Monday, October 22, 2007

PERFIDY OR STUPIDITY

Senator Sherrod Brown’s signature on a letter worth $51,222? I would never have thought so but on a pro rata basis that is what his signature brought on an Ebay auction. Sherrod Brown was one of the 41 Democrat signatories on the letter smearing Rush Limbaugh that was sold on Ebay for over 2 million dollars; obviously the most highly priced document ever sold containing Senatorial signatures. Unfortunately for Sen. Brown, Democrat majority leader Harry Reid and Democrat presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama, the sale of their letter has been a terrible fiasco for them, exposing the mendacity and partisanship of Senate Democrats willing to use the Senate for an attack upon a private citizen and a blatant attempt to impose censorship on the airwaves even if it means using false information and distortion of facts in order to give them political gain.
Sen. Brown’s participation in this saga that began as a smear, rolled into a slander on the Senate floor and then was memorialized as an ignominious libel in the infamous letter sold on Ebay, is regrettable. It shows how unbridled partisan politics can turn a smear campaign into farce and then, when exposed, evolve into a disaster and humiliation for the perpetrators
With total disregard for truth and fact, Sen. Reid took the unprecedented step of using the Senate floor, for the first time in history, to vilify a private citizen, Rush Limbaugh, a conservative radio talk show host. It appears that Sen. Reid was fed a false story by Media Matters, an organization that Hillary Clinton helped create, and that is devoted to partisan disinformation to assist Democrat candidates. Media Matters circulated the story that Rush called soldiers who disagreed with how the Iraq war was being conducted "phoney soldiers". In a sign of how policy, decisions and laws are made in Washington, Sen. Reid swallowed the bait and took to the floor in the Senate and in hysterical tones denounced Mr. Limbaugh and called on his employer to censor him and curb his speech. A simple checking of facts would reveal that the charge was a deliberate falsehood using doctored quotes and spread by Media Matters but Sen. Reid could not be bothered to check the program transcript or have any of his many minions or flunkies type a few keystrokes into their computers.
As Sen. Reid finished his rant on the Senate floor, he called for the Senate to censure Mr. Limbaugh, a private citizen, and for the Senate to send an official letter, signed by Sherrod Brown and the others, to the radio network that carries Mr. Limbaugh’s program demanding that they censor him and his views. Of course the actual facts were wildly different from those contained in Sen. Reid’s letter. Mr. Limbaugh is well known as a supporter of our nations troops and had actually denounced a phoney soldier, Jessie Mac Beth, who had been convicted of impersonating a soldier and who was relating stories to a gullible media that he and others had committed atrocities in Iraq, a place he had never been. It seemed a foolproof plan to have some high political theater on the floor of the Senate and to take down an ideological political opponent.
But the foolproof ploy proved to be foolhardy. Mr. Limbaugh immediately challenged their falsehoods and challenged Sen. Reid to come on the air and debate the facts. He also obtained the smear letter containing the original signatures of the senators from his employer and proceeded to place the letter up for auction on Ebay. When the bidding stopped the winning bid was $2,100,100. All of the proceeds of the auction go, not to Mr. Limbaugh, but to the Marine Corps Law Enforcement Foundation, a charitable group that help widows and orphans of Marines and Law Enforcement Officers killed in the line of duty. Mr. Limbaugh then matched the winning bid with a gift of the same amount, $2,100,100, to the charity. So the foolish posturing of the senators did some real good by raising over $4,200,200 for the families of heroes; even if it did humiliate the Senators and expose their venality.
Mr. Limbaugh has also challenged the Senators to match the winning bid and his donation. Based upon forty-one Senators signing the letter, according to my math that means each ought to donate $51,222 to the Marine Corps Law Enforcement Foundation.
In the end one must wonder if it was perfidy or stupidity that caused the senators to send the letter. Perfidy if they knew what they were doing was false or stupidity if they are so gullible to not check facts.
Sherrod Brown is your check in the mail?