In today's Journal-World, letter writer Karl Brooks writes, "The weekend before Election Day, right here in Kansas, [President Bush] denounced Democrats as unpatriotic and misguided for simply asking him to share the facts about Iraq!"
This is a false statement. I was at the event in Topeka and Bush explicitly said Democrats were not unpatriotic for questioning his policies in Iraq. The Topeka Capital-Journal accurately reported on Bush's statement:
"Bush said he didn't think Democrats with alternative views on Iraq were unpatriotic."
The Journal-World's own reporter, Scott Rothschild, heard the same thing:
"Democrats who have criticized the president for the war and his tactics in fighting terrorists aren’t unpatriotic, Bush said, 'I’m just saying they’re wrong.'”
One would think such claims would be fact-checked before they are published. The failure to do so does not reflect well on the editorial page editor or the newspaper as a whole.
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