On
Thursday’s Nightline, ABC co-anchor Terry Moran offered up a
nearly seven-minute-long hit piece on “John McCain 2.0,” about
how the GOP nominee has, according to Moran, dramatically
changed his basic message, his campaign style, his policy
positions and launched a dirty ad campaign.
“The old John McCain repeatedly promised voters a
different kind of campaign — nobler, less nasty, better,” Moran argued.
“That was then, this is now.” After running a clip from an ad
criticizing Obama for voting in favor of sex education for
kindergartners (“called, quote, ‘simply false’ by the non-partisan
Annenberg Center’s FactCheck.org,” Moran scolded), Nightline offered a
condemnatory soundbite from ABC analyst Matthew Dowd: “I think the
McCain campaign wants to have a campaign in the mud.”
Yet
for all its indignation about McCain’s supposedly filthy tactics,
neither Nightline nor any other ABC News program mentioned the new
Spanish-language ad put out by the Obama campaign that blatantly
distorted a two-year old comment from Rush Limbaugh as a way to incite
racial hostility. Targeting “John McCain and his Republican friends” on
the subject of immigration, Obama’s Spanish-speaking narrator began:
“They want us to forget the insults we’ve put up with, the intolerance.”
On the screen appeared the phrase “Cierra tu boca o lárgate!” — “Shut
your mouth or get out!” — next to Limbaugh’s face and name.
It’s a false charge: Limbaugh never suggested illegal
immigrants should shut their mouth or get out. Obama’s dirt-diggers
surely know this because they
found the phrase in a 2006 piece by Limbaugh describing Mexico’s laws
against foreigners: “You don’t have the right to
protest....You’re a foreigner: shut your mouth or get out! And if you
come here illegally, you’re going to jail....That’s how the Mexican
government handles immigrants to their country. Yet Mexicans come here
illegally and protest in our streets!”
ABC’s Moran knew all about Obama’s devious ad — his own
colleague
Jake Tapper detailed the falsehoods in the Obama ad and posted a “fact
check” to his ABC “Political Punch” blog on Wednesday: “Tying
Sen. McCain — especially on the issue of immigration reform — to
Limbaugh is unfair. Limbaugh opposed McCain on that issue....The [‘shut
your mouth’] quote is totally unfair.” But Nightline ignored Tapper’s
reporting of Obama’s slander, choosing instead to air a one-sided slam
on McCain. So much for fairness.
For more, see the
September 22 CyberAlert
