It is kind of entertaining watching Greg Sargent catch Stephen Hayes in any number of lies, but why bother? The guy wrote The Connection: How al Qaeda’s Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America, over 200 pages of nonsense. He clearly has a limitless capacity to make things up.
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Mary
What do you mean, why bother, John? Greg Sargent taking Hayes and Cheney apart at the Washington Post is immeasurably valuable. You and I may know that Stephen Hayes is a hack propagandist but not everyone knows and people forget. Besides, Greg’s work is important enough that Hayes is now going after him personally. All hail, Greg Sargent, a brave and fearless reporter.
c u n d gulag
I finally realized now why I can’t find any of the books by Conservative writers in the Library or book stores.
And it’s due to my own supidity.
I keep looking for them in the “Fiction” section.
General Winfield Stuck
When you have an audience of millions, “who want to believe” and are willing to shuck out 20 to 30 bucks for the next list of lies confirming liberals are Satan’s Sidekicks, then it becomes easy for these clowns to make things up.
I expect any day a wingnut epic penned from Coulter or Hannity called Culture of Death Libtards and What REALLY Happened to Gramms
Comrade Jake
Right. So I assume this means he’ll be booked on The Today Show relatively soon?
wilfred
Sargent writes:
That’s it, isn’t it? That’s their entire way of doing things. But what does ‘built into our discourse’ actually mean?
MattF
But now I’m actually concerned– Hayes is asserting that Cheney didn’t personally torture anyone. Sooo, uum, therefore,… Just wondering… has anyone checked out the basement of the Vice President’s home within the past year or so?
jon
MattF,
Cheney’s basement has a cage in it. In the cage is a box. In the box is a man in a rubber suit furiously typing pro-Cheney propaganda. That man is Stephen Hayes, though to Cheney he is only known as “The Gimp”.
kay
I’m afraid that the new theme is this: Obama’s national security team (which includes Justice) can’t function to “keep us safe” when Holder is investigating team members.
Which takes you right to the next question: what agency or entity may then police the CIA without some morale/trust-related potential degradation to team spirit-national security? No one, right? Who’s left?
demkat620
Why bother?
I’ve been wondering that for a while. Showing them to be liars just makes the base believe them more, the media to show “both sides” of the controversy and the liberals screaming to the heavens.
For Jeebus’ sake, Nooners just went on Morrning Joke and had the nerve to ask “What happened during Katrina? Why did that city breakdown?”
Honestly, by the end of next week they will have declared that Obama was president during Katrina and the media will play along.
MikeJ
While it might not do any good to debunk their lies, I think it would do harm to not do so.
Woody
The estimable Mr. Twain once remarked (paraphrasing) that the lie had already circled the globe before the truth was even out of bed.
The Murkin media system–i.e., the 24-hour News Cycle–appears to have been crafted with the promulgation of the “Big Lie” in mind. Were I a propagandist desirous of utilizing the (historically undiminished) powers of the Big Lie to spread my lines, and the 24-Hour News-Cycle didn’t exist, I’d have to invent it, because it guarantees the frequent repetition of lies. Even if they are rebutted, they are repeated. And repetition, as both Hitler and Bernays both knew, makes things “true” for the casual news reader.
geg6
@jon:
LOL, thanks for channeling the Rude Pundit. I love his Cheney stuff and this comment sounds like him without all the “spooge” and “fisting.”
Bernie
Comarde Jake nails it. The really shameful thing about Hayes is not that he is a blatant liar and hack, but that he is treated by the MSM as a thoughtful and respectful commentator on issues ranging from national security to domestic policy. It is for this reason that he needs to mocked and riduculed over and over again until someone in the media finally takes this jackass to ask for his bullshit (preferable in my lifetime).
The Grand Panjandrum
Why bother to wipe your ass after taking a dump? You know you’re going to taken another one tomorrow.
someguy
You need to bother because Hayes is a diversionary tactic.
The right figures that if it can make enough of a stink about Iraq, yellowcake and Joe Wilson’s mint tea, that nobody will look at the real issue, which is that Bush could have easily prevented 9/11 by reading his daily intelligence briefing, instead of reading My Pet Goat. Admittedly, My Pet Goat was more appropriate to his reading skill levels, but still. Bush knew we were about to be attacked, and did nothing.
asiangrrlMN
Why bother? A slow, cumulative effect. A year ago, no one would have even countered the first piece of bullshit from Stephen Hayes, let alone the following excrement. I am a tad bit more heartened today than I was a year ago that maybe, just maybe, truth will out. I may be dead by that time, but that matters little.
Xanthippas
Stephen Hayes gives hagiography a bad name.
SGEW
Mary, above, said it first and best:
You can’t let these people keep on getting away with it. If Greg Sargent was at the WaPo back when The Connection was published, maybe so many people wouldn’t still believe that there was an Iraq/Osama connection.
. . . okay, maybe not. But we’ve gotta keep trying, right?
Chad N Freude
Cheney didn’t actually torture anyone himself.
Hitler didn’t actually gas anyone himself.
Since Cheney is innocent of responsibility, so must Hitler be.
eric k
I wonder how much they pay him to keep going out to be the whipping boy, I remember last year sometime he got skewered by Jon Stewart and then the same week Bill Maher and Tim Robbins butchered him on Real Time.
Maher was ready to counter his Iraq-Al Queda BS with the quotes from the 9/11 commission report and Tim Robbins simply said something like if you keep repeating the same lies they don’t become true they are still lies.