Month: July 2010

Remember all those liberals and lefties huffily denouncing this blog's attempts to make sense of Sarah Palin's bizarre stories about the pregnancy and birth of her alleged fifth child? I was nuts, crazy, vile, disgusting, etc etc to indulge in what Dave Weigel, with no working knowledge of the story, calls "nonsense." You may also recall that the liberal media didn't touch this with a barge-pole  – and still hasn't (apart from a NYT puff-piece that I found utterly credulous at the time). Newsweek has even put its entire reputation behind the details of the story as outlined in Going Rogue, without doing any independent reporting on the subject.

Well, we now know, that, for some at least, I wasn't crazy. I was just not disciplined enough to curtail what this blog airs in order to conform with what many Journo-listers believed were the interests of the Obama campaign. Any delusions that Journo-List was not, in part, a collusory venture to shape the media narrative in ways to benefit Obama, above and beyond ferreting out the truth about any and all candidates, must now be abandoned. Ezra Klein has already been caught in a bald-faced lie about his discretion in picking members; and the notion that this was simply a water-cooler collection of journalistic thoughts is also belied by the emails now published by the Daily Caller.

One should say this, however: I have no way of knowing what the DC has omitted, and how it has shaped this information. The thread stops rather abruptly. Maybe there is context that adds to what we know. I do not trust in any way the ethics of the Daily Caller. Nonetheless, I was obviously not alone in those August days, when I was pilloried for saying out loud what the entire chattering class was saying in private. Check these quotes out. First Ezra, setting down the line:

Seriously, folks? Best case scenario, what’s your outcome here: Her daughter, hounded by the tabloids, breaks down that it was her child, and her mother heroically took on the burden and welcomed the disabled boy as one of her own? Palin’s relationship with her children — however they may have come to her — strikes me as pretty far out of bounds. By all accounts she’s a wonderful mother, and devoted to her fifth son. Leave this be.

If you want to know why the allegedly liberal media didn't touch – and still won't touch – this story, look no further. It has nothing to do with the facts, and everything to do with their politics. Notice the core modus operandi of the political operative, not the journalist. When dealing with a story: first ask yourself not if it is true but whether the outcome benefits your side. Second, write things in defense of this that you cannot possibly know. Palin a "wonderful mother"? How on earth did Klein know that? 

Here's Katha Pollitt, untroubled by the possible truth:

I like what you said about this possibly being a dirty trick, intended to blow up in our faces. so let’s just leave it alone…

Mark Schmitt:

“We” don’t have to do any digging. There’s enough reason for suspicion that the entire GOP research team is probably off the Obama-Biden job for the weekend to figure out what they don’t know, but should have, about Sarah Palin.

Actually, we know that the McCain team never asked her about this at all – and still don't know. They just played the simple denial game, demanded deference, worked out an agreement with the liberal media not to inquire into the story, and never, ever asked about it. But they sure felt that there was something fishy here. Laura Rozen:

seriously, if her water broke and the baby was what two months premature, it doesn’t seem normal to have not gone straight to the nearest hospital. again, if the official story is true. but that just doesn’t make any sense.

Er, yes – but if a story doesn't make sense and inquiring into it might backfire, the liberal journalists won't inquire. "Leave this be" comes the instructions from Ezra, and leave this be they dutifully did. Lamar Robertson:

all right. this is getting way fishy now. 1) getting onto the plane TO ALASKA after your water breaks? i’m sorry. that does not happen. i live 2 minutes from the hospital. my wife went to the hospital immediately after her water broke w/ my second child and it was almost too late to get the epidural. 2) the baby was 6 lbs, 2 oz? That’s a healthy sized baby for a preemie. it’s also incongruous w/ the notion that she — a thin person — wasn’t showing at 7 months.

Paul Waldman:

If the date on this photo from the Anchorage Daily News web site is correct, she is absolutely, positively, not seven months pregnant.

Kathleen Geier:

When I first heard this story, I thought it was preposterous. (And btw, a scenario similar to this lurid tale occurred last season on Desperate Housewives). And maybe I really am losing it, driven over the edge at last by my hatred of all things Republican, but at this point I’m starting to believe it.

All great points. Especially the latter. But nothing was to be aired in public, for fear of backlash from the right. 

This is your liberal media, ladies and gentlemen: totally partisan, interested in the truth only if it advances their agenda, and devoid of any balls whatsoever. And people wonder how this farce of a candidate now controls one major political party and could well be our next president. One reason is that we do not have a functioning adversarial media uncorrupted by partisan loyalty and tactics.

(See my update here.)

In case you were suffering from an excess of optimism this morning, Bruce Bartlett has the cure:

What happens if we have a double-dip next year? Is it realistic to think that any stimulus at all is possible on the fiscal side? Given the likelihood of Republican gains in the November elections and the strong Republican incentive to make the economy as bad as possible going into 2012, I don’t think it would even be possible to pass a stimulus package that was 100% composed of tax cuts—the only stimulus Republicans might support.

The war is over, apparently, and we already won it. This is the kind of utopianism that now passes for analysis on the right, with respect to the fiasco of Iraq.

Blumenthal takes a look at the poll from last week showing Democrats resurgent. Bottom line:

The case for true “jump” in Democratic performance on the generic House ballot is weak. If we add the context of other recent polls, it gets weaker still. Their results scatter around a dead-heat margin in ways that are more or less consistent with their typical house effects on the generic ballot.

As always, more data next week will likely settle the issue, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see the next move in Gallup’s weekly tracking in the Republican direction, not because of real-world events but rather due to what statisticians call a reversion to the mean.

Oriental, North Carolina, 6.47 pm

My two cents. But this one has a stark simplicity to it:

“Reading on the toilet.”
James Franco, actor

Alexis Madrigal deems the latest document dump "a milestone in the new news ecosystem":

The rogue, rather mysterious website provided the raw data; the newspapers provided the context, corroboration, analysis, and distribution. … Traditional media organizations are increasingly reaching out to different kinds of smaller outfits for help compiling data and conducting investigations. NPR is partnering with several journalism startups to deliver their information out to a larger audience. The Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University broke a large story on renewable energy in association with ABC's World News Tonight. ProPublica's 32 full-time investigative reporters offer their stories exclusively to a traditional media player.

Andrew Bacevich calls this a new type of "information warfare":

Rather than being defined as actions undertaken by a government to influence the perception of reality, information warfare now includes actions taken by disaffected functionaries within government to discredit the officially approved view of reality. This action is the handiwork of subversives, perhaps soldiers, perhaps civilians. Within our own national security apparatus, a second insurgent campaign may well have begun. Its purpose: bring America’s longest war to an end. Given the realities of the digital age, this second insurgency may well prove at least as difficult to suppress as the one that preoccupies General Petraeus in Kabul.

Pejman does his best to profess "shock" at some writers' view that the Israeli government has been damaging US interests and its own survival by its policies for the past few years, and that the immensely influential pro-Israel lobby bears some responsibility for enabling this. But in trying to find anti-Semitism in any of our writings, he comes up short. In fact, he honorably bears witness to the opposite:

For the record, Stephen Walt was a professor of mine for two classes back when he was at the University of Chicago. Part of the reason I consider it painful to write about what his place in the blogosphere has become is that in the time that I knew him, I never at any time heard him say, or even intimate anything that could be remotely considered anti-Semitic …

I vividly remember how searing John Mearsheimer’s lecture on the Holocaust was, how powerful and unsparing his discussion was concerning the manner in which millions of Jews were massacred. He made sure that we, his students, fully absorbed the horrors attendant to the Holocaust, and in doing so, he did us a massive favor by ensuring that we were fully cognizant of the barbarism associated with the times.

There is no attempt to exonerate me from the Tablet's and The New Republic's baseless smears – but Google will do. What Pejman's point boils down to is that we, as writers, must constantly berate any and all vile anti-Semites who try to exploit or co-opt our arguments, without our knowledge. I guess I thought that went without saying. But my own diligence against anti-Semitism, in all its forms, in my own church in particular, is well-documented and has gone back decades.

I will not be intimidated from examining and criticizing both the actions of the Israeli government and the lobby that does so much to enable it, against what I believe are the long-term interests of the US and the West. Neither, I suspect, will the others now routinely targeted with these lies and smears.

A contrarian view of the pamphleteer.