Getting back to the computer at 1:30 AM California time has one advantage:
you can check tommorrow's news....well, last night.
Bad news from what I can see. The Dick Cheney Tuesday story, the truth about his attendance in the Senate highlighted in this diary by Dave the Pro, this story which is the more potent lie underneath his claim to have met Senator John Edwards for the first time at the debates.....is not getting out, despite the paper trail, and being blogged hard.
This is an outrage and I think we should do something about this BS. Whaddaya think? Time to crank up the Raise Hell Machine?
The coverage is running like this:
-Many papers have a story about Dick Cheney actually having met John Edwards before.
However Lynne Cheney has been out there "stuffing" that story and claiming it was only at a prayer breakfast...and repeating the claim that Edwards is a no-show in the Senate. This not only neutralizes the lie, but furthers the charge that Edwards is somehow derelict in his duties.
-Fewer, and more tech savvy, papers are running stories about how Cheney flubbed the FactCheck.org address for FactCheck.com. Funny, pithy even, but not the REAL story.
-No one, as far as I can see is verifying the information that we Kossacks have seen for over 24 hours now, that Dick Cheney did not regularly preside at the Senate on Tuesdays. ie. The Vice President is not only lying, but he is a total hypocrite...lying to accuse John Edwards of the very thing he is lying about.
Is this a big deal? I think so. Read these stories and tell me if you think they do us any favors or hurt the cause:
This article in Newsday closes like this:
Cheney's campaign, however, didn't seem to be losing sleep over the flap. "It's a really good thing to go to prayer breakfasts," Cheney's wife Lynne said at a rally in Tallahassee. "But don't you think the senator ought to go to the Senate once in a while?"
This KnightRidder feed to the Houston Chronicle is typical in ending on a net negative for us:
Cheney aides said Wednesday that his comment merely pointed up a larger truth: that Edwards has often been absent from his Senate duties.
During 2003, as he was beginning his run for the Democratic presidential nomination, Edwards missed 38 percent of the 459 roll-call votes. He's missed all 45 votes held since Sen. John Kerry named him as his running mate in July.
This Arizona Republic letter to the editor takes Cheney's charge unmitigated by any fact checking:
During the vice presidential debate on Tuesday, I found it very interesting to hear that Sen. John Edwards is called "Senator Gone" in his home state because he is never there to vote on all the critical bills and decisions.
Our one bit of coverage but not in the mainstream press is this article in the Progressive Trail. Sad to say, Kos and Atrios I'm sure have the readership of this publication many times over, but we're not on GoogleNews with it and they are.
On a separate and more depressing note, the LA Times is mocking some early letters to the editor that came in for Edwards, before the debate....they print 3 of them and then buried this notice in the fine print, emphasis mine:
The Times tried to contact the authors of these letters. Peter Blue did not return phone calls. Shay Enan did not respond to e-mail attempts to contact him. And Andy Taylor, whose real name turns out to be Andrew Schoppe, assured us that he had sent the letter as a test, just to see if we were checking. He said he was "very, very pleased" to find that we hadn't fallen for his prank. He said he was a registered Republican.
A Republican? A Republican? Hell, that might be an interesting STORY in its own right, editors....editors.....editors?????
So. No USA Today No Washington Post as far as I can see. No Wall Street Journal. This New York Times campaign blurb is the SUM TOTAL of their coverage of this information....emphasis mine:
Democrats, on the other hand, were eagerly capitalizing on Mr. Cheney's statement that he had never met Mr. Edwards before last night. He was implying that the North Carolina Democrat had not been much of a workhorse in the Senate,
since Mr. Cheney spends some time there as the presiding officer.
Democrats immediately began circulating a photograph of Mr. Cheney and Mr. Edwards standing together at a prayer breakfast in Washington in 2001. Edwards allies also noted that the two debaters were together again in 2003 when Elizabeth Dole was sworn in as the other senator from North Carolina.
Lynne Cheney stood by her husband on the issue. "It's a really good thing to go to prayer breakfasts, but don't you think the senator ought to go to the Senate once in a while," she asked a crowd in Tallahassee.
"It turns out he had a lapse in memory, it happens to all of us," Senator Richard Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, said on the Senate floor this morning. "It's a rather incidental thing in the scheme of things."
I don't know about you, but I think it's time to get mad, get ornry and crank up the Raise Hell Machine. This story won't get out there any other way, We've got to raise a little hell, imo, if we want to see it make the papers in the next day or two. It's memorable, visceral evidence of who Dick Cheney really is, and they should report it. It's a good story.
Don't let them impugn Senator John Edwards, (someone who had one of the best attendance records in the Senate before he ran for President) with Dick Cheney's lies. It's fair to ask, how can the media be doing it's job if someone with an excellent attendance record before he ran for President is allowed to be characterized this way? If you ask me, they KNOW this story is out there in NYC and DC, they know that it's unfair to Senator Edwards or any member of Congress to make this attack, and they are doing nothing.
We know that when Dick Cheney launched that attack, and his wife confirmed it, they knew exactly what they were doing. They did this for the same reason they've done everything brazen on their watch because they thought they could get away with it. It's time for us to raise some hell and let everyone know the truth.
Of course, now it's 2AM....it's also time for me to hit the hay. adelante ahora!
AM coffee update Lot's of good discussion and new input below, thank you so much for your words and opinions, I am in awe of the energy here.
sixthdoctor cites a strong BIG LIE (ie. Iraq) story out of Newsweek/MSNBC
beholderseye got this interesting response tor Bloomberg's Heidi Przybyla that may shed some light on the press pov
reading this ABC News story this morning just tells us everything we need to know about Dick Cheney and lying. He's lying faster than 50,000 googling monkeys can type!!! Have they no shame?.....rhetorical question.....let's raise hell...and GOTV....