NewsBusters joins the Obama-Toyota conspiracy

NewsBusters' Tom Blumer was among the promoters of the bogus conspiracy theory that the Obama administration was deliberately terminating the franchises of Chrysler dealers who donated to Republicans -- and then taking it one step further by claming that minority-owned Chrysler dealers were disproportionately spared. Now Blumer has found a new bogus conspiracy to latch onto.

In a February 4 post, Blumer joins the likes of WorldNetDaily and the Washington Examiner (and, sadly, USA Today) in promoting the idea that the Obama administration is deliberately targeting Toyota for recalls in order to boost sales at bailed-out General Motors and Chrysler:

To the extent the government is leaning hard on the company, somebody in the press should be questioning whether the motivations are purely related to safety or whether they also involve generating as much negative publicity as possible about the principal foreign-based competitor of government-controlled General Motors and Chrysler.

In fact, as Media Matters has detailed, complaints about sudden acceleration in Toyota vehicles date back more than a decade -- Toyota is merely dealing with it now. Apparently, Blumer doesn't think the 19 fatalities and 815 vehicle crashes since 1999 reportedly linked to sudden acceleration in Toyota vehicles merit mention.

Blumer also suggested that the Associated Press, in reporting on the Toyota recall, is "looking over its shoulder to avoid getting White House pressure as Reuters experienced when it pulled Terri Cullen's tax column earlier this week. Cullen had the nerve to point out that there are some middle-class tax hits in President Obama's budget."

Oops! Blumer seems to be unaware that the day before, NewsBusters removed without comment a post falsely claiming that the Reuters article was deleted "without explanation." In fact, Reuters did provide an explanation -- the story, specifically its claims about "middle-class tax hits" that Blumer latched on to, was "wrong." Even the conservative American Enterprise Institute agrees.

NewsBusters, by the way, has yet to explain to its readers why that post was yanked, thus doing to the author of that post what he (falsely) accused Reuters of doing.

Somehow, we suspect that another NewsBusters post is about to disappear without explanation.