Leave it to Tim Graham to portray telling the truth about the Bush as “Bush-bashing.”
Channeling Stephen Colbert’s maxim that “reality has a well-known liberal bias,” Graham used a May 18 NewsBusters post to complain that Rachel Maddow gave a ” Bush-bashing graduation speech” at the “liberal all-female Smith College.” (What, Tim, you couldn’t work “lesbian” in there somewhere? Or does “liberal all-female” sufficiently imply that as far as you’re concerned?) And what is Graham’s chief exhibit to support his claim that Maddow was engaging in “Bush-bashing”? Her rehashing of the unambiguously true scandals of the Bush interior department. From Maddow’s speech, as excerpted by Graham (relevant links added by us):
With the massive surge of profits flowing through that criminal underworld, this country reached whole new levels of government corruption that puts anything we’ve got today to shame — except for maybe the Interior Department of the Bush administration.
It’s not about the Bush administration — remember they put the Abramoff guy as the Number Two guy in charge of the Department of Interior and there was that one office where they were snorting meth off the toaster oven and the people who worked in the office regulating the oil industry were actually having affairs with oil industry lobbyists? So the Bush administration Interior Department maybe can compete.
At no point does Graham contradict Maddow’s statements — perhaps because he can’t. For Tim Graham, it seems, reality is indistinguishable Bush-bashing.
Indeed, Graham is seeing “Bush-bashing” everywhere, particularly in graduation speeches. He also referred to Brian Williams’ allegedly “Bush-bashing commencement address at Notre Dame,” linking to his previous post on the subject. Graham’s evidence here: Williams’ description of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as “benign neglect turned fatal.”
How is that “Bush-bashing,” you ask? Graham explains: “If you think that isn’t directed squarely at George W. Bush, you didn’t see the Williams interviews of the “clueless patrician” president and his radical-left black accuser in 2005.”
That’s not a Colbert schtick; that’s just a desperate and slightly paranoid leap of logic.