Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from January, 2016

The rehabilitation of Lesley Hughes hits a bump

No sooner had we posted a commemoration of the first decade of The Black Rod than we got a tip that one of our featured players had popped up on the radar again. Lesley Hughes is the infamous Liberal party candidate who was kicked off the party slate in 2008 when she got caught up in a firestorm over something she wrote years earlier that critics attacked as a blatantly anti-semitic remark. It was The Black Rod that first publicized her comment, which almost instantly took on a life of its own and within 24 hours immolated her fledging political career. For the record, here's the relevant segment of what Lesley Hughes wrote in a column titled Get The Truth written for community newspapers in Winnipeg in 2002. "Many official sources are claiming to have warned the American intelligence community, which spends $30 billion a year gathering information, about the attacks on the twin towers on that heartbreaking day. German Intelligence (BND) claims to have warned the

What a long, strange trip it's been ( apologies to the Grateful Dead)

If you blinked you missed it. Starring Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett and screen veteran Robert Redford, the movie titled "Truth" came and went and nobody noticed. Despite opening in more than 1100 theatres, this certified stinkeroo, which cost $9.6 million to make, has grossed barely $2.5 million. So why mention it? Because its the celluloid apologia for Rathergate, the infamous scandal where CBS tried to influence the 2004 American presidential election by smearing George Bush with a phony story on 60 Minutes (Wednesday edition) hosted by Dan Rather.   When the documents used by Rather to attack George Bush proved to be fraudulent, show producer Mary Mapes was fired and Dan Rather's career was over.   The only thing left behind was the mantra adopted by bad reporters everywhere: the evidence is false, but the story is true. The real heroes of Rathergate were the bloggers and internet commenters who rose up together to take the false story apart, line by lin