Much ado about nothing

Republicans and conservative media are in full attack mode over Teresa Heinz Kerry telling a "journalist" to "shove it" and the media is buying it, hook, line and sinker.

Considering “Vice President” Dick Cheney recently told a senator to ”GFY” this is much ado about anything, unless the Republicans are successful with their chant “Act like an American, not like a Republican.”

The person who asked the question was NOT a reporter but the editorial page editor of the conservative Pittsburgh Tribune-Review which has a mean-spirited editorial page which has attacked the Heinz family in the past.

Mrs. Heinz Kerry in her speech said -"We need to turn back some of the creeping, un-Pennsylvanian and sometimes un-American traits that are coming into some of our politics." The “writer” repeatedly pressed her about what she meant by "un-American activity."
"You said something I didn't say, now shove it," Heinz Kerry said.

So Heinz Kerry said “un-American traits.” The writer claimed she said “un-American activity.”

Is that the same thing? Was she right in pointing out he changed her quote and then refused to answer for a quote she didn’t make?

The New York Daily News pointed out that the paper - which in the mid-1990s notoriously promoted the theory that Clinton White House lawyer Vince Foster's suicide was really a sinister murder plot to protect the political interests of Bill and Hillary - is owned by reclusive right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. Richard Mellon Scaife is behind the “newspaper,” and James Carville in 1999 called him "the archconservative godfather in [a] heavily funded war against [Clinton]."

As one web site wrote In his 2003 book Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them), Al Franken said that the abusive tone of rightwing zealots like Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter can be traced back to Scaife, and in particular to one episode in 1981 when Scaife verbally assaulted a reporter. When the reporter, Karen Rothmeyer of the Columbia Journalism Review, asked Scaife about his funding of conservative groups, he replied, "You fucking communist cunt, get out of here." Franken writes that Scaife "went on to tell her that she was ugly and that her teeth were 'terrible.' Of Ms. Rothmeyer's mother, who was not present, he said, 'She's ugly, too.'"

I suppose Mrs. Kerry should be nice to everyone, including those who hate and unfairly attack her. The key to whether this incident hurt the Kerry’s is whether most people will learn the truth of the incident. Unfortunately, based on how the media acted in 2000 during their “War on Gore,” I expect only a few people will know the full story.