Rewriting History

The Kennedy Campaign takes a page from the Rovian handbook:

The headline on Mark Kennedy's U.S. Senate campaign website, over excerpts from an Associated Press article, said he is "A Common-Sense Get Things Done Guy," and the AP material under the headline made the case that the Republican congressman voted with Democrats on 10 key issues this year.

Missing from the story were 13 sentences in which Democrats and political analysts accused Kennedy of disguising a career of extreme conservative voting by only recently casting a few votes with Democrats as he prepares for a U.S. Senate race. No link was supplied to the original version of the AP story, so readers who came to this article via the Kennedy website might think that they were getting the AP's portrayal of the candidate as a bipartisan moderate.

Amazing, a headline that reads "A Common-Sense Get Things Done Guy," taken right from the article. Oh wait, wherein the article was that:

That phrase appeared in the article as Kennedy's description of himself

Ohhh, that'll hurt.

Campaign's use clipping and excerpts to their advantage all the time. But this is to an extreme that has even peeved the AP themselves:

The AP is not pleased about the Kennedy campaign's editing of the article, and its attorney in Washington called the campaign Tuesday afternoon.

The lawyer requested that the material be removed as quickly as possible, said Dave Pyle, AP's Minneapolis bureau chief. "Number one, they are not authorized to use the content. And number two, if they were, they'd never be allowed to alter the content the way they have," Pyle said.

The egregiousness goes a step further in that they wouldn't even link to the original stories

Campaign websites commonly provide online links to articles that are favorable to the candidate, and no one expects a candidate to post an unflattering profile, West said. But Kennedy has gone a step further, he said, excluding all unflattering references on a sentence-by-sentence basis and providing no link to the full version of the article.

The local spin doctors will be defending their anointed candidate, but I would hope the objective side of them will denounce this kind of deceptive behavior. There is too much mud and mess in the campaign business as it is. Let's not pollute the race with the continued deception of the people. Haven't we had enough of that from the Rovian machine already.

Flash