6/25/10 VP Cheney hospitalization hate-fest update: Scrub-a-dub-dub!!!

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This page is an update to:

6/25/10: VP Cheney hospitalized; HuffPost approves users to unleash death wishes

Three interesting happenings since HUFF-WATCH published the above article, earlier today:

1) BigJournalism, the site that broke the ACORN scandal stories, featured our expose' in their top stories listing:


2) Thanks to a reader tip, we learned that all the links to the user comments featured in our original story, now lead to... nothing. HuffPost has removed all of them --- but left all the users active. Fortunately, there's nothing they can do about all the screencaps we obtained, which formed the backbone of our original story.

3) HuffPost is not just surgically removing individual comments, it is taking a machete to blocks if not pages of comments, apparently in an attempt to sanitize the entire thread. The only thing you're doing, HuffPost, is making yourselves look ridiculous... because you're moving so fast you're leaving things like this, right on page 1:


To the uninitiated, that looks like a pretty routine set of comments. To those familiar with HuffPost and its habit of propagating falsehoods, it is a smoking gun. Let's look a little closer (here is the link to these comments):

• The screen says that "ColoradoCool's" comment was posted at 02:44 PM on 6/27/2010.
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• It then says that last comment posted before that was more than three hours earlier, at 11:23 AM on 6/27/2010, by "DS7."
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• Then, it shows that the response to that comment was posted almost 12 hours later, at 10:47pm.

HuffPost is counting on your not knowing that on a thread like this, there are never, ever multi-hour breaks between comments, even if it is a day or two old. The radical leftists that HuffPost enables, protects and emboldens hit this thread fast and hard, and over several days.

The only way that such breaks would show up inbetween comments is if HuffPost took a machete and whacked away large numbers of them - which, as shown in item 1, we've gone a long way to proving it is doing.

This isn't the first time that HuffPost attempted to manipulate a comment thread, to conceal what it had permitted to occur on it. Ironically, it was also on a thread concerning Vice President Cheney, and HuffPost's facilitation of death wishes and urgings of murder against him, a little over three years ago.

Excerpted from Section 1, here:

(O)n February 27, 2007, the Taliban failed in its attempt to assassinate Vice President Cheney during his visit to Afghanistan. HuffPost put up the story of this event as its top news thread. Many of its resident hard-leftists expressed their regret that the Taliban was unsuccessful, and how much better the world would be if someone would murder Cheney.

The only physical evidence of the comments that appeared on this HuffPost thread is found at Michelle Malkin's site, here (story here).

Within hours, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and others were all over HuffPost for this outrage --- and the fact that it then claimed that there were only a "miniscule minority" of "clearly unhinged, fringe" users who put up "offensive" comments, which its moderators then removed. The PDF of that thread proves the facts. This episode was also covered in detail at other blogsites, including TownHall (Dean Barnett), and in significant detail at JonQuixoteWorld, here.

Several days later, Ms. Huffington lashed out at her critics in a blog article she wrote for HuffPost. Excerpts (emphasis added):

A miniscule portion of the people who read that story chose to take advantage of the anonymous, open forum nature of comments in our news section to express regret that the Vice President hadn't been killed in the attack.

As soon as these offensive comments came to our attention, they were deleted from the site.
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No one at HuffPost is defending these comments -- they are unacceptable and were treated as such by being removed. They were not made by me, by our editors, or by our bloggers. They were made by anonymous visitors to the site -- visitors that make up a very, very small unrepresentative portion of our readers."

So, please, spare us the bogus indignation. And stop trying to build an illogical but politically-convenient thesis on the backs of a few unhinged and clearly fringe commenters.

The reality of the situation --- in contrast to Ms. Huffington's statements --- was proven by the actual thread, and blog analysis of HuffPost's actions concerning it. Little Green Footballs provided the most concise debunking of the obfuscations HuffPost put forth (emphasis added):

The simple fact is that Arianna Huffington deleted hundreds of those comments about Dick Cheney, and when another topic about Cheney was posted there, the exact same thing happened again.

We seem to recall recent incidents in which Ms. Huffington admonished politicians and corporate leaders that it's better to fess up to one's wrongful acts, than to try to cover them up - which, she correctly noted, usually only makes things far worse. Seems like advice worth thinking about, HuffPost, before you think about pulling another stunt like this one.

Ironically, one was an incident in which (brace yourself) Ms. Huffington lectured Vice President Cheney on... telling the truth:

One good thing about your conscience no longer functioning is that you are comfortable with everything. Especially with whitewashing the truth.

- Arianna Huffington, February 15, 2006

If that isn't enough irony for you for one day, here's a second heaping helping, from just a few months ago:

Beyond hypocrisy: Arianna Huffington accuses Fox of "inciting" hate

Will Ms. Huffington or HuffPost ever be asked to explain their actions --- or their hypocrisy? Who knows... maybe someday, someone in a position of influence will ask it to do so.

In the interim, if you'd like to make your voice known to HuffPost management (politely, please), here's how.


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