MSNBC's Keith Olbermann delivered another of his “Special Comment” rants on Thursday night -- this one his longest yet, clocking in at just over 11 minutes. Olbermann began the diatribe, which concluded the October 5 Countdown, by saying his topic was “lying,” specifically how President Bush is making false claims about Democrats. Olbermann cited how Bush charged that Democrats “don’t think we ought to be listening to the conversations of terrorists” and “think the best way to protect the American people is wait until we're attacked again.” Maintaining that the accusations are baseless, Olbermann asserted: “A President who comes across as a compulsive liar is nothing less than terrifying.” But by Olbermann's reasoning that since no Democrat has said exactly what Bush asserted when he made the political points about the implications of Democratic positions, no one should be able to accuse Bush of lying about Iraq since he has never said he lied about Iraq.

Olbermann proceeded to allege that Bush “has savaged the very freedoms he claims to be protecting from attack” through his “terrifying attempt to hamstring the fundament of our freedom -- the Constitution -- a triumph for al Qaeda, for which the terrorists could not hope to achieve with a hundred 9/11's.” He accused Bush: "You want to preserve one political party's power. And obviously you will sell this country out, to do it. These are lies about the Democrats, piled atop lies about Iraq, piled atop lies about your preparations for al Qaeda.” Olbermann also denounced Vice President Cheney for how he “lives on, in defiance, and spreads -- around him and before him -- darkness, like some contagion of fear.” Sounds more like Olbermann. (Transcript follows)

Video clip (11:10): Real (8.3 MB at 100 kbps) or Windows Media (7 MB at 81 kbps), plus MP3 audio (2.6 MB)

Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia's Center for Responsive Politics should, by rights, watch his reputation as a nonpartisan observer of the political scene go up in smoke as a result of inserting himself into the George Allen "N-word" controversy. More than that, he is a longtime practitioner of selective outrage at negative campaigning so characteristic of so many 527 Media journalists and the "experts" they go to for quotes.

Specifically in the Allen situation, Sabato claimed that he KNEW Allen used the "N-word," when he himself actually never heard Allen use it.

The Associated Press reported the following on September 26, in part:

Interviewed by ABC's Charles Gibson at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia shortly before receiving, along with former President Clinton, the center's “Liberty Award,” former President George H.W. Bush zinged the New York Times and Bob Woodward. In an excerpt aired on Thursday's World News, Bush 41 fretted how “there's a lot of Bush-bashing” of his son with “a lot of people out there that have nothing good to say.” Bush then marveled: “I can't remember the New York Times ever writing anything positive about our son."

When Gibson raised how Bob Woodward, in his new book about the Iraq war, State of Denial, “quotes Mrs. Bush as having said that you were losing sleep over whether that was the right thing to do, and your feeling that perhaps it was not,” the former President rejected the accuracy of the premise: “In that incident, it was a conversation that Barbara allegedly had with David Boren,” the former Democratic Senator from Oklahoma, “who has sent me a letter saying it didn't take place. That's a Kitty Kelley journalism in my view, and he can get away with it,” Bush regretted, because “he's a very famous journalist.”

We've been here before; the similarities are, well, eerie.

First, the sensational story in the closing weeks of an election, attributed, of course, to an anonymous source. A blogger, William "Wild Bill" Kerr of Passionate America, using clues gleaned from ABC's own website, reveals the name of one of the "victims," and the fact that he was not, as reported by ABC, under 18 at the time of the Instant Message exchange.

On Brian Ross' Blotter blog, someone quietly tries to change the wording of the Foley story to fit the new reality, but is tripped up by the Google cache.

While Democrats and the MSM have revelled in stressing the tough sledding in Iraq, they had been constrained to acknowledge that the mission in Afghanistan - from the overthrow of the Taliban to the fostering of democracy leading to the election of President Karzai to efforts aimed at rebuilding a country mired in medieval poverty - has been largely successful.

But in recent weeks, Democrats and the MSM have sought to paint a more negative portrait of the situation in Afghanistan, culminating in an article in the October 2nd edition of Newsweek "The Rise of Jihadistan."

The article's sub-title states its thesis in these terms: "Five years after the Afghan invasion, the Taliban are fighting back hard, carving out a sanctuary where they—and Al Qaeda's leaders—can operate freely." And in his famously finger-pointing interview with Fox's Chris Wallace, Bill Clinton claimed that "if I were still president, we'd have more than 20,000 troops there trying to kill [Bin Laden]."

