PrintFebruary 21, 2009
The nauseating hypocrisy of the left on Bill Moyers
Bill Moyers is a sanctimonious jerk who piously ran a series of broadcasts that excoriated the Bush Administration for violating the American people's right to privacy by initiating programs to protect the nation from a terrorist attack.
Now it turns out that Moyers likes peeping through keyholes into people's bedrooms. The Washington Post reports on the unearthing of some FBI documents from the 1960's when Moyers worked for LBJ:
Bill Moyers, a White House aide now best known as a liberal television commentator, is described in the records as seeking information on the sexual preferences of White House staff members. Moyers said by e-mail yesterday that his memory is unclear after so many years but that he may have been simply looking for details of allegations first brought to the president by Hoover.
No, he wasn't "just looking for details of allegations." That is a baldfaced lie. From The Corner:
Only a few weeks before the 1964 election, a powerful presidential assistant, Walter Jenkins, was arrested in a men’s room in Washington. Evidently, the president was concerned that Barry Goldwater would use that against him in the election. Another assistant, Bill Moyers, was tasked to direct Hoover to do an investigation of Goldwater’s staff to find similar evidence of homosexual activity. Mr. Moyers’ memo to the FBI was in one of the files.
Gay Patriot (who gets the Hat Tip for the links) asks: "Isn’t using the FBI to dig up dirt on political opponents kind of similar to what Nixon did in Watergate? There’s even a memo in the FBI files."
But this isn't really news. It came out in 2005 but never caused a ripple of concern among our guardians of gay rights. If a Republican had tried something like that he would have been handed his manhood on a plate. Instead, Moyers is celebrated for his courage in speaking truth to power -- even though when it comes to violating privacy rights, he has the inside track on knowledge of how to go about doing it.
So where are the gay rights activists who would crucify a Republican if they outed a Democrat? John Avarosis at Americablog was involved in an effort a few years ago to out gay Republican Congressmen and staffers. Where is his outrage today? Where is the outrage of the rest of the left who get their panties in a twist every time a Republican mentions "gay marriage?"
Where's the outrage of the media? Why not drive this hypocritical Johnson toady out of broadcasting? If not for this, then certainly for the fact that he sicced the FBI on Martin Luther King among other targets. Tom Lifson covered this story when it surfaced again during the campaign. He links to a comment by journalist Thomas Lipscomb on Moyers' website and quotes Morley Safer on Moyers' hyopcrisy:
I find it hard to believe that Bill Moyers would engage in character assassination over one evening news broadcast -- even given the political imperatives of the moment. But I confess, I find it harder not to believe it.
His part in Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover's bugging of Martin Luther King's private life, the leaks to the press and diplomatic corps, the surveillance of civil rights groups at the 1964 Democratic Convention, and his request for damaging information from Hoover on members of the Goldwater campaign suggest he was not only a good soldier but a gleeful retainer feeding the appetites of Lyndon Johnson.
It's all too confusing. Bill Moyers, the sometimes overly pious public defender of liberal virtue, the First Amendment, and the rights of miniorities playing the role of Iago."
Of course Safer had felt the effect of one of Moyers nastier disinformation campaigns himself. LBJ and his press secretary Moyers summoned CBS head Frank Stanton to the White House and "threatened that, unless CBS got rid of me and 'cleaned up its act' the White House would 'go public'with information about Safer's 'Communist ties.'"
Moyers may not have "gone public" but somehow the ambassador to Vietnam called Safer "a KGB agent" and Secretary of State Dean Rusk noted his "ties to the Soviet intelligence apparatus."
This is the great liberal lion -- a man that has no business criticizing Bush or anyone else for violating privacy rights given his own peeping history.
I suppose we should expect nothing less from people who praise and lionize Robert Byrd and Barney Frank despite their pasts. You would have to be brain dead not to recognize the fact that if a Republican or conservative had been revealed as a former KKK member or ran a bordello out of his residence, they would have been hounded from public life.
