When  the incredible LA Times goes after a Republican, most conservatives can tell by the headlines that a hatchet job is in the making. 

Sadly, the smear job was so effective it fooled conservative blogger., Erick Erickson of the venerable Red State, Erickson with an attempt to route our corrupt Republican House members, so GOPers win in 2008, targeted Ken Calvert’s rise to Appropriations. Unfortunately, Erickson read the LA Times and believed it. His call to remove Calvert from Appropriations got a lot of MSM [liberal] reportage.

Congressman Ken Calvert is one of many of California congressional Republicans to endure the fueling of unfounded rumors and half truths. With snappy prose it took 3 "Times staff writers" to make up its story against Calvert. They thought they had a hot one.

The Times complained that Calvert made a profit when he sold property. The innuendo was old socialist class bating…" without even cutting the weeds, or carting off old septic tank parts … sold the land for $1,000,000. "

Imagine anyone making money on California real estate!

Of course,  the Times reporters wouldn’t understand this principle. But the crux of their charges is that Congressman Calvert used an earmark to finance a federal highway to improve his parcel of land. What the Times failed to mentioned is that Calvert’s land is some 16 miles from the earmark. Whoops. 16 miles in the Metropolitan LA / Riverside market involves millions of people and hundreds of thousands of parcels. Next time the boys at the Times ought to use a GPS. Their article strongly implied that  Calvert engineered federal funds to build an offramp direct to his shopping center.

Shoddy reporting by the Times is standard fare yellow journalism. But anythings is fair for the Times when it comes to smearing Republicans. 

Calvert’s office wisely put all key articles on their official website for anyone to peruse.

Even the liberal Riverside Press Enterprise editorialized against the Times charges, in a piece called False Alarm, by dismissing the claim generated by a local crank, but picked by the Times,  " Sounding false alarms of corruption only breeds more cynicism about government. "

The cynicism here, is that when reading the Times, why would anyone believe what they are reading?

[Publisher’s Note:  I have watched my friend and colleague Erick Erickson thrashing the heck out of Congressman Calvert, and I was very pleased to see Shawn make this post.  It’s a good opportunity to chime in with some words of support for the Congressman.  Ken Calvert’s a good guy.  I will close with an editorial comment that if the GOP takes back the majority, they MUST change the ‘culture’ of the House, that places so much ‘gravitas’ with the spenders ("Appropriators") — perhaps embracing Congressman Rohrabacher’s proposal to abolish that Committee.  – Flash]

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 31st, 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.