And the way Clinton himself got Somalia handed off to him by Poppy Bush.

TRex @ 59

I don’t think President Clinton was still in office when the USS Cole was bombed.

10/12/2000

Just curious, but did they also criticize Reagan for sending the Marines into Beirut without allowing them to lock and load? Or for failing to take action after the Marines died? Or for his cut and run from Beirut? Didn’t think so.

Austin, Texas: Howard, I’m not sure what I expected from your discussion yesterday on Reliable Sources in regard to the Graeme Frost debate, but I really left feeling you didn’t do it much justice. “The consensus seems to be that the questions were fair, but certainly the tone can be mean-spirited in a lot of these controversies and it is really striking when a 12-year-old boy is involved.”

Let’s concede the questions were fair and the tone wrong — but the whole point was that people ran with inaccurate answers to those questions. Kudos to you for half-mentioning it earlier in the segment, but it really seemed like the main point and you guys really didn’t discuss it.

Howard Kurtz: But every guest was offered the opportunity to weigh in. Was it fair to question a family’s qualifications for the S-CHIP insurance program after Democrats had made the 12-year-old boy a symbol by having him deliver its weekly radio address? My feeling is yes; you can’t say one party can trot out such a symbol and no one can criticize. I also recited instances in which I felt the criticism was misleading: yes, the kid attends a private school, but on scholarship. Yes, the dad owns a home but bought it for $55,000 in a rundown neighborhood in 1990. In short, I tried to put the debate into perspective.

And then he dismisses quite legitimate concern that the attack dogs were treading in the field of actionable libel:

Rockville Md.: I have a question that has been bugging me for some time and I hope you can address it. I have folloewd the recent stories about Graeme Frost, the child who gave the Deomocratic response about SCHIP, and what some commentators are calling the “Swift Boating” of Frost by right-wing groups. Realizing that the jury may still be out about Frost: It is one thing when politicians slam each other, but when someone goes after a private citizen, don’t libel and slander laws ever come into play?

Howard Kurtz: Libel and slander laws only come into play when you say something that is both inaccurate and damaging about someone. Whether or not the Frost family should be considered too well-off to qualify for federal health benefits doesn’t seem to fall in that category. When the parents agreed to make their son available to the Democratic Party as a spokesman for the program, surely they must have expected that their financial situation would become part of the debate. I am not, for the record, in favor of beating up on 12-year-old boys, but the family did willingly step into the political arena.

Because, you know, every citizen who takes a public political stand deserves to have his entire life audited.

Nuh-uh.

These denial queen assholes have performed so many pre-frontal lobotomies on themselves to avoid having their synapses connnect about the reality of what they’ve helped create, that nothing shocks me about how many floors their elevator skips, or which Nightmare-at-conservative-headquarters it DOES stop at.

And ladies and gents, we aint seen NUTHIN’ yet.