Finally, CNN Decides To Fact Check

By Lorie Byrd ~ March 23rd, 2006 @ 12:16 am

Betsy Newmark posted the following, which I did not know:

Cheers to Torie Clark and to CNN for clarifying a standard line from the Democrats about General Shinseki’s retirement as Army Chief of Staff. Shinseki retired and his replacement was named early. Later he testified before Congress on how many men he thought would be needed on the ground in Iraq in the forthcoming war. Afterwards, Democrats, including John Kerry, conflated these two events to say that the Pentagon fired Shinseki because of his testimony. Torie Clark was on Wolf Blitzer’s show yesterday and clarified that his retirement was announced months before his testimony and the two were not at all connected as Paul Begala had been spouting off about. Wolf Blitzer did some fact-checking and scored one for Torie Clark and zero for Paul Begala.

Read Betsy’s Page for links to the transcript and video.

I never believed the Democrat line about Shinseki being fired, especially not over anything he said. I assumed Democrats were at least right about the timing though, otherwise, how would the media have allowed Democrats to make the claim dozens (if not hundreds) of times over the past few years. Silly me. I should have known better than to assume the media would ever factcheck a Democrat making accusations against the Bush administration. I guess better late than never, but this never should have been allowed to have been repeated over and over again, unchallenged, on national television.