Hume-Gate!

O yeah, baby! Time to bring down the MSM! We are the truth tellers!

Sorry, I haven't had my PowerLine-ectomy yet. But actually, this needs to be looked into:

James Roosevelt Jr: Hume's "outrageous distortion" of FDR "calls for a retraction, an apology, maybe even a resignation"

MSNBC host Keith Olbermann and former Social Security associate commissioner James Roosevelt Jr. examined how FOX News Washington managing editor Brit Hume and other pundits distorted a quote by Roosevelt Jr.'s grandfather, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in order to claim that the former president would have supported privatizing Social Security.

Here's the gist of the thing. Hume said this:

"It turns out," Hume said, "that FDR himself planned to include private investment accounts in the Social Security program when he proposed it. In a written statement to Congress in 1935, Roosevelt said that any Social Security plan should include, 'Voluntary contributory annuities, by which individual initiative can increase the annual amounts received in old age,' adding that government funding, 'ought to ultimately be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans.'"

And this is how Olbermann and Roosevelt understand it:

OLBERMANN: The argument is that Mr. Hume more or less twisted this entirely around. Can you explain it in layman's terms?

ROOSEVELT: I think I can. And it's really quite an amazing distortion. What they did was that they took a very simple statement that my grandfather made, which said that Social Security, when it was enacted almost 70 years ago, ought to first of all have a part that took care of people who didn't have time to build up a Social Security account. And the government should fund that out of general revenues.

Secondly, Social Security should have a self-sustaining portion that was funded by contributions from both employers and employees. That's what we know and have known for 70 successful years as Social Security.

And thirdly, those who wanted and who needed to, as many -- almost everybody -- did, to have a higher income and retirement, should have accounts where they could pay in voluntarily, in addition to the guaranteed Social Security benefit.

And then my grandfather said that eventually, the self-sustaining portion of the guaranteed insurance would phase out the government-paid portion. That's because we would have a fully functioning Social Security system as we do today.

What Brit Hume and others have done is take portions of that paragraph and rearrange it so that it says something entirely different from what he intended.

This is a Republican talking point, promoted not just by Hume but Bill "Put It All on Red!" Bennett and John Fund of the WSJ. Is it a firing offense? I don't even know what a firing offense is anymore. But an apology would be, er, expected. Although Josh Marshall put it best on Air America yesterday: "He [Hume] was distorting the truth and misleading his viewers? Isn't that simply fulfilling his job description?"

[UPDATE] Atrios has this exactly right:

Brit Hume has no standards. Fox News has no standards. And, none of the usual suspects even tries to hold them to any standard.

So, when people ask why the "left" can't collect any scalps, that's why. You can't shame people who have no shame.