Drudge Misleads About Dean Comment in Kansas

Here's the story today, "Dean's ‘evil' comment draws Web attention". from the Lawrence (KS) Journal-World:"If you were having trouble accessing a page at ljworld.com Tuesday, you can thank the Drudge Report. About 9 a.m. Tuesday, the Drudge Report (www.drudge-report.com) linked from its front page to a Journal-World story about Friday's visit to Lawrence by Howard Dean, the former presidential candidate who is now chairman of the Democratic National Committee. The Drudge link was titled "DNC Dean Says Republicans are ‘Evil' . . .," which directed readers to a J-W story titled "Dean roars into town." Dean was not quoted in the story directly calling the GOP evil. He told fellow Democrats, "This is a struggle of good and evil. And we're the good." After Drudge linked to the story, Journal-World servers almost immediately began to pull in overwhelming traffic. "Generally, traffic spikes of up to 10 to 15 times our normal load do not cause any problems," said Jacob Kaplan-Moss, programmer for World Online. "This morning we hit 200 times our normal load. We immediately began serving a high-traffic version of the page, which has everything stripped from the page but the story content." Kaplan-Moss said that as of 3 p.m. Tuesday, the story had been accessed more than 101,000 times from the Drudge Report Web site." The Rovians seem to require systematic misrepresentation in order to maintain and consolidate their power. If you require more evidence of this see "Novak: venal, stupid or both?" from "Where's Howard" about Robert Novack, or "the mendacious traitor" as I like to call him, and his inaccurate reporting of Dean's comments on Social Security. For more debunking of the "racist" charge against Dean, "Where's Howard" has this post: "Black Caucus members stand up for Dean." I don't want to feed the impulse for progressives to be consumed by these trash attacks to the extent that they take us off our messages. But I don't want them to go answered either. I want a very strong and vigorous response which brings us back to our core beliefs and proposals. I am looking to Dean to provide this. David Brock's Media Matters for America says, "Novak misquoted Dean for second time in three days" and then proves his case. Department of "I Told You So": Even before Dean was elected DNC Chair, but as soon as his appointment was certain, the attempt to tear him down with lies and echo chamber trash talk began, just like during the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. At that time, I said here that the Rovians were threatened by Dean and would need to attempt to neutralize him, just like the "Swift Boat" campaign did with Kerry.