A Reply To The NYT's Deliberate HitPiece On Darrell Issa

[bitterlyclingin]

Posted on August 19, 2011 by John Hinderaker in Media Bias

Darrell Issa Sticks It to the Times

Darrell Issa is a brilliant businessman who made a lot of money the old-fashioned way: he earned it, rather than marrying or inheriting it as so many Democratic politicians do. Which is another way of saying that he is just the kind of man we need in Washington.

The Left, of course, doesn’t see it that way. The New York Times hates Issa because, as Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, he has launched several investigations of wrongdoing that have embarrassed the Obama administration. So ace reporter Eric Lichtblau, no longer occupied with illegally leaking national defense secrets now that a Democrat occupies the White House, went looking for dirt on Issa.

“Looking” isn’t exactly the right word; let’s say he went “trolling.” We have written a number of times about how the relatively respectable left-wing organs, like the New York Times, the Washington Post and MSNBC, rely on the far-left blogosphere for material. They monitor the crazy stuff that the Daily Kos, Democratic Underground, Think Progress, etc., spew out, and if they see something they think they can turn into a plausible story, they steal it.

That is what happened here. It started at Think Progress, where cub reporter Lee Fang wrote an article in March claiming that Congressman Issa had secured earmarks for highway construction that benefited properties he owns in his San Diego district. Lichtblau picked up Fang’s “research” and amplified it in a hit piece in the Times. Of course, as we have often noted, one of the problems with lifting stories from the fever swamp is that they generally turn out to be wrong.

Before getting to Lichtblau’s errors, however, a more basic point: his story in the Times is intended to put Issa in a bad light and to imply some sort of wrongdoing on Issa’s part. But if you read to the end of the article, the question that will occur to you is, What was the point? Where was the wrongdoing? There isn’t any alleged. Lichtblau’s article is sheer atmospherics; it attempts to portray Issa as a shady character without offering facts in support of that characterization.



Darrell Issa Sticks It to the Times | Power Line

 

[bitterlyclingin]

"So ace reporter Eric Lichtblau, no longer occupied with illegally leaking national defense secrets now that a Democrat occupies the White House, went looking for dirt on Issa."
NSA Electronic Surveillance Program, (Probably out of those same barbed wire surrounded West Virginia Mountaintops) and the Terrorist Money Laundering Surveillance program.
"Methinks thou protesteth too much." What were the Times and the other Liberal outfits the Times represents up to that caused them to scream so loudly and so long at these programs? Colluding and conspiring with terrorists, perhaps?

 

[Sallow]

Oh bullshit.

Issa is a crook.

Twice during that year he was arrested. In March, Issa and his brother William were charged with stealing a Maserati from a dealer's showroom in Cleveland. Issa says it was a matter of mistaken identity by the Cleveland Heights police; the case was later dismissed.[3]
Before that had happened, in December 1972, police in Adrian pulled Issa over for going the wrong way on a one-way street and, as he was retrieving his registration, saw in the car's glove compartment what turned out to be a .25-caliber Colt automatic handgun inside an ammunition box, along with a military pouch containing 44 rounds, a tear gas gun and two rounds for that. Issa was charged with carrying a concealed weapon; ultimately he pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of possession of an unregistered firearm. He was sentenced to six months' probation and paid a small fine.[3][6] At the time Issa told police that Ohio law allowed such possession of a handgun with a justification; his was the need to protect the car and himself. Years later, he said that the car and gun were his brother's, which William Issa supported. He had been unaware of the gun's presence when inadvertently driving the car the wrong way down the alley and that, to the extent of his knowledge, there had been no ammunition present. The entire incident, he had believed, had been expunged.[3]
<snip>
Issa soon turned Steal Stopper around, to the point that it was supplying Ford with thousands of car alarms and negotiating a similar deal with Toyota. But early in the morning of September 7, 1982, the offices and factory of Quantum and Steal Stopper in the Cleveland suburb of Maple Heights, caught fire. The fire took three hours to put out; the buildings and almost all inventory within were destroyed.[3]

The Ohio state fire marshal never determined a cause for the blaze. The initial theory was that it was electrical, but the insurance company came to doubt the theory when a fire analysis report it commissioned outlined evidence that the fire could be arson. It had exhibited two distinct areas of origin, both with "suspicious burn patterns" but without any "accidental source of heating power."[3] Investigators believed that a stack of cardboard boxes, which had burned in a manner inconsistent with an accidental fire, may have had a flammable liquid spread on them.
Darrell Issa - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Quantum Windbag]

Oh bullshit.

Issa is a crook.

Twice during that year he was arrested. In March, Issa and his brother William were charged with stealing a Maserati from a dealer's showroom in Cleveland. Issa says it was a matter of mistaken identity by the Cleveland Heights police; the case was later dismissed.[3]
Before that had happened, in December 1972, police in Adrian pulled Issa over for going the wrong way on a one-way street and, as he was retrieving his registration, saw in the car's glove compartment what turned out to be a .25-caliber Colt automatic handgun inside an ammunition box, along with a military pouch containing 44 rounds, a tear gas gun and two rounds for that. Issa was charged with carrying a concealed weapon; ultimately he pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of possession of an unregistered firearm. He was sentenced to six months' probation and paid a small fine.[3][6] At the time Issa told police that Ohio law allowed such possession of a handgun with a justification; his was the need to protect the car and himself. Years later, he said that the car and gun were his brother's, which William Issa supported. He had been unaware of the gun's presence when inadvertently driving the car the wrong way down the alley and that, to the extent of his knowledge, there had been no ammunition present. The entire incident, he had believed, had been expunged.[3]
<snip>
Issa soon turned Steal Stopper around, to the point that it was supplying Ford with thousands of car alarms and negotiating a similar deal with Toyota. But early in the morning of September 7, 1982, the offices and factory of Quantum and Steal Stopper in the Cleveland suburb of Maple Heights, caught fire. The fire took three hours to put out; the buildings and almost all inventory within were destroyed.[3]

The Ohio state fire marshal never determined a cause for the blaze. The initial theory was that it was electrical, but the insurance company came to doubt the theory when a fire analysis report it commissioned outlined evidence that the fire could be arson. It had exhibited two distinct areas of origin, both with "suspicious burn patterns" but without any "accidental source of heating power."[3] Investigators believed that a stack of cardboard boxes, which had burned in a manner inconsistent with an accidental fire, may have had a flammable liquid spread on them.
Darrell Issa - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

That proves it.