David Cole: “…here’s what should haunt Josh Howard, and here’s what makes his festival wins so ironic”

By the way, Cole is right about Breitbart: He smeared Shirley Sherrod. It’s why I can’t get fully onboard with the “Andrew!” worship.

He also sounded and acted like an unrecovered alcoholic/addict and/or untreated manic depressive, and owed a duty to his wife and children to take better care of himself.

Yes, Breitbart’s death was a shocking loss (I cried on Sun TV) but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t subject him to the same scrutiny to which he subjected others…

Anyway, here’s Cole on the guy behind a new documentary (and an old scandal):

As if blaming Acer’s victims for their own deaths wasn’t bad enough, Howard conveniently forgot to inform his viewers that the scientific “expert” who was the linchpin of the segment was dirty as sin. Lionel Resnick, a dermatologist(!), challenged the accuracy of the CDC’s DNA sequencing, which had linked the AIDS virus in Acer’s patients to the virus Acer himself carried. But it turned out that Resnick was a paid shill ($300,000, to be exact) for CIGNA, Acer’s insurance company. Howard not only didn’t mention the CIGNA connection, he also conveniently left out that Resnick’s conclusions had been dismissed by pretty much everyone else who examined the case (shortly after the 60 Minutes piece aired, Resnick was indicted for fraud and fled to the Cayman Islands).

The CDC took the highly unusual step of denouncing the 60 Minutes segment in an article in the Annals of Internal Medicine. That’s how bad Howard’s “journalism” was. It should be added that even though Howard titled the segment “Kimberly’s Story,” he didn’t interview any of her friends or family. The point of the piece was to smear a girl who died a terrible death at the hands of a gay man. Based on Howard’s hit job, The New York Times’ carbuncle-in-residence Frank Rich labeled Bergalis a homophobe, blaming her for hurting the feelings of the poor dentist who killed her. Rich even went so far as to put scare quotes around “victim” when referring to her.