Roger Simon & Karen Tumulty on CNN -- Read This Shameful Transcript

[SeveneightyWhoa]

Here are these two Bush-bots spitting their thoughtless garbage on CNN's Lou Dobbs (if you didn't see it):


TUMULTY: Well, considering, however, that the arguments for the last week have essentially consisted of bouncing from headline to headline, I think this gives us the message for the rest of the campaign. Quite frankly, I find it hard to find any way that this helps John Kerry. What we've seen over and over and over again is that when terrorism is the topic, and when people are reminded of 9/11, Bush's numbers go up.

ROGER SIMON, U.S. NEWS AND WORLD REPORT: I don't have any trouble parsing out who this helps. I think this is an enormous boost for George Bush. And if the president is reelected, to some extent, he will have Osama bin Laden and this tape to thank for it.

Consider four days before presidential election, the most hated man in America, the murderer of 3,000 of our citizens, attacks the president. What response shall the voters of the United States give? Shall they say, we agree with Osama bin Laden, we're going to turn the commander in chief out of office, or shall they return the commander in chief to office?

I think -- also it energizes the Republican base. It energizes Jewish voters, since Osama bin Laden directly links Israel and the attacks on Lebanon. And it steps on all the bad news, the explosives story, that disastrous briefing at the Pentagon, the altering of the TV commercials. All that's off the table, at least today, tomorrow, and probably through Sunday.

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SIMON: That's why I think energizing the base is so important. Any little unexpected thing -- we thought the October surprise might be the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden. This tape is better than either of those things for George Bush.

DOBBS: I'm surprised you think this is such a strong...

SIMON: I think this is very big. I think this will anger a lot of Americans. It's much more angry than Brits writing letters telling us who to vote for. This is Osama bin Laden telling us who to vote for.

BROWNSTEIN: Is he telling -- I mean, do you read the tape as in telling us who to vote for?

SIMON: It doesn't matter the specifics of the tape, or the fact that he's attacked George Bush before. Now for the first time...

BROWNSTEIN: Now, he attacked both of them in the tape.

SIMON: But we know who his enemy is. His enemy is President Bush.

[T Roosevelt]

1. Tumulty: * whore

After the debate when *'s only response to everything was education, she actually said (on Charley Rose) that his theme "would play well with women", and I just sat there thinking "what a WHORE!"

[rusty charly]

3. matt taibbi

"Karen Tumulty is Lendl in his prime. Mortals don't stand a chance against her. She is the standard-bearer for a new breed of campaign journalist: the reporter who is incapable of comprehending the election as anything other than a horse race. She appears quite honestly not to understand that it might have some other significance. In the old days, reporters used to lapse into poll-watching and political sportswriting on the campaign trail when they got tired or lazy. Thanks to shameless hacks like Tumulty, the sportswriting has actually replaced issue politics as the only meaningful story of the race.

Tumulty's articles are all the same; they are all about momentum, who has it and why. Every piece is essentially a reaction dealt in response to some new poll, often commissioned by Time and limited to a few dozen mysterious respondents (a recent widely cited Time poll showing Bush ahead had just 857 respondents). The deck to a typical Tumulty piece reads something like this: "A new poll shows Kerry trailing Bush by nine points in four key battleground states. TIME looks at why the Kerry campaign was fucked from the start—and what it must do now to convince us it takes our poll numbers seriously."


http://www.nypress.com/17/40/news&columns/feature.cfm

[SeveneightyWhoa]

2. Usually Roger Simon is fair, but look at this:

A hat-trick of Bush-fellating statements from just the selected snippets I posted:

1. "I think this is an enormous boost for George Bush."
2. "This tape is better than either of those things for George Bush."
3. "(Osama bin Laden's) enemy is President Bush."

Tell us what you really think, Roger Simon. Tell us who you're rooting for, it's really hard to tell.