FoxNews, Bill Sammon And CNN Are So Full Of Fail

Yesterday the WingNut blogosphere was energized by a post on FoxNews.com from Bill Sammon alledging that on 9-11 Democratic strategist James Carville, the man they claim came up with the Limbaugh strategy, said he wanted President Bush to fail. CNN's Wolf Blitzer thought it was such a scoop that he repeated Sammon's claims on his show. There wasn't a link to be found in Sammon's column and much of what he wrote was unsourced and unquoted. So it wasn't surprising to find out this morning on Greg Sargent's blog that he misrepresented what Carville had said.

Carville’s comments were made at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast on the morning of 9/11, before the attacks.

The Monitor’s Dave Cook, who runs the breakfasts, has audio of the event, and he transcribed the relevant comments and emailed them to me. Carville was asked if Bush was politically vulnerable. Carville replied:

People basically like this president as a person and they want him to succeed, but they have some pretty serious doubts that have not crept in but are sort of there. You have almost half the country saying he is in over his head. Over half the country saying he is for the powerful. And as much as I would like for it or wish for it, they are not going to pull away completely from him months into his administration.

I don’t care if people like him or not, just so they don’t vote for him and his party. That is all I care about. I hope he doesn’t succeed, but I am a partisan democrat. But the average person wants him to succeed. It is his country, his life or their lives. So he has that going for him. There is a lot that is going to happen between now and next November. It is not that people don’t like him. It is not that people don’t want him to succeed but it is also not that he doesn’t have some serious underlying problems.

It’s clear from that context that Carville was talking about his own desire for the President to fail politically, in terms of getting votes for himself and his party, not in policy terms. Carville went on to say that average Americans want him to succeed substantively, which he said was a political boon to Bush.

Now the surprising thing is how outlets like CNN chose to pick up Sammon's drivel and put it forth as credible news. I wonder how long it will take them to run a correction. But bigger than that even if Sammon was to be believed lets take a look at how he says Carville ended the discussion after learning about the planes hitting the Twin Towers.

Minutes later, as news of the terrorist attacks reached the hotel conference room where the Democrats were having breakfast with the reporters, Carville announced: "Disregard everything we just said! This changes everything!"

You see, Carville (of whom I am a big fan) knew immediately that this wasn't a time for partisan ship. In the aftermath of the attacks he didn't want a divided country, he wanted a country united behind the President. In contrast Rush Limbaugh at a time of financial crisis is still calling for his listeners to take a totally partisan stance and not support President Obama's efforts to revive our economy. Its fine for Limbaugh to disagree with President Obama, I have no problem with that. Its even fine for him to oppose different bills while they are being debated. But to hope that the stimulus bill fails when in point of fact that will mean great harm and hardship for many many Americans, is borderline traitorous. And that is the difference between what liberals and progressives did during Bush and what Limbaugh is exhorting conservatives to do under President Obama. Its truly sickening and reprehensible and next year the Republican Party is going to have to deal with the blowback.