Randoph UT Redux: Finkel Trashing Bush Again

Regular readers of HazZzmat (assuming we have them!) will recall a little flap the Wonk started by fisking Washington Post "reporter" David Finkel's trashing of little Randolph, UT for being stupid enough to whole-heartedly embrace George W. Bush and vote for him en masse in 2004.

We then jumped on a number of sites obtained via a piece in another website/blog that seemed to agree for the most part with Finkel's little essay in trash journalism:

Mercy buckets to UtahPolicy.com ("Where political junkies get their daily fix") for noting our fisking yesterday of the Washington Post's extended insult directed at the good citizens of Randolph, UT. In its short mention of us in its Blog Watch section, the site accurately characterizes the

...Washington Post article that implies the citizens of Randolph, Utah, support Pres. Bush because they're ignorant, Dijon mustard-deprived hicks (see also here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here)...

Well, looks like Finkel is at it again, co-authoring with another Postie, Karl Vick, a Post piece that appeared yesterday, excoriating Bush's attempt to help out Iran's hapless supporters of democracy. This gist of this journalistic hit piece is that America's help for Iran's true patriots can only hurt them. They then cite as corroborating evidence a statement from one of these patriots. But read the statement carefully:

"We are under pressure here both from hard-liners in the judiciary and that stupid George Bush," human rights activist Emad Baghi said as he waited anxiously for his wife and daughter to emerge from interrogation last week. "When he says he wants to promote democracy in Iran, he gives money to these outside groups and we're in here suffering."

Yep, that's right. Vick and Finkel get a trash-Bush quote out of a real Iranian democrat which proves their point, right? Wrong answer! Baghi's wife and daughter are under "interrogation" by Iran's thug-ocracy. What the hell else is he going to say???

NRO's Michael Ledeen noted the same thing, observing further:

I love the moral equivalence: Bush wants to help them acquire freedom, while the regime (neatly reduced to a couple of bad guys in the Ministry of Injustice) crushes them. And Bush is the stupid one...

So, in keeping with the paradigm established by Walter Duranty — the man who never found Stalin the least bit objectionable — Vick/Finkel blame Bush for the ongoing savagery of the Islamic republic. No matter that pro-democracy dissidents have been arrested, tortured, and murdered for 27 long years in Iran; the actions of the regime are simply blamed on Bush. “You know what a vulnerable situation we have here in Iran,” Baghi says, “It was not a good thing to invite us to such a workshop.”

Duranty, BTW, was the "reporter" who knew about Stalin's mass murdering in the 1930s and covered up for him in the New York Times, eventually copping a Pulitzer for his brilliance! Duranty has become the gold standard, it seems, for contemporary reporters who pen propaganda while disguising it as journalism. (The Pulitzer People, infested by Gramscian Marxists, have never withdrawn the prize, interestingly enough. Complicity, anyone?)

Ledeen lets Vick and Finkel have it, so be sure to read his piece.

Meanwhile, for those bloggers who thought Wonker was off the wall when he interpreted Finkel's breezy Utah trashing of country conservatives for what it was, think again. Finkel is clearly establishing himself as a leftwing advocacy journalist whose articles cannot be trusted as factual. Like an increasing number of journos, he's following the NYTimes model of reporting which seems to be defined roughly along the lines of Pravda's pre-Berlin Wall "reporting."

Which is why I'm putting "reporting" in scare quotes. This is not reporting, folks. This is propaganda, pure and simple. AKA, trash journalism. Increasingly, you cannot believe a word that you read in the MSM when it involves George W. Bush or the Global War on Terror.