-By Warner Todd Huston
Peter Hamby of CNN seems to have dropped all pretense of being an unbiased journalist. Not only is he tweeting out the donations page of Obama’s campaign website, but he is also Tweeting that Paul Ryan is a neo-Confederate, or something.
Last week Hamby indulged his inner partisan at least twice on his Twitter account. The first time was on Sept. 13 when he was reporting on an Obama appearance in Wisconsin. Hamby noted that Obama was going to Milwaukee and in his Tweet also gave out the Obama donations page address.
Wisconsin officially a battleground: President Barack Obama going to Milwaukee next weekend > donate.barackobama.com/page/contribut…
I guess helping team Obama raise money for his re-election campaign is now considered to be “journalism.”
But Hamby perpetrated an even bigger outrage a few days later when on the 15th he claimed that Paul Ryan was using coded Civil War era language from the Confederate States by referring to Florida as the “breadbasket of the South.”
Ryan just called Florida “the breadbasket of the South” … phrase has Civil War origins. Florida a major supplier food to the Confederacy
Of course, during the war the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia was far more often called the breadbasket of the Confederacy than Florida was, but the Sunshine State was sometimes referred to that way, too, and has been by historians but infrequently.
Beside those historical vagaries, though, is the obvious allusion that Hamby is trying to make with Ryan’s words. Hamby is trying to make Paul Ryan out to be some sort of neo-Confederate by claiming he’s using coded language to harken back to the Confederacy.
This is a pretty strong charge and one would hope that Hamby would actually have some proof for his case. But, one will search in vain for his proof that this is what Ryan meant. No, it’s easier to just float the false narrative and then move on to other biased Tweets than to take the time to prove his outrageous assertions.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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