by Taylor Marsh
"Quinn & Rose" are at it again, with a lot of help from XM radio. You may remember them from my coverage during the '06 election. I caught these radio wingnuts supporting the swiftboaters against John Murtha, then let them have it. Of course, many of the links that showed them out can no longer be found, but that's also to be expected. Once caught, these types of political assassins just wipe away the evidence. Well, now they're lying on the air, joined by a wingnut site that is doing whatever it can to spread the word.
However, FreeRepublic.com and XM radio just got slapped by Howard Dean. They tangled with the wrong man, who's shown before that he's a different kind of Democrat. The fighting back kind.
The Democratic National Committee filed two cease-and-desist letters Thursday with a conservative website and XM Radio regarding comments they alleged were made by DNC Chairman Howard Dean.
As a DNC-imposed noon deadline passed today, the allegedly inflamatory comments had not been removed from the Web. A party spokeswoman, Stacie Paxton, said she was not sure what the Democrats' next step would be.
The website FreeRepublic.com, citing an XM radio show, said Thursday that "Dean called Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius early, around 5 am, one morning after the tornado had destroyed the town of Greensburg, Kansas and discussed with her what to say about the tornado and how to blame the war in Iraq and the Bush administration on a slow response to the aftermath."
According to Democrats, the conversation never occurred. ... ..
... By early Friday afternoon, the cease and desist letter was posted on a FreeRepublic thread that had garnered more than 250 comments disparaging the Democrats. The Quinn & Rose Show homepage also was still alleging the Dean-Sebelius conversation took place. ... ..
The letter to both XM and FreeRepublic.com are on Raw Story. Here's one snippet:
The statement made by Mr. Quinn, repeated on FreeRepublic.com is demonstrably, uneqivocably and absolutely false," Sandler wrote. "Governor Dean had no such conversation with Governor Sebelius, ever."
On the Quinn & Rose "war room" site, in the section "War Room Greetings and Messages," scroll and you will see that the defamatory statements are still live.
This is how wingnut radio works. I've been talking about it for years and years. It's about drumming up emotion through lies to get more people to listen. It's especially effective during voter season. But we're on to them. This time the swiftboating wingnuts not only got caught, but called out and shut down. They will be shut down, or the lies retracted, right?
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