Tuesday, October 18, 2005

Ed Shultz radio show pulled from AFR before Starting

Ed Schultz has a radio show heard across the country, and, for a short time, was slated to be heard on Armed Forces Radio (AFR) as well. Ed had received a signed letter from AFR confirming that his show would be heard on AFR, which, until now, has only had Rush Limbaugh and James Dobson's Focus On The Family radio offering general commentary. That was on 9/29/05.

All seemed to be going well, with the Ed Schultz Show scheduled to start on Oct 17.

That is, however, until someone at the Pentagon noticed that Ed was actually awake and breathing, and able to notice that when the Bush White House tried to build a "Potemkin village" using the U.S. troops in Iraq when Bush recently made a "conference video call" to what was (according to the White House press secretary) an unscripted and unrehearsed dialog between Bush and the soldiers.

Unfortunately for the White House, when specifically asked, they claimed that there would be no scripting, and no pre-vetting of questions. Because of *that* response, it was all the more embarrassing when there was a live cable feed, before Bush started his part of the call, when Pentagon staff went over exactly what the procedure would be, and what kind of questions Bush was going to ask, and who should yield the mike to whom. Including an admonition, at one point, on just what to do if the call got "off the script."

Ed actually had the temerity to make the call that this was contrary to the earlier stated pronouncements by the White House, and mentioned it on his show. And it showed even more gall to actually play a clip of Allison Barber doing the coaching.

Yesterday morning (Monday, 10/17/05) Ed was informed that he would not actually be airing his show on AFR that day after all.

More under the fold...

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