CNSNews.com, on top of their gotcha FOIA requests, has a new gotcha tactic: plucking a random quote of a book by a liberal, then ambushing them with it.
Here’s how this worked in a Sept. 16 CNS article by Nicholas Ballasy, in which the victim was longtime right-wing target John Holdren:
CNSNews.com asked Holdren about this passage on Tuesday after he participated in an Environmental Protection Agency forum celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Clean Air Act.
CNSNews.com asked: “You wrote ‘a massive campaign must be launched to restore a high quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States’ in your book Human Ecology. Could you explain what you meant by de-develop the United States?”
Holdren responded: “What we meant by that was stopping the kinds of activities that are destroying the environment and replacing them with activities that would produce both prosperity and environmental quality. Thanks a lot.”
CNSNews.com then asked: “And how do you plan on implementing that?”
“Through the free market economy,” Holdren said.
As Media Matters notes, this quote was plucked from a book Holdren co-wrote in 1973 — nearly 40 years ago — and was asked apropos of nothing.