Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall

Who's the biggest whore of all?

Zowie, it's Howie!

This is beyond the pale even for the illustrious Kurtz. Although this latest outrage has been excerpted all over the place, it deserves a prominent place on this blog. Some lowlights:

Bush's "lost weekend":

"I've seen a couple of references to Bush's National Guard service, but since we never got a definitive explanation as to whether he was absent without leave, it's hard to keep pounding that as an issue."

"I think it's entirely appropriate for the media to talk about Bush's Guard service when he stages an event on an aircraft carrier. I just don't think it delegitimizes anything he does [well, Howie, you can't delegitimize something that's not legitimate in the first place], just as I didn't feel Clinton's avoidance of military service undermined his tenure as commander in chief (though it did contribute to his strained relations with the military). [Fact, Howie: What Clinton did was completely legal and millions of young men took student deferrals, but what Bush did, or appears to have done since his unscrubbed military records are NOT available to the public, was clearly illegal.] Much more troubling, in my view, is the way that television, particularly cable, turned Bush's excellent adventure at sea into a 24-hour campaign commercial, complete with gushing commentary and endless replays of the landing, as if it were Apollo 11 touching down on the moon [and in that column about Bush's landing, Kurtz referred to the nine Democratic candidates as the "Columbia 9," absolutely offensive in the context of the column]."

Substance abuse, etc.:

"Bush didn't shut off discussion of his youthful irresponsibility; he just refused to talk about it in any detail [distinction without a difference, Howie]. The press was filled with stories questioning what he was trying to hide, examining his youthful [sic] drinking, speculating about whether he used cocaine, questioning his explanation to a Dallas reporter that he could have signed a government application attesting to no drug use in the past 15 years. There was also the story of his DUI charge that broke in the last week of the election. So this was hardly a non-issue."

In spite of the numerous lowlights, this question and answer was interesting:

"Conroe, TX: Do you think it's right for ABC to stage an event like a debate and sit on the copyright? Couldn't this be a disturbing trend of outlets essentially 'canning' news content for their exclusive use? I understand the idea of the 'exclusive' interview is old, but this seems to go well beyond that.

"Kurtz: ABC is hardly the first news organization to do this. CNN and others have staged a number of debates, and when a network goes to the time and expense of doing that, naturally it wants the exclusive rights. The difference here is taht when CNN does it, anyone who has cable can watch. When ABC does it but declines to make it required programming for its affiliates, almost no one gets to watch it live. So perhaps ABC should not have locked up the rights if it wasn't willing to go all the way."

It has to do with the public interest, and ABC clearly violated that trust by having exclusionary rights to something EVERYBODY has the right to see and see live.

As for Kurtz, he should stick with the copying-and-pasting of his daily column. He's worse on a forum.