Bill Moyers, Hypocrite

I make it no secret that I strongly dislike Bill Moyers.

What bothers me most about Moyers is how he presents himself as compared to the reality of what he is.

As Commentary Magazine describes:

Moyers is among the most sanctimonious individuals on television (quite a feat, given the competition). He presents himself as a champion of good government, an intrepid voice for integrity and honesty, ever on the lookout for people who would degrade our public discourse or act in a dishonorable manner.

I'd add to that that he's always pushing himself as an independently minded "journalist" who's only interested in the truth.

But the reality is that Moyers is a partisan hack. That doesn't mean he doesn't occasionally bring some important issue to light or that he's always wrong. But he does have an agenda. It's liberal. And his typical modus operandi is trying to make Republicans look foolish or corrupt.

And, this week, we're reminded that Moyers has been doing this since his days of working for the Johnson administration. Specifically, the Washington Post is reporting that:

Even Bill Moyers, a White House aide now best known as a liberal television commentator, is described in the records as seeking information on the sexual preferences of White House staff members. Moyers said by e-mail yesterday that his memory is unclear after so many years but that he may have been simply looking for details of allegations first brought to the president by Hoover.

A 2005 Wall Street Journal article sheds additional light on this:

Only a few weeks before the 1964 election, a powerful presidential assistant, Walter Jenkins, was arrested in a men's room in Washington. Evidently, the president was concerned that Barry Goldwater would use that against him in the election. Another assistant, Bill Moyers, was tasked to direct Hoover to do an investigation of Goldwater's staff to find similar evidence of homosexual activity. Mr. Moyers' memo to the FBI was in one of the files.

When the press reported this, I received a call in my office from Mr. Moyers. Several of my assistants were with me. He was outraged; he claimed that this was another example of the Bureau salting its files with phony CIA memos. I was taken aback. I offered to conduct an investigation, which if his contention was correct, would lead me to publicly exonerate him. There was a pause on the line and then he said, "I was very young. How will I explain this to my children?" And then he rang off. I thought to myself that a number of the Watergate figures, some of whom the department was prosecuting, were very young, too.

And that's who Moyers is. Not a open minded "journalist." A man with an agenda to smear conservatives. Wether it's alleging a scandal without any evidence or trying to "out" gays in 1964, it's all for the same purpose with Moyers.

And, of course this "outing" business isn't the only example of Moyers acting badly during the LBJ years. As Mark Hemingway notes:

Moyers and J. Edgar Hoover worked together to illegally bug Martin Luther King jr. as well as leak unflattering information about political enemies to the press.

And, returning back to returning to the fore-quoted Commentary Magazine article:

Mr. Moyers was a key figure in the creation of the notorious “Daisy” ad, dubbed by the New York Times at the time as “probably the most controversial TV commercial of all time.” The ad featured a young girl plucking daisy petals as a countdown leads to her annihilation in a nuclear blast. The message was clear: this was the fate of the earth if Barry Goldwater were elected.

Moyers was, and is, a hypocrite and political hatchetman. He is no journalist.