Instapundit’s Tea Party Lie

9:07 pm EST April 19th, 2009 | Media | 9 Comments

Glenn Reynolds:

KANSAS CITY STAR: Tea Party Movement Captures Real Concerns.

Wow, that’s an interesting position attributed to the entire Kansas City Star newspaper. After all, the star’s editorial board endorsed Obama so this must be quite a turn around for them.

Oh wait, let me click the link.

Oh. It’s not an editorial from the Kansas City Star, as Reynolds link leads you to believe. It’s an editorial column from “E. Thomas McClanahan”. Well, let me do a Google and see who this guy is. Maybe he’s someone who has recently changed his mind on Obama, somebody who has an actual disagreement with the President and isn’t just an idealogical columnist.

So, I check. Here’s a sample of the columnist’s work product:

A dissent: When you compare policies, McCain is the reasonable choice

Disastrous power grab by unions awaits

Bad timing for an anti-trade president

Obama’s path still unclear, agenda unfocused

Obama’s blizzard of big-spending proposals snowing under economic hope

Union card-check bill deserves to fail again

Obama’s big-government express already losing steam

So, a conservative anti-Obama columnist thinks that the Fox News Tea Parties were REALLY IMPORTANT and Glenn Reynolds passes this individual’s opinion off as what? “The Kansas City Star”.

Then I figured, what does the actual Kansas City Star – and not one of it’s conservative columnists – say about the Fox News Tea Parties?

Today also will find a number of frustrated Americans attending “tea parties,” including ones at the Liberty Memorial and Johnson County Community College.

These aren’t exactly grassroots events. They have been organized or hyped largely by conservative-leaning groups, Republican politicians and others opposed to the Obama administration’s plans to get the U.S. economy back on track and to clean up many of the financial messes left by former President George Bush.

While protests against taxes and spending are time-tried rituals, these aren’t exactly on target given the nation’s current crisis.

…

If Republicans and arch-conservatives really had better ideas — other than the irresponsible one of holding the line on government spending during a recession — they would be out trumpeting those plans.

Instead, ill-defined political rallies are being gussied up as tea parties, implausibly trying to link today’s financial woes to what the Founding Fathers faced more than two centuries ago.

So in fact, the Kansas City Star holds the exact opposite editorial position that Instapundit says the publication has.

Intellectual dishonesty: Glenn Reynolds soaks in it.

UPDATE: Via email, Reynolds tries to defend himself by telling me that he also links to Andrew Malcolm’s LA Times blog by just calling “The LA Times”. Really? You mean the sloppy former Laura Bush PR flack Andrew Malcolm? Well, of course you’d want to pass that off as “The LA Times”.

Instapundit used to try a little bit harder than this to be dishonest.

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9 Responses to “Instapundit’s Tea Party Lie”

  1. Matthew Hooper says:
    April 19, 2009 at 9:19 pm

    I suppose that you could make the argument that “Kansas City Star:” is meant to say this the editorial was in the KCS, and not by the KCS editorial board, and that the usual brevity of an Instadundit post is being obfuscatory.

    This is, to put it mildly, charitable. And embarrassingly sloppy. Heaven help Prof. Reynold’s students if he’s this sloppy professionally.

    Especially seeing as he finally takes the time to compose something to defend himself against your charges of racism. With complete sentences! And profanity! And everything!

    It’s really depressing to watch him sink into his role as a PJTV shill. I used to read him for some of the useful links, like Carnival of the Recipes. Now, he’s just a mess.

  2. Jaim says:
    April 19, 2009 at 9:50 pm

    Well played O-dub. The tea parties were a failure, so now comes the desperate spin which also leads, alack and alas, to more Republican fail.

    It’s like their version of gravity.

  3. Oliver Willis says:
    April 19, 2009 at 9:53 pm

    Well, Jaim, didn’t you hear? About 300 million people showed up!

  4. Blue Girl says:
    April 19, 2009 at 9:55 pm

    E. Thomas is a hack extraordinaire and a chickenhawk deluxe. He and I have had a personal disagreement over the ‘gentrification’ of my neighborhood. Specifically – he doesn’t like the building style of the Costco, Home Depot and MainCor buildings at Main and Linwood, two blocks from my apartment. I don’t give a rat’s ass that his sense of asthetics are offended, because where those businesses are now, we used to have an overgrown vacant lot, fenced off and inhabited by junkies and a pack of feral dogs. Seriously. Twice a year he writes an 800 word screed about the architecture of that development.

    The Star keeps firing personnel, and this idiot never gets the axe. It’s unbelievable.

  5. Ray Radlein says:
    April 19, 2009 at 10:25 pm

    I could sort of understand that in Twitter, where the 140 character limit can sometimes cause extreme compression of details. But on a blog post? NO ONE is that lazy.

  6. William K. Wolfrum says:
    April 19, 2009 at 10:33 pm

    You mean Andrew “I fell for Martin Eisenstadt before it was cool and then wouldn’t acknowledge it” Malcolm?

    Oh Yeah, he’s a good go-to guy.

  7. canadian bacon says:
    April 20, 2009 at 12:00 am

    Nice work Oliver.

  8. Matthew Hooper says:
    April 20, 2009 at 7:05 am

    More often than not, most Instapundit “posts” would qualify as tweets. Hey, Instapundit was twittering before twittering was cool!

  9. Oliver Willis says:
    April 20, 2009 at 1:02 pm

    Keep thinking you’re not a part of the kook party as you slide further into irrelevance.