Murtha Opponent Irey Continues Lying to Voters

By Bob Geiger

In addition to the smears I described yesterday by Diana Irey against Congressman John Murtha, the Irey campaign also sent out an e-mail blast last week denouncing Murtha for allegedly saying that "the United States poses a greater threat to world peace than nuclear threats in North Korea and Iran."

The problem is, they did it long after the newspaper that originally published the story printed a correction saying they had misrepresented Murtha's remarks.

The Irey campaign sent an e-mail to supporters at 5 PM on Thursday, June 29, castigating Murtha, gushing about Irey's appearances with Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and praising the talking heads' goal of continuing "…to focus on exposing Jack Murtha's latest outrageous statements."

"Between you and me, I don't know which one was worse," wrote Irey in the e-mail. "Was it saying we could 'redeploy' our troops from Iraq to Okinawa and still defend our interests just as well? Or was it his declaration that the United States poses a greater threat to world peace than nuclear threats in North Korea and Iran?"

A little detail that Irey didn't bother to mention was that the South Florida Sun-Sentinel had already corrected its story the day before with the following statement:

"An article in Sunday's editions misinterpreted a comment from U.S. Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., at a town hall meeting in North Miami on Saturday. In his speech, Murtha said U.S. credibility was suffering because of continued U.S. military presence in Iraq ,and the perception that the U.S. is an occupying force. Murtha was citing a recent poll, by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, that indicates a greater percentage of people in 10 of 14 foreign countries consider the U.S. in Iraq a greater danger to world peace than any threats posed by Iran or North Korea."

So Murtha was citing a poll using that language and not making that statement himself.

Despite the fact that even the likes of Brit Hume, Bill O'Reilly -- both of Fox News -- and The Wall Street Journal gave grudging retractions on their similar attacks against Murtha, Diana Irey saw fit to send out an e-mail citing the erroneous story and presenting it as truth.

So we can believe one of two things about the Irey campaign: That a Republican Congressional campaign that undoubtedly knows every move made by John Murtha and every word printed about him, didn’t know that what they were offering was provably untrue. Or we can infer that they did know, but decided that the lie would be so much better to slime him with than the boring truth.

Not a tough call, is it?

You can reach Bob Geiger at geiger.bob@gmail.com