The MRC’s Tim Graham uses a Nov. 24 NewsBusters post to lie about Sen. Patty Murray, reviving a years-old discredited falsehood that Murray “praised” Osama bin Laden:
Saturday’s Washington Post devoted the left-hand corner of the front page to hailing liberal Sen. Patty Murray, the new chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. “In a Congress of hot tempers and sharp tongues, Murray doesn’t favor over-the-top rhetoric,” oozed Post reporter Rosalind Helderman. Sen. Harry Reid added: “Everyone takes Senator Murray seriously because she does not bluster.”
She doesn’t? While the Post noted Murray had the “luck” of “intemperate” Republican gaffes on abortion and rape in the last election cycle, nobody in the media wants to remember Murray’s 2002 whopper praising that humanitarian Osama bin Laden[.]
As we first detailed way back in 2002 , Murray was not “praising” bin Laden; rather, she was trying to draw a contrast over how the U.S. is viewed in the Middle East, explaining (somewhat erroneously) that bin Laden had been “building schools, building roads, building infrastructure, building day care facilities, building health care facilities, and the people are extremely grateful. We haven’t done that.”
Graham cited what his boss, Brent Bozell, “reported at the time,” but 1) Bozell does not “report,” and 2) he was trying to distract attention away from Trent Lott’s remarks about Strom Thurmond.
Graham goes on to whine, “You would be a fool to underestimate how much hot wind that liberal newspapers will blow behind a liberal Democrat like Murray, whose gaffes are rarely acknowledged and never remembered.” It’s only a gaffe in the minds of rabid, dishonest partisans like Graham who have to distort her words and tell lies about what she actually said in order to force it into a “gaffe.”