance of freedom for 200 Palestinians. And though Krauthammer is sarcastic about people who charge him with "moral deficiencies," I don't think his pro-torture ethics give him much ability to explain to them why they're wrong.

In his latest Salon blog entry (5/1/09, ad-viewing required), Glenn Greenwald displays his find of "a perfect illustration of how severely our political spectrum has shifted in the last two decades and how depraved and extremist our political and media classes have become"--one quote of the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer rebutting those who "believe you never torture. Ever":

Torture is an impermissible evil. Except under two circumstances. The first is the ticking time bomb. . . . The second exception to the no-torture rule is the extraction of information from a high-value enemy in possession of high-value information likely to save lives. . . .

as compared to the text from Article II/IV of the "Convention Against Torture, signed and championed" by none other than Ronald Reagan:

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture. . .  Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offenses under its criminal law.

That Ronald Reagan's ideas "are ones that are now--in the view of our dominant media narrative--the hallmarks of The Hard Left" is clearly demonstrated by the fact that

Reagan's explicit view that the concept of "universal jurisdiction" permits signatory nations (such as Spain) to prosecute torturers from other countries (such as the U.S.) is now considered so fringe that it's almost impossible to find someone in mainstream American debates willing to advocate it.

A January 27 New York Times story, "The Epidemic That Wasn't," brought the news that researchers following children prenatally exposed to cocaine have found "the long-term effects of such exposure on children's brain development and behavior appear relatively small" and are "less severe than those of alcohol and are comparable to those of tobacco."

Though the Times makes it sound like breaking news, the fact is many reputable people disbelieved the whole "crack baby" phenomenon from the beginning: Even Dr. Ira Chasnoff, whose 1985 study spurred much of the early coverage, was lamenting as long ago as 1992 that medical research was being misused: "It's interesting, it sells newspapers and it perpetuates the us-vs.-them idea."

Did it ever. The despicable role played by the press corps is why the Times story feels not just too late but too little. The paper reports "there were widespread fears that prenatal exposure to [crack cocaine] would produce a generation of severely damaged children," and goes on to cite inflammatory headlines as if they were merely reports on those fears, rather than the means of their creation. The truth is there would be no "crack baby" storyline if not for the zeal with which many in the press corps seized upon limited, qualified medical research as an excuse to at least entertain the idea of writing off huge numbers of overwhelmingly black and poor children. (Though the research pertained to cocaine in all forms, the story was always about crack, wasn't it?)

It wasn't a medical researcher who wrote, "The inner-city crack epidemic is now giving birth to the newest horror: a bio-underclass, a generation of physically damaged cocaine babies whose biological inferiority is stamped at birth"; it was the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer (Washington Post, 7/30/89). Krauthammer had American Enterprise Institute media darling Douglas Besharov to thank for the term "bio-underclass", and Besharov wasn't shy about spelling out the wished-for social repercussions: "This is not stuff that Head Start can fix.... Whether it is 5 percent or 15 percent of the black community, it is there." Being violently wrong doesn't appear to have dimmed Besharov's media star; nor should we hold our breath for any apologies from Krauthammer for telling readers, "The dead babies may be the lucky ones."

The saddest part: Early on, researchers recognized that the social stigma attached to being identified as a "crack baby" could far outweigh any biological impact. The Times piece underscores that, with a source who says, "Society's expectations of the children and reaction to the mothers are completely guided not by the toxicity but by the social meaning" of the drug.

But it seems as though journalists are no more likely now than they were then to examine what it is about their own practices that would drive them to perpetuate such a "social meaning" when it was not supported by science and when its potential effects were so devastating.

Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer continues to support Israel's assault on Gaza in today's paper (1/9/09). He displays a remarkably odd notion of what a cease fire is for, citing the lessons of Lebanon as a cautionary tale:

The U.N.-mandated disarmament of Hezbollah in Lebanon is a well-known farce. Not only have foreign forces not stopped Hezbollah's massive rearmament, their very presence makes it impossible for Israel to take any preventive military action, lest it accidentally hit a blue-helmeted Belgian crossing guard.

In other words, the Lebanese cease-fire is problematic because it is currently preventing an outbreak of violence.

The Associated Press reported on December 27 that "thousands of Gazans received Arabic-language cell-phone messages from the Israeli military, urging them to leave homes where militants might have stashed weapons."

In his latest column (1/2/09), Charles Krauthammer pointed to that report to prove just how obvious it is that Israel is the moral actor in this battle of good and evil:

Some geopolitical conflicts are morally complicated. The Israel/Gaza war is not. It possesses a moral clarity not only rare but excruciating. Israel is so scrupulous about civilian life that, risking the element of surprise, it contacts enemy noncombatants in advance to warn them of approaching danger.

Here's what Amnesty International (12/29/08) has to say about it:

Compounding the atmosphere of fear resulting from the Israeli bombardments, Israeli forces have been sending seemingly random telephone messages to many inhabitants of Gaza telling them to leave their homes because of imminent air strikes against their houses. Such messages have been received by residents of multi-storey apartment building, causing panic not only for those who received the calls but for all their neighbours. Such practice was widely used by Israeli forces both in Gaza and in Lebanon in 2006, but has not been reported since. The threatening calls seem to aim to spread fear among the civilian population, as in most cases no air strikes were carried out against the buildings. If this is the purpose, rather than to give effective warning, this practice violates international law and must end immediately.

Anthony DiMaggio finds (ZNet, 10/19/08) "the massive attention surrounding ACORN" as much evidence of "media racism as it is their class prejudice":

In danger of losing its eight year hold on the Presidency, the Republican Party has become increasingly desperate in its attacks on poor and minority groups, who have registered in increasingly large numbers this election year. The attacks on ACORN must be understood within the context of this enfranchisement of dispossessed groups....

Media discussions of ACORN have predictably followed the talking points issued by Republican Party leaders to Fox News and right-wing radio.... The uniformity of conservative attacks on ACORN has been rather impressive, although hardly intellectual or informative. The editors at the Washington Times lambasted ACORN for being "either co-opted by an outside group bent on committing massive voter fraud to rig this election."... Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer draws attention to "Barack Obama's long-standing relationship with the left-wing vote-fraud specialist ACORN."... Radio personalities such as Rush Limbaugh, Dennis Prager and Michael Medved and Fox News commentators such as Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity have relentlessly emphasized the ACORN issue in their programs.

Aside from the fact that "there's only one problem with this narrative--none of it's true," DiMaggio is impressed that "the right-wing foot soldiers in the media, who couldn't have cared less what ACORN was doing months ago let alone describe what the acronym stood for, have now become independent experts on the organization's negligence and duplicity in destroying democracy."

Listen to FAIR's latest radio show CounterSpin: Lori Minnite on ACORN and Vote Fraud (10/17/08)