Tim Graham has been the Media Research Center’s chief promulgator of taking writer Charles Pierce’s 2003 profile of Ted Kennedy out of context by falsely insisting that he was praising Kennedy with a reference to Mary Jo Kopechne — in fact, it was intended as “a tough, but fair, shot.”
Graham keeps up the falsehood in a June 20 NewsBusters post, in which the mere mention of Pierce by a Washington Post blogger (who was quoting Pierce dismissing as “clown analysis” an attempt to co-opt baseball phenom Bryce Harper as a conservative hero) was enough to send Graham into a paroxysm of rage:
If you want to consult someone in the act of some “fundamentally dehumanizing dragooning,” please consult Charles Pierce in the act of lionizing Ted Kennedy. May we recall Pierce’s rhetorical atrocity about the woman that drowned at Chappaquiddick as Kennedy swam away? “If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age….” That, Mr. Steinberg, isn’t “clown analysis.” It’s mouth-breathing political idolatry.
You’re lying, Tim, and you know it. Please stop.