Crank Yankers

Sully "Grab Ass" Sullivan is fired up in anticipation that ABC News's 20/20 program will speak in mitigation of Matthew Shepard's murderers:

Now ABC News has prepared an important, thorough and debunking review of what happened. I was tangentially involved in the documentary, but wasn't privy to its most closely held findings. I have a feeling it will reveal how dangerous it is to rest an entire political argument on one incident, whose details were always murky and subsequently turned into myth.

Something -- quite a few things -- stink here. Most obviously, it's not clear how Sully knows the "documentary" will be an important, thorough debunking since he doesn't know what ABC's key findings are, and only "has a feeling" what the program might reveal.

The New York Post article to which Sully links claim that Shepard's killers now deny the killing was motivated by bias. Case closed. If you can't take the word of murdering, crank-dealing muggers who are seeking to make themselves look good and who are contradicting their earlier admissions, who can you trust?

As described, this whole project has the whiff of John "Make Shit Up" Stossel and his right-wing agenda. And the fact that Sully claims he was "tangientially involved" in the report makes it sound even more questionable. Sully has no first-hand knowledge of the circumstances of the crime or the participants' motivations. His only purported contribution is his vehement opposition to hate crimes laws (and his willingess to misrepresent them). If the program's focus is "what happened," the question of what the law should be is totally irrelevant. Unless the program is wingnut propaganda passing as news.