By Rob Kall

OpEdNews.COM

First it was a heckler in a crowd, actually, a republican shill. Dean read him right (sorry for the pun) and told him to sit down and shut up (not his exact words, which were, according to Reuters, ""You sit down. You('ve) had your say, and now I'm going to have my say."  Fox, Drudge, Hannity, and the rest of the right wing echo-chamber-for-dummies went wild, frothing at their mouths with the joy of evidence that Dean is unstable. He got angry and here was their proof.

Except for one thing. If you actually watched more than the three second sound byte, Dean was perfectly appropriate-- not angry, just firm and tough, just the way I like a president who shouldn't and won't put up with Republican bullshit.

But for days, Fox flashed it repeatedly, CNN showed it occasionally and the talk radio hosts ran it almost in a loop.

Now, Dean got passionate after the Iowa caucuses, he kept talking after running out of breath and his voice got raspy. What does Drudge, often the first to get the echo chamber belching out its ugly spins and distortions, say?

He uses a picture of Dean at an impassioned moment and captions it "DEAN GOES NUTS..."

Now O'Reilly says that Americans love passion, but Dean is "immature." I guess the truth forced them to re-spin their stupid, immature attack on Dean. Oh, that it was just immature. Worse it is a vile, systematic attempt to go after the strongest Democratic presidential contenders, with the intent to whittle them and their images down, to constantly assault and vilify them so their reputation is eroded and "branded" as flawed.

Sean Hannity plays a three second snippet of Dean enthusiastically whooping it up, then plays a fraction of a second sound Dean makes, He repeats it three times, so it sound exagerated and... it does sound crazy then. But it's not real. It's a fraud. I'm sure Hannity would call it a transparent joke. But not to some people and even to those who know, there's a kind of additive effect, hearing a person's voice modified, replicated like that.

A day later, Anderson Cooper of CNN copies Hannity, with video and replays Dean whooping it up, then plays a shot of him being mocked on Conan O'Brien. At least Hannity was original. Cooper is just a nasty knock-off.

These uses of the media are unethical, corrupt, abominations that should not stand.They should not be allowed. Something must be done. Perhaps boycotts, perhaps call-ins, by thousands of us, telling these unprofessional spin whores what we think of them.

America is in danger. Democracy is threatened. This is a systematic effort funded by the superwealthy, planned by the team of right wing think tanks, carried out by media lackeys who will do and say anything to further the regime that does not represent a majority, the regime that is systematically looting and plundering the assets of this country, to the benefit of megacorporations.

We can expect the most abusive, aggressive most defamatory coordinated campaign of assaults ever seen in history on the candidate finally chosen to run against Bush. While the official Bush campaign will pretend to be above the fray, its proxies will be running the ugliest attack and smear, distort and lie campaign in history.

We should be outraged. We should take action. We should be angry. It's enough to almost drive you crazy, seeing what these lying thugs, these spineless sleazoids are doing to honest men, doing to this country.

Rob Kall rob@opednews.com is editor/founder of  OpEdNews.com, president of Futurehealth, Inc. and organizer of the Futurehealth Winter Brain, Optimal Functioning and StoryCon Meeting.  This article is copyright Rob Kall and originally published by opednews.com but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, blog or web media so long as this credit paragraph is attached. 

afterward Sunday, Jan 25 Check out a tape of raw footage of Dean's speech, with the roaring crowd, in context. Fox, CNN and all the other media that played doctored tapes should be ashamed. And... they seem to have stopped running the tapes. This was an example of the worst, most partisan, unethical, unprofessional journalism in recent history. It was like mass psychosis