The Drudge Report is featuring a link to a YouTube video of Ted Turner speaking at the National Press Club. In the thirty-second video, Turner is clearly expressing his reservations about the wisdom of invading Iraq in 2003, but the Drudge headline reads, “Ted Turner says he can’t pick sides in War on Terror.”
This is little more than a smear-job coordinated by a YouTube user who has dishonestly edited a portion of CSPAN’s coverage of the event.Turner says, “There are a lot of things about this war that disturbs me … and one of them is the attitude expressed most clearly by our President, that either ‘you are with us or you are against us.'” (emphasis mine)
“This war” quite obviously refers to Iraq, not the broader War on Terror. However, the YouTube video is edited to make this reference somewhat ambiguous. But if you watch the CSPAN feed of the event, you can see that at minute 44 — moments before the You Tube snippet begins — the moderator asks, “What do you think of the fact that other people who have criticized the Iraq war have had their patriotism questioned?”
It was in response this question that Turner laments the kind of political polarization that leads people to question the patriotism of those who take issue with war in Iraq. The cropped YouTube video leaves the moderator’s question out, catching Turner mid-way through his response. And Drudge links to the edited snippet, ironically, in order to perpetuate the very character smear that Turner tackles head on just a few seconds before the YouTube video begins.