Month: January 2011

The New York Post has the story:

Who is behind the apparently concerted campaign to smear The New Yorker's Jane Mayer? For several weeks, the Daily Caller, a conservative Web site — co-founded by Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel, a former aide to former vice president Dick Cheney — have had a reporter poking around what they thought would be a scandalous story about Mayer. The allegations were serious — that Mayer borrowed or plagiarized from a liberal blogger and other mainstream publications for an Aug. 30 smackdown in The New Yorker on the conservative billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch. In the end, even the Daily Caller found the allegations to be unfounded, and to its credit, abandoned the story. The story is dead but the person or persons behind the allegations remains a shadowy mystery.

New Yorker Editor-In-Chief David Remnick said, "Everyone agrees there's no story here, and we're baffled by why someone would go through almost 10 years of articles when no one has ever raised ethical questions about Jane's reporting. It seems like someone is trying to stir up trouble where none exists."

Memo to Remnick: Mayer is a dangerous journalist, who has done heroic work in exposing the war crimes of the past president and crew. She also knows more about Clarence Thomas than anyone else has forgotten. She matters because the truth matters. Taking her career down is important for many.

Their different fates are telling. Clay Shirky grapples with the whole Wikileaks dynamic with his usual thoughtfulness here. I think he's onto something in his distinction between "international" and "global" media. International media – like the NYT or BBC – are based in a single country and are a product of its social and political norms and laws. Global media – like Wikileaks or Glenn Greenwald – belong nowhere and are institutionalized in nothing very solid. Classic Shirky analogy:

The LSD business is more global than the cocaine business, because coca leaves only grow in certain climates, but lysergic acid can be synthesized anywhere. Media is like this as well: The internet is more global than the telephone network, even though both systems can send data between any two points in the world. Similarly, Wikileaks is more global than the BBC or Al Jazeera; those organizations are very large, but they are international, with a home base as rooted in a particular place as a coca farmer is.

So governments can get at the sources of international media far more easily than they can global media:

Fans of game theory will recognize these conditions as those required for an iterated game of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, where the press exhibits self-restraint from short term defection against the US’s interests, in order to benefit from an amicable relationship with the government over the long haul. This is why the difference between the Times, as an international actor, and Wikileaks, as a global one, matters so much. Wikileaks does not have to play an iterated game of Prisoner’s Dilemma with the US. Not only is Wikileaks not housed in the US, it isn’t housed in any single other nation the US could complain to. They can defect at will.

I do think this is a paradigm shift, and a permanent one. The era of the Pentagon Papers is over. What will replace it we do not yet fully understand.

The "retard" responds. Will Palin? Original interview here.

Her life, as she has explained, is an open book. But somehow it's also locked shut:

Alaska state regulations require public officials to make public records available to the public within 10 days in most cases. On Monday evening, Sarah Palin's former staff in the Alaska governor's office requested another delay in making public 25,000 e-mails exchanged by Palin, her husband and her senior aides. The governor's office is asking the state's attorney general to approve a delay of five more months, until May 30, 2011. At that point, the request filed by msnbc.com and other news organizations will have been pending for 986 days.

Yep. Longer than her actual half-term in office.

Chait pwns.

Instapundit swings for the anti-Obama fences.

What’s interesting to me is not the extremist rhetoric Darrel Issa used to attack the Obama administration with no supporting evidence, but that the political atmosphere has shifted so this is enough of a liability for him to withdraw the statement. To say that the Obama administration has been one of the most corrupt in American history is on its face an absurd charge. And withdraw it he does:

Pathetic. But very telling. Notice Issa’s late attempt to include the past GOP as corrupt as well. He’s not stupid. The mood has changed. Nice job, Mr King, by the way.

The Boston Herald's Steve Buckley throws a few stereotypes under the bus:

A candid admission: There was a time when I hated it when my mother would call with an urgent request that I drop everything to take her shopping. These trips often involved the pursuit of trivial items — shoes, a table lