Greenwich Time's Vigdor Shills for Chris Shays- Again!

by: thomashooker

Sat Aug 21, 2010 at 14:39:23 PM EDT

Once again, Connecticut is being treated to a hefty dose of conservative media-induced amnesia, this time at the hands of Greenwich Time/Stamford Advocate shill Neil Vigdor.  Vigdor conveniently paints former 4th district Republican congressman Chris Shays as a righteous voice who has been proved prescient by Roger Clemens' indictment on federal charges of lying to Congress under oath.

According to Vigdor:

Former U.S. Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., Friday gave Roger Clemens a taste of the chin music that the once-sure-fire Hall of Fame pitcher used to dish out on the mound, saying Clemens has no one to blame but himself for legal troubles hanging over him...

But when the heat was on Clemens during his actual testimony, Shays said that the inconsistencies became obvious, with Clemens acknowledging that he was injected with the anaesthetic lidocaine and vitamin B-12 -- both legal substances -- by his former trainer Brian McNamee.

"So he lied to me in the office," Shays said. "He just lost all credibility the moment he started to testify."

"It was very clear during the course of that day that he was untruthful to Congress and would ultimately have to pay the price," said Shays.

But that is certainly not the tune that Shays was singing during that congressional hearing:  

"I hope and pray Roger is telling the truth...He's a sports icon. He's a remarkable player. Brian McNamee is, frankly, kind of sleazy. I hope he's the one that is lying. I hope someone who a lot of Americans look up to is telling the truth."

In the congressional hearing Shays called Brian McNamee a "police officer who became a drug dealer," , while defending Clemens.

In fact, before the hearings were held, Shays was denigrating the entire idea of holding hearings in the first place:

WASHINGTON -- Rep. Christopher Shays, a member of a congressional panel probing the use of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs in baseball, said Thursday there is little to be gained by calling players to testify at hearings scheduled for next month.

"If we went back to every player, we would have to do research every morning, noon and night," Shays, R-Conn., said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. "There's no way in my judgment we're going to be able to focus on the past. Only a real court can do that, in my judgment."

And the New York Daily News recalled in 2009 how Shays had excoriated McNamee at those hearings:

Exactly one year ago, Connecticut Republican Christopher Shays called Brian McNamee a "drug dealer." He was one of several GOP congressmen in the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform who sided with Roger Clemens during the lengthy and contentious Feb.13 hearing on the Mitchell Report and steroids.

No surprise that Shays was ambivalent about hearings, since, in a previous congressional hearing on steroids in baseball, Chris Shays
took about as much heat as Commissioner Bud Selig and players union executive director Don Fehr.:

Shays, R-Conn., was ridiculed in the media for getting facts about baseball and sports history wrong and incorrectly pronouncing the name of former slugger Rafael Palmeiro.

And the sports talk radio show "Mike and the Mad Dog" ripped into Shays after the hearings, calling him an embarrassment:

Mad Dog: "Here's the thing about Shays. I'm gonna go out of my way in November. We're gonna get him the hell out of Connecticut. We're gonna get Himes in there."

The article on Shays is one in a series from their shill-in-residence Vigdor.  He is the character who repeatedly denigrated Ned Lamont during his 2006 senatorial campaign by almost unfailingly referring to him as a "political neophyte", disregarding his seven years of service in elective office in Greenwich and his run for state senate, or a "Greenwich millionaire", an appellation that he has virtually never attached to Greenwich billionaire and Republican state senator Scott Frantz, or to the two Greenwich billionaire Republican state representatives Livvy Floren Lile Gibbons.  And this is the guy who almost invariably referred to former Democratic state house of representative candidate Ed Krumeich as with the conservative pejorative "trial lawyer", rather than attorney and long-time partner in one of the state's largest law practices.

This whitewashing Shays' participation in the Clemens hearings is certainly predictable, but it is still inexcusable.  And yet another example of why the people in this state are fed up with right-wing shills like Vigdor and our conservative corporate press, including his employer Hearst Newspapers.