GREAT MOMENTS IN TRADITIONAL-MEDIA FACT CHECKING

What is Giuliani’s baggage as a would-be Republican nominee?

... there is the personal baggage. The last presidential candidate to have had cancer was Paul Tsongas, who lied about being cancer-free in 1992, and who has since died.

--Richard Brookhiser, National Review Online

Uh, Richard, ever heard of a cancer survivor named John Kerry?

And John McCain ran for president seven years after his first bout with skin cancer, in 1993.

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American popular music has had explicit political content at least since "Strange Fruit," the song about Southern lynchings sung hauntingly by Billie Holiday in 1939.

--Renee Loth in The Boston Globe

Oh Lord, where to begin?

(Perhaps that's not what Loth means by "popular" music. Well, I have a book of early sheet music covers that includes World War I-era songs such as "Those Draftin' Blues" and "When the Good Lord Makes a Record of a Hero's Deed He Draws No Color Line," along the with more traditionally patriotic "When the Kaiser Does the Goose-Step to a Good Old American Rag," "We're Goin' to Knock the 'Hel' Out of Wilhelm," and "If He Can Fight Like He Can Love, Good Night Germany!")

*****

When George Bush ran for president the first time around in opposition with John Dukakis, they ran an ad that everybody said was one of the most biting political ads ever. Everybody remembers the Willie Horton ad. Does anyone think that George Bush, the current president, will take a chapter out of that page, because the lieutenant governor to John Dukakis was John Kerry?

--Deborah Norville on MSNBC's Deborah Norville Tonight (emphasis added; quote via the Daily Howler)

John Dukakis? Yikes.

No wonder these people can't tell that the Swift boat Kerry haters are lying.

But remember, bloggers are the menace! We don't have standards!