Stephen Hayes on Keller on Dick
Warning: I’ve just started to read Stephen Hayes’ book on Cheney (thanks to the short line for the book at Ann Arbor’s Public Library, I didn’t have to pay Hayes a cent), so this blog will be a little propaganda-busting focused in the next few days. I haven’t even gotten beyond the intro without a post!
When I sat down to start this book, I was grumbling to myself that the traditional media had pretty much accepted Hayes was a shameless propagandist–and started treating him as such. I remember how, after I called into Diane Rehm’s show and pointed out that Hayes’ shameless pimping of Cheney’s Iraq and Al Qaeda myths made him a worse propagandist than even Judy Miller, Rehm stopped having him on anymore, until just the other day, so he could pimp his Cheney book. It disturbs me that the media will accept a book about the Vice President by an unabashed propagandist and treat it seriously, only because Cheney (who picked said propagandist to write the book) was the subject.
Well, the intro is basically Hayes’ attempt to get people to treat his book seriously (which says something about his credibility). And wouldn’t you know it–his defense of his shilliness relies on the NYT’s Bill Keller.
I am glad it is you who is reading Hayes’ book, not I. Hayes is a pimp.
Remember, football season is approaching rapidly. Read in a back room so as to not risk heaving something through the television.
Hurrah, again.
Just because its a book doesn’t make it any less a puff piece.
I guess Bush and Cheney have trained the media that they will not get access unless they obey.
o/t – FISC orders government to reply to ACLU motion.
See Balkinize Now, This is Interesting … and
background at ScotusBlog’s Access to wiretap orders sought.
You are Stephen Hayes worst nightmare.
Things I didn’t know about Stephen Hayes, (which would make anyone wonder why Cheney would choose Hayes as his biographer.) From wiki:
Iraq/al-Qaeda argument
Hayes is well known for his writings postulating an operational relationship between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the al-Qaeda terrorist organization.
Hayes authored a book on this subject entitled: The Connection: How al Qaeda’s Collaboration with Saddam Hussein has Endangered America
The arguments raised by Hayes about the Saddam/al-Qaeda relationship have mostly discounted; they have been rejected by almost all counterterrorism experts and intelligence analysts, as well as by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and by the Bush administration itself.
Prosthetic leg claims
In his book The Connection, Hayes wrote: â€After evacuating an al-Qaeda training camp he ran in Afghanistan as U.S. troops approached, Ansar al-Islam founder Abu Musab al-Zarqawi eventually had his leg amputated and replaced with a prosthesis around late May 2002. He was treated in Baghdad’s Olympic Hospital, an elite facility whose director was the late Uday Hussein, son of the deposed tyrant.†Hayes repeated these claims multiple times in print and in live appearances. An autopsy of al-Zarqawi’s body after he was killed by coalition forces showed two fully-intact healthy limbs, although x-rays revealed that one had suffered a fracture, but healed.
Hayes is a graduate of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He also served for six years as Director of the Institute on Political Journalism at Georgetown University.
Journalist. Ha.
cboldt – I saw that; and calling it interesting is somewhat of an understatement. We may be about to see the second review/appeal out of this fun little forum.
Neil
Oh, those are precisely the reasons why Cheney picked Hayes–he was the one person who never gave up talking Cheney’s designated talking points.
– calling it interesting is somewhat of an understatement –
If nothing else, it’s a signal that the FISC won’t put up the stonewall, or run interference on its own dime. It’s going to make the administration stiff the public’s request for an explanation. Anyway, more later, on different threads. This is way off topic for here. Apologies for the diversion.
Dear Mr. Keller,
If Mr. Cheney hides from your journalists, hides public view while in the WH or Senate, while ostensibly doing a public duty on the public payroll, and hides his staff and what they do, hides is programs and his budget, hides his influence and his network, all to make them more powerful and less accountable, then THAT’s the story. Not the ostensible running of govt via policy and public discussions and cute names for legislation and who gets on Timmeh’s Sunday morning after church show.
The lede is that Cheney won’t talk, that he’s going to enormous lengths to hide, which suggests to Main Street and Wall Street alike that there’s something awful he’s hiding.
If you don’t make that the lede, and you haven’t, then Cheney â€manages†the NYT as easily and carelessly as he manages Timmeh into worrying more about his beach barbecues on the Vineyard than he does about the news. Throw another shrimp on the barby, Bill.
Regards,
A Reader from Outside the Beltway
Did you see Hayes interviewed by Jon Stewart? Pretty funny. That was when the video of Cheney in 1994 got played. Jon skewered him so much he was laughing at his own book. What a cynical jerk.