Rep. Barney Frank gave an interview to Advocate.com yesterday where he compared gay Republicans in
Congress to "secret Jews".

In what is billed as an Advocate.com exclusive Rep. Franks stated that the Foley scandal will result in a purge of gays from the Republican Party.

What do you think was the role of gay Republicans in all this?

Apparently, Kirk Fordham, Foley's ex–chief of staff and Rep. Thomas Reynolds's chief of staff, is a very active gay Republican [and] also had some role in the hush-up. [As of Wednesday, Fordham is no longer on Reynolds's staff.] There are others who were involved that I can't mention since they aren't out. They are all more like secret Jews.

How do the gay Republicans reconcile their consciences?

A lot of them chose between their gayness and their party. I'm sure the group of gay Republican staffers hid Foley's actions as best they could.

This is a real crisis, since before, gays in the Republican Party were willing to be tolerated, but Republicans will now be more nervous having gay people in positions of power. They have been critical of people who are out and gay—there could be a real purge of gays in the Republican Party now. It's probably just enough for people to be perceived to be gay.

Congressman Barney Frank’s scandalous tolerance of a gay prostitution business operating out of his house, uncovered by the Washington Times in 1989, drew from ABC nowhere near the dramatic amount of attention ABC gave Mark Foley. On the August 25, 1989 World News Tonight, Sam Donaldson noted it just once in passing, a mere 67 words:

"Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank, an acknowledged homosexual, today confirmed that his Washington apartment had been used as a callboy headquarters by a male prostitute for a year and a half until late 1987. Responding to a story in today's Washington Times, Frank said he had hired the prostitute out of his own funds as a personal aide and fired him when he found out what was going on."

USA Today took another swipe at the produce packaging industry in today's Money section.

Reporter Julie Schmit buried an expert in her story who called the industry "superb" at processing vegetables to be safe and germ-free for consumers.

“The industry does a superb job of washing,” said Christine Bruhn of the Center for Consumer
Research at the University of California, Davis.
In fact, said Bruhn, “the bagged product is safer” than washing produce at home that has been purchased unpackaged at the grocery store.

Yet rather than put this point of view near the top of her article, Schimt buried these quotes at the end, long after sounding an alarming tone about the safety of pre-packaged produce.

What did Speaker Hastert know about former Congressman Foley’s lurid communications with a former page, and when did he know it? This is an open question that will be resolved through investigations by the House Ethics Committee and the FBI. Yet before all the facts are known, "The Early Show" continued to clamor for Hastert’s resignation. The "Early Show" has raised the subject of Speaker Hastert resigning in at least two stories in each of the last four days. On Thursday’s program, Hannah Storm spoke with CBS’s idea of a balanced panel-- a Republican and a Democrat who agree that Hastert should resign his position.

In the 7:00 half hour of today’s program, Hannah Storm spoke with Republican strategist Bay Buchanan and Democratic strategist Kiki McLean. Storm focused her first questions to each of her guests on whether Hastert should resign:

Conservatives engage the enemy and our fellow countrymen (the libs) flank us from behind.  Ever see Braveheart?  I really believe we could be heading towards civil war.  Don't let them take your gun~!  If you don't have one, get one!  If you haven't been watching Glenn Beck, you should be.  Mitt Romney is a great candidate for President.  I will say I think we need a stronger strategy on the war in Iraq.  But, I absolutely support taking the fight to the enemy.  I think we ultimately need to take our gloves off while we still can in this war.  When we find hundreds of Taliban leaders in cemeteries, we need to take them out.  Polls say 90% of the world doesn't like us.

Just as PJ Gladnick and I were hypothesizing that Democrats were behind the Mark Foley page scandal, Matt Drudge is reporting this:

According to two people close to former congressional page Jordan Edmund, the now famous lurid AOL Instant Message exchanges that led to the resignation of Mark Foley were part of an online prank that by mistake got into the hands of enemy political operatives, the DRUDGE REPORT can reveal.

According to one Oklahoma source who knows the former page very well, Edmund, a conservative Republican, goaded Foley to type embarrassing comments that were then shared with a small group of young Hill politicos. The prank went awry when the saved IM sessions got into the hands of political operatives favorable to Democrats. This source, an ally of Edmund, also adamantly proclaims that the former page is not a homosexual. The prank scenario was confirmed by a second associate of Edmund.

The news come on the heels that former FBI Chief Louis Freeh has been named to investigate the mess.

When the story broke in July of 1983 on the sexual affairs with House pages by Reps. Daniel Crane and Gerry Studds, ABC did not fuel days of speculation about whether Speaker Tip O’Neill would resign. (Fun fact: when Studds was censured, Speaker O’Neill did not cast a vote. Three Democrats voted against Studds being censured.) By the time Studds ran in a primary re-election campaign in September 1984, ABC aired a report telling the nation that Studds faced only "a strong sense of loyalty" and forgiveness from the voters in Massachusetts.

On July 14, 1983, ABC reporter Charles Gibson reported:

"In both cases, the relationships were voluntary, there was no favoritism granted to the pages. Thus it was the recommendation of the committee's special counsel, Joseph Califano, that the Congressmen not be expelled or censured, simply reprimanded and by an eleven to one vote, the Ethics Committee agreed."

Perhaps the Times should rethink its policy on commencement speeches, given that every time a Times staffer gets up in front of a college audience he or she seems to spout left-wing rhetoric that contradicts the paper's increasingly disbelieved claims of objective reporting.

The most recent controversy involved Times Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse , who returned to her alma mater Harvard in June and delivered these pearls of wisdom: "Our government had turned its energy and attention away from upholding the rule of law and toward creating law-free zones at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Haditha, and other places around the world. And let’s not forget the sustained assault on women’s reproductive freedom and the hijacking of public policy by religious fundamentalism."(Greenhouse also marched in an abortion-rights rally in 1989.)

ABC News has just released this statement explaining how blogger Wild Bill of Passionate America was able to learn the real screen name of Mark Foley's Instant Message correspondent:

On Friday, ABC News published instant messages between a former page and Congressman Foley with the IM screen name of the teenage victim redacted. Immediately, we discovered that in one instance, the screen name of the teen on one IM exchange had not been properly redacted. ABC News immediately took down the posting [version 1], redacted the screen name and re-published the posting [version 2]. We certainly believed that we had taken care of the issue quickly. Last evening, after an inquiry from Matt Drudge, it came to our attention that a blogger was able to access our deleted file [version 1] by typing in a slightly modified web address. To be clear, no one visiting our website would have simply stumbled on the old version. We thank the blogger and Drudge for bringing this to our attention.

Talk about a double standard. On the one hand, ABC News breaks stories pushing disgust at Mark Foley's "X-rated emails" with teenagers, and suggests Dennis Hastert should resign for being unable to stop them. But wait: ABC Entertainment rolls out the adult-on-teen gay sex scenes on ABC's smutty "Desperate Housewives" for fun and profit. It wins awards for ABC as "Best Comedy." How serious is ABC and Disney about the sexual exploitation of teens by adults? Doesn't it make money presenting it as saucy?

From our colleagues at the Parents Television Council, here's a sketch of a gay teen-and-adult sex plotline on Desperate Housewives, from the profit-intensive May sweeps:

David Brooks' New York Times column of this morning on the Foley matter, "A Tear in Our Fabric," is so important that I'd normally be inclined to simply reproduce it in its entirety and let it speak for itself. But as a subscription-required item, I cannot. I do offer an extended-but-redacted excerpt for our readers' consideration:

This is a tale of two predators. The first is a congressman who befriended teenage pages. He sent them cajoling instant messages asking them to describe their sexual habits, so he could get his jollies.

The second is a secretary, who invited a 13-year-old girl from her neighborhood into her car and kissed her. Then she invited the girl up to her apartment, gave her some vodka, took off her underwear and gave her a satin teddy to wear.

Congressman Mel Reynolds, the Democrat convicted of 12 charges, including sex with 16-year-old Beverly Heard and asking her to take pornographic photographs of a 15-year old, was indicted on August 21, 1994. ABC, the current scourge of congressional teen-sex scandals, reported nothing – until Reynolds was convicted a year later, on August 23, 1995. In fact, on May 13, 1994, ABC featured Reynolds in a "Person of the Week" speaking out in favor of two Chicago ladies fighting child molesters:

Peter Jennings: " Their local congressman is certainly on their side. He also wants to make child molesting a federal offense."

Rep. Mel Reynolds (D), Illinois: "These ladies really illustrate how being active in your community can really make a difference."

Somehow a blog manages to scoop the ABC Brian Ross story about the Mark Foley page scandal by five days and yet the MSM remains remarkably incurious about that blog, Stop Sex Predators. So how did a relatively unknown blog come to be the recipient of messages from House pages complaining about Foley? If you read the MSM you will get very little information about this. However, in the October 1 edition of The American Thinker, Washington, D.C. attorney Clarice Feldman posted an excellent article, Foley and the Blame Game, that poses questions that the MSM still refrains from trying to find the answers to:

In July a blog appeared, designed it said to trace sex predators. Few posts were made in that month or the following month. All recounted years old stories. Then on September 18, the blog printed the fairly innocuous email exchange between Congressman Foley and an unnamed page. In this correspondence initiated by the former page, Foley asks the former page how he is after Katrina (the boy lived in Louisiana) and asked for a photo. Thus began the latest political kerfuffle which swirls through the final five weeks of the campaign. How likely is it that this site with virtually no readership , few posts and hardly any history or posts of interest suddenly receives this bombshell? I’d say slight. About as likely as Lucy Ramirez handing Burkett Bush’s TANG papers.

One aspect of the Mark Foley scandal that hasn't gotten a lot of coverage is how the story even became one at all. The first public source of the story was an obscure blog called Stop Sex Predators which seemingly was started with the express intent of outing the GOP congressman's sex life.

How did such a small blog with no readership manage to score such a scoop? Its owner refuses to say. He/she/they has posted this message:

Maybe I'm not so happy that so many people are coming to this blog site.

I'm not interested in media interviews. Thank you for your interest, but if you were doing your job to begin with, Mark Foley would have been exposed a long time ago. Instead of wanting to do a story about this blog, how about covering the fact that the media sat on this story for over a year. You're as bad as the Congressional Leadership that covered for Foley.

Today's starter: Patrick Frey (better known as Patterico in the blog world) has been doing a series of interviews with a military nurse who was stationed at the Gitmo prison for accused terrorists. In today's interview excerpt, the nurse talks about how detainees there commit violence against U.S. personnel and that the guards and they, not the staff, are the ones who have desecrated the Koran.

So why haven't we seen this kind of journalism from the liberal media? Are they really more willing to take the word of terrorists and their sympathizers over that of the American serviceman? Or is it just that prison abuse is a more sensational story? Or is it ultimately about being suspicious of Gitmo staff because their commander in chief is a Republican?

Related: Gitmo detainees have gained weight while in U.S. custody.

The Foley 'scandal' has prompted further investigation by the dems, unfortunately nothing was learned from ABC's complete failure.

In an attempt to publicly identify each of the conservative sicko homo perverts, the dems have created a list and circulated it in Washington. They dangle the details hoping the public will salivate waiting for it's release.

When Kerry made reference to gays, he chose VP Cheney's daughter, not an unknown or out of the closet.

There are no dems on the 'list'.

...In the coming days, we may see the Foley story morph into a referendum
on gay Republicans – particularly if the G.O.P. continues to push the
storyline that Foley was protected by "a network of gay staffers and
gay members." News organizations, one can safely assume, would not be
happy about such a development. The questions surrounding putting gay
Republicans in the spotlight – and how the press handles such questions
– would be incredibly divisive: Conservative site Newsbusters is
already lauding
Borger for breaking the "PC Barrier" by taking about the alleged
network; others, no doubt, will criticize news outlets for talking
about staffers' personal lives. And what of The List? If it hits the
Web, as Corn suggests, should news outlets publish it? Should they do
follow up reporting based on its contents?

It could be a no-win situation for many of the parties involved –
the media, conservative politicians with gay staffers, and, of course,
those themselves on The List. But the election is not far away, and
some lawmakers may see the "network of gay staffers and gay members"
narrative as their best chance to limit fallout from the Foley story.
Stay tuned – this one could get even uglier.

It appears that OPEC member states are worrying about the slumping price of oil. Venezuela and Nigeria have already cut back on production a bit but there's talk of an emergency meeting soon.

But so far, not a peep from the broadcast media. See my article at BusinessandMedia.org.

And don't hold your breath for CNN's Jack Cafferty to see a Democratic conspiracy to hike oil prices in time for the election.

MRC president Brent Bozell appeared on Fox News to discuss the Foley scandal and the calls for Speaker Hastert to resign.

Bozell was asked if Hastert was being "demonized by the media."

Watch the video clip and post your reaction.

Video clip (2:30): Real (4.10 MB) or Windows Media (4.69 MB), plus MP3 audio (716 KB)