David Warren: Freedom and Errors

In the course of another repetitive article on the topic, David Warren described Canada's "’human rights’ commissioners” as “drooling, humourless, subliterate twits”. Further on, he again demonstrates what he does with his freedom of speech.

First, he appears to make rather free with Bruce Walker’s 2008 article on the website “American Thinker”. Might he have credited the author?

Bruce Walker: "The Democratic Party has become the Lawyers' Party. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are lawyers. Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama are lawyers. John Edwards, the other former Democrat candidate for president, is a lawyer and so is his wife Elizabeth. Every Democrat nominee since 1984 went to law school (although Gore did not graduate.)… Look at the Democrat Party in Congress: the Majority Leader in each house is a lawyer.

The Republican Party is different. President Bush and Vice President Cheney were not lawyers, but businessmen. The leaders of the Republican Revolution were not lawyers. Newt Gingrich was a history professor; Tom Delay was an exterminator; and Dick Armey was an economist. House Minority Leader Boehner was a plastic manufacturer, not a lawyer. The former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is a heart surgeon…. the lynching of Scooter Libby and Tom Delay…"

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/03/the_lawyers_party.html

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Ruled+legalistic+minds/2425599/story.html

David Warren: “This is a point brought home to me by an amusing item a friend forwarded this week, comparing Democrat to Republican party in the United States. The Democrat leadership is all lawyers, and has been for some time. Barack Obama, lawyer; Michelle Obama, lawyer; Hillary Clinton, lawyer; Bill Clinton, lawyer; Bill Reid, lawyer; Nancy Pelosi, lawyer; and so forth. All Democrat presidential candidates since 1984, lawyers — except Al Gore, who somehow failed to graduate from law school.

Compare, if you will, the Republican leadership over the last while, in White House and Congress. The last Republican lawyer to make president was Gerald Ford. Instead: movie actor, spy chief, businessman, successively. Last election: an old soldier, and a PTA lady. Look back at the leaders of the so-called “Republican revolution” in Congress: Newt Gingrich, history professor; Tom Delay, pest exterminator; Dick Armey, economist; Bill Frist, heart surgeon. (And note what the Democrat lawyers did to get rid of them.)”

Walker: We cannot expect the Lawyers' Party to provide real change… or real hope in America… change cannot be brought to our nation by those lawyers… hope does not come from the mouths of lawyers

Warren: …they voted in Obama: “Hope and Change.” From lawyers.

And then, the errors: Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives, is not and never was a lawyer - never even attended law school. Perhaps he confused the Democratic Majority Leader in the House of Representatives, Steny Hoyer, with the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.

“Pelosi earned her degree from Trinity in 1962, and then served as a congressional intern for a Maryland senator. She thought about law school, but followed the more traditional path for a young woman of her era, that of marriage… She began raising a family, and was the mother of five by 1969...”

No lawyer, and as many kids as Sarah Palin.

And who, in the “Democratic leadership”, is “Bill Reid”? Did Mr. Warren mean Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (about whom he was required to retract an earlier error)? Or is he inventing some other leading Democrat to serve his purposes?

http://www.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/story.html?id=704ca7eb-053f-48c0-9423-a6d126ab5838

We’ll wait to see if corrections appear.

As for Al Gore - he “somehow failed to graduate from law school” in the same way that David Warren “failed to graduate” from high school. Well, maybe not quite the same. After some time in divinity school and as a journalist, Gore left law school to run for a vacated seat in the U.S. Congress. (Warren tells us he himself left school after Grade 10).

This isn’t the first article on the gulags, “star chambers”, and “totalitarian” Human Rights Commissions to demonstrate the remarkable freedom Warren has with fact. One of his more notable errors/retractions occurred in another article on the same topic, in which he likened rights bodies to witchcraft trials. In “Under a spell” (Feb. 17, 2008), Warren described a supposed brutal Sharia punishment, photos of which had appeared on extremist websites (where even there they had been debunked as staged in 2005). A letter to the editor requested a correction, but like others, the Citizen (less enamored of that kind of freedom of speech), declined to publish it. The staged punishment item was half-heartedly retracted. He then deleted the embarrassing retraction from the "copyright Ottawa Citizen" version of the article that appears on his website, despite claims like this.

"I have faithfully posted everything I've written in newspapers since 9/11 on my davidwarrenonline.com website, warts and all”.

http://www.regrettheerror.com/newspapers/mea-culpa-mea-culpa