Ben Stein is the biggest liar of 2005.

[Eric J in MN]

http://www.moveleft.com/moveleft_essay_2005_06_06_conservative_con_ben_stein_is_the_biggest_liar_of_2005.asp



Ben Stein


The media includes many liars.

But to claim that the US would have won the war in Vietnam, and also would have won a full-scale war in Cambodia, if only Mark Felt (Deep Throat) hadn't helped Woodward and Bernstein: that is the biggest lie told this year.

Ben Stein's essay can be summarized as:

War is Peace. Ignorance is Strength (per the novel 1984.)

This is how Ben Stein writes about Richard Nixon, during whose time in office thousands of American soldiers and millions of Vietnamese lost their lives:

Deep Throat and Genocide

By Ben Stein

Published 6/1/2005 12:22:42 AM
Re: The "news" that former FBI agent Mark Felt broke the law, broke his code of ethics, broke his oath and was the main source for Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward's articles that helped depose Richard Nixon, a few thoughts.

Can anyone even remember now what Nixon did that was so terrible? He ended the war in Vietnam, brought home the POW's, ended the war in the Mideast, opened relations with China, started the first nuclear weapons reduction treaty, saved...Israel's life, started the Environmental Protection Administration. Does anyone remember what he did that was bad?

Oh, now I remember. He lied. He was a politician who lied. How remarkable. He lied to protect his subordinates who were covering up a ridiculous burglary that no one to this date has any clue about its purpose. He lied so he could stay in office and keep his agenda of peace going. That was his crime. He was a peacemaker and he wanted to make a world where there was a generation of peace. And he succeeded.

...This is what they bought for themselves in the Kharma Supermarket that is life:

1.) The defeat of the South Vietnamese government with decades of death and hardship for the people of Vietnam.

2.) The assumption of power in Cambodia by the bloodiest government of all time, the Khmer Rouge, who killed a third of their own people, often by making children beat their own parents to death. No one doubts RN would never have let this happen.

Ben Stein's big lie was repeated by Peggy Noonan and Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh.

Shame on them all.

We lost the Vietnam War because we didn't have a strategy for winning.

The dreadful strategy was that US soldiers were supposed to kill the Viet Cong without claiming territory in north Vietnam.

58,000 Americans died and millions of Vietnamese

Nixon kept the Vietnam war going for years, and half the American deaths were while Nixon was president. Some peacemaker.

It's despicable that Ben Stein, Peggy Noonan, Pat Buchanan, and Rush Limbaugh are all such liars that they would tell the pubic the US lost Vietnam because of Mark Felt.

Giving Nixon Credit Where Credit Isn't Due

He ended the war in Vietnam,

Years after he should have ended it.

brought home the POW's,

Years later than they could have been brought home by ending the war sooner.


ended the war in the Mideast,


Israel ended the Yom Kippur War, not Nixon.

opened relations with China,

Any president would have opened relations with China after they got nuclear bombs.

started the first nuclear weapons reduction treaty,
I'll give Nixon credit for that one.

saved...Israel's life,
What does that mean?

started the Environmental Protection Administration

I'll give Nixon some of the credit for the EPA, but environmentalists deserve more of the credit.

[OldLeftieLawyer]

1. Why on earth

would you pay attention to anything that man has to say, let alone devote all that time and energy to posting it here?

He's truly not worth it, honey. Save your outrage for the things that matter. Ben Stein never mattered, never will.

[demwing]

6. Because its a forum, not a think tank

and its fun to point out the miserable lies and the lying liars that tell them. :)

[OldLeftieLawyer]

9. He's not worth it

Talk about a nobody ............

[demwing]

14. Maybe he's not worth a Dan Rather report

but he's definitely worth a DU post.

Why do you protest so much?

If he's not worth 1 post, why is he worth your 3 or 4?

[OldLeftieLawyer]

16. I'm killing time until dinner is served,

and I know Ben Stein. He lives near my daughter and son-in-law in Malibu. I knew his father here in Washington. His father was a nice man who often wondered about his son.

Ben Stein's the worst kind of remora.

Never confuse an opinion with a protest.

[Gman]

23. Sent me to dictionary.com

rem·o·ra Audio pronunciation of "remora" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (rmr-)
n.

Any of several marine fishes of the family Echeneidae, having on the head a sucking disk with which they attach themselves to sharks, whales, sea turtles, or the hulls of ships. Also called shark sucker, suckerfish, suckfish.

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=remora

[OldLeftieLawyer]

29. Good word, huh?

And you just won my heart, going to look it up. One of my favorite things is learning about words ................

[Gman]

34. Well, I don't know how "old" you are, OldLeftieLawyer

But I'm old enough to say that I had the nuns beat into me the value of looking up words you don't know or recognize.

[OldLeftieLawyer]

35. Well, they did a fine job

I didn't go to parochial school, but I heard all the stories about the nuns. In my case, I was in love with the words early on - before school - but once I fell into the clutches of Jesuits, I discovered what those beautiful Latin and French and Old English and German words in parentheses were for, and, ever since then, it's been a love affair with the words. That's why I ended up as a novelist.

Those nuns really had a lovely teaching style, though, didn't they? At least the Jesuits didn't leave marks.

:yourock:

[hatrack]

31. Might I suggest "lamprey"?

After all, they're parasites, while remoras are not! :hi:

[OldLeftieLawyer]

33. I'd go with

pilot fish. Whaddaya think?

:woohoo:

[Eric J in MN]

7. Ben Stein's lies were repeated by Peggy Noonan and Pat Buchanan and Rush

Limbaugh.

[OldLeftieLawyer]

10. So what?

That's one of the Democrats' problems - get all het up about a bunch of bullshit, and then spend time and energy refuting it when it doesn't matter at all. No one cares, it means nothing.

That's what the Democrats do and that's why they're in the fix they're in - just so damn wrongsighted and distracted by the mealymouth crap that doesn't have the half life of a sneeze.

[Eric J in MN]

22. We should call Republicans on their lies instead of letting them

re-write history.

[OldLeftieLawyer]

28. He's nobody

He's just an attention-craver wannabe, and he has absolutely no standing in today's political world. Not worth paying attention to.

I mean, he does eye drop commercials and hosts some game show.....

[demwing]

36. As much as you might dislike the guy, he isn't a "nobody"

From his bio:

(Ben Stein) graduated from Columbia University in 1966 with honors in economics. He graduated from Yale Law School in 1970 as valedictorian of his class by election of his classmates. He helped to found the Journal of Law and Social Policy while at Yale. He has worked as a poverty lawyer in New Haven and Washington, D.C., a trial lawyer in the field of trade regulation at the Federal Trade Commission in Washington, D.C., a university adjunct at American University in Washington, D.C., at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and at Pepperdine University in Malibu, CA. At American U. He taught about the political and social content of mass culture. He taught the same subject at UCSC, as well as about political and civil rights under the Constitution. At Pepperdine, he has taught about libel law and about securities law and ethical issues since 1986.

In 1973 and 1974, he was a speech writer and lawyer for Richard Nixon at The White House and then for Gerald Ford. (He did NOT write the line, "I am not a crook.") He has been a columnist and editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal, a syndicated columnist for The Los Angeles Herald Examiner (R.I.P.) and King Features Syndicate, and a frequent contributor to Barrons, where his articles about the ethics of management buyouts and issues of fraud in the Milken Drexel junk bond scheme drew major national attention. He has been a regular columnist for Los Angeles Magazine, New York Magazine, E! Online, and most of all, has written a lengthy diary for ten years for The American Spectator. He also writes frequently for The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, op. ed. and almost every other imaginable magazine...

In other words, he has a national voice, and people listen to him. He should not be allowed to alter history unchallenged.

[OldLeftieLawyer]

37. I know his CV - I know him

And he is a game show host who also hawks eye drops. On the national stage, at this point in time, he is as big a has-been as E. Howard Hunt.

Pay attention - listen to the people who actually have power and influence, not the old-timers who've lost their teeth, and, consequently, their bite.

He's my kid's neighbor, and he's a bloody boor.

[Richard Steele]

2. Ben Stein: as politically RELEVANT as any other failed game-show host.

[JimmyJazz]

3. Don't forget, he escalated the war in Vietnam after peace talks

broke down.

He used IRS audits as a weapon against his "enemies."

He didn't want Salvador Allende in power in Chile because Allende wanted to nationalize the telephone system which would have cost ITT (Nixon's butt buddy) several billion dollars in lost revenue, so he approved of the overthrown of the government and upheld the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet who was every bit as evil as Saddam Hussein.....

Ben Stein and the others can kiss my ass. They are liars and are on the wrong side of history. Fuckers.

On edit: I forgot to mention his backing of Pakistan (a military dictatorship) in the war against India (a democracy). By his sending in military ships when the US was supposed to remain neutral, he could have caused WWIII.

[Ken Burch]

15. Don't forget, Nixon HELPED BREAK DOWN the peace talks

so the war wouldn't end before the 1968 election.

Johnson and Humphrey both knew Nixon had sent emissaries to Paris to interfere in the talks, but they wouldn't bust him on it because they thought it wasn't "fair play" or something.

And he overthrew the democratic government of Chile and helped arrange the murder of Salvador Allende.

[JimmyJazz]

20. There's too much evil to include in one post, but you are correct!

[whistle]

4. Yes, Ben Stein is an entertainer and will say anything to be the...

...center of attention. Ignore him and he'll shrivel up and blow away.

[ClintonTyree]

5. Stein's just another Nixon apologist....

who's still grieving over his hero's ruination. Hey Ben, Nixon WAS a crook! To say that America would have won in Viet Nam if not for Felt is insane, not a lie. Those are the ramblings of an unbalanced man completely out of touch with reality. Ben's finally gone around the corner, just like Buchanan, Liddy and every other Nixon ass licker left from that horrible era in American history. :eyes:

[Missy M]

8. Ben Stein is a blathering idiot...

according to him Richard Nixon is ready for sainthood or he was Superman!

[yurbud]

11. So is he indirectly slamming the still living Gerald Ford?

Nixon's republican successor?


If all those things were doable, couldn't Ford have done them since he had most of the same foreign policy team?

Hillbilly Hitler art:



Blog:

[Eric J in MN]

24. Right. If Nixon had us on the right-track, the vp

he chose should have been able to win the Vietnam War plus a Cambodian War.

[VOX]

12. So Felt, and Woodward, and Bradlee are responsible for genocide!!!

So says Ungentle Ben:
"Mark Felt has bought himself the worst future of any man on this earth. And Bob Woodward is right behind him, with Ben Bradlee bringing up the rear. Out of their smug arrogance and contempt, they hatched the worst nightmare imaginable: genocide."

That's the most absurd bit of retroactive :crazy: ***SPIN*** :crazy: I've heard in a long time.

My best guess? Out-of-work Ben is shopping himself around as yet another right-wing talking head. :puke:

[Eric J in MN]

25. If only Ben Stein had charisma, his big lies would give him

a new talking-head career.

[democrat in Tallahassee]

13. A special place in HELL for Ben

A special place in hell right next to Nixon is waiting for Ben..

Ben will have to continue kissing Nixon's ass for the rest of eternity...

[Ken Burch]

17. Ewwww! Even Satan doesn't deserve that.!

Even Hitler.

Even Roy Cohn.

(Alright, maybe Roy Cohn does deserve it, but I'm not sure he'd take it as a punishment...)

[OldLeftieLawyer]

18. Don't forget Kissinger

That one - the world's greatest mass murderer - got the Nobel Peace Prize.

At that point, Tom Lehrer quit performing, because, as he said, "Irony is dead."

[gratuitous]

19. Does anyone even remember what Nixon did?

I do, Mr. Stein. And a few of my friends who are no longer with us remember what Mr. Nixon did that was so horrible, and they paid with their lives. You, on the other hand, have gone on to a fabulously lucrative career after serving as a henchman to a megalomaniacal demagogue who should have never gotten within spitting distance of power. So I guess it worked out okay for you and the rest of the world can just go to hell, huh?

[BlueManDude]

21. I propose a new game show - Kick Ben Stein's Ass.

This is the kind of programming you would see if I owned a cablenet.

[Cha]

26. benstein-nixonlover

I'm so glad moveleft has brought this crass boor's lies to focus.

ben stein is just another mediawhore..they're a dime a dozen.

[jedr]

27. Vietnam , as it was fought, could not be won;

It always amazes me that those who did not go to the war ,just don't get it! Nixon Staying in office didn't mean squat.

[chaska]

30. Who cares what that stupid man-cow says?

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

32. Ended war in the middle east?

Yes. The middle is a paradise of non-violence.

Let's remember the words of Hunter S. Thompson regarding Nixon.

"If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin."

Considering the Thompson was at least 50% more coherent on his worst acid binge that Ben Stein has ever been -- even during one of this intellectually challenging stints as a fucking game show host -- I think Thompson's description is probably closer to the mark.