Do you think Neal Boortz is aware of the ironic impression he creates when he says stuff like, "COME ON, FOLKS. SHOW A LITTLE RESPONSIBILITY HERE", and goes on to show that he is quite capable of fact-checking an e-mail chain letter. Shouldn't it occur to him to fact-check his own column? Wouldn't that be "showing responsibility?"

I'll have to give him credit. He broke a rule and told the truth today. He said that Howard Dean has flip-flopped on (gasp!) the relative importance of the Iowa caucus. Actually, the tapes in question document a pretty bad gaffe, and a pretty mediocre flip-flop. Dean will (rightly) pay a political price for the gaffe. I thank goodness that this is the worst the opposition can come up with on Dean without making stuff up. That's good news.

The bad news is the opposition has made it clear that they cannot run against Dean's (or Clark's) policies and will be making the desperation move of running a campaign of character assasination. "Hey," they seem to be saying, "Everybody in Vermont thinks Dean did a great job, but we found one sherriff in the state who thinks he's a little bit two-faced." This is ironic, too. Dean and Clark are politicians, so they surely have some character flaws. The irony is discovered when you look at the careers of the people who are running the smear campaign. Neal Boortz, for instance, can't let a day go by without at least misleading his readers (I assume that would go for his listeners, too).

I've noticed something about Boortz. Sometimes, when his source is the Weekly Standard or World Net Daily, he will divulge to his audience where he got a piece of information. Other times, he won't tell. I've finally discovered the pattern. Can you guess? The times that he refuses to divulge his sources are the times when they include information he doesn't want you to find out about.

For instance: today he says this of the Howard Dean tapes, "That should make good fodder for the first debate if he is the nominee. He also lamented in February 1999, regarding Palestinian terrorist Yasser Arafat, that 'The next great tragedy is going to be Arafat's passing, believe it or not.' Oh joy..just the man we need in the oval office.

Now, why didn't he give you the source of this quote? Because he doesn't want you to know the rest of what was said:

I could play the Neal Boortz 'lying-sack-of-canine-excrement' game with this, if I wanted to. See, Dean thinks Hamas is worse than Arafat. The page from the 'lying-sack' playbook is to take the fact that Neal is bitching about (part of) what Howard Dean said and extrapolate the conclusion that Neal must disagree with Dean on this point. He must therefore think that Hamas is better than Arafat, we would spin. We would then state as fact that "Neal Boortz doesn't think Hamas is all that bad." And we would repeat it daily until the election. But we are the good guys, so we won't.

Oh yeah, one more thing from the tapes: Dean really dented himself way back in the year 2000 when he apparently believed, along with 49% of the electorate, that "George Bush ... is in his soul a moderate." (You would only find out that this was the year 2000 if you read the source.) That's another reason he didn't tell you the source.

I must reiterate. I love it that the right can't get traction on anything. They can't find any real chinks in Dean's Vermont record, can't be taken seriously in their attempts to smear Clark's character, and when they finally find a point to try to make, its usually something we are pretty clearly right about. Perhaps the most illuminating thing ever said by a radio republican operative is this, from today's Nuze:

There you have it folks. Neal Boortz actually thinks its wrong to change your position based on compelling evidence. It must be much better to ignore the evidence, and just read off the talking points handed to you from on high.

That's your free press at its best, folks.
Today's Nuze, Today
Today's Nuze, Tomorrow

P.S. Hell, one more thing: Anybody else think its funny Boortz is ready to pronounce the whole Democratic Party splintered because Steve Murphy (of the Gephardt Who? camp) decided to throw a low-ball? I like seeing them desparate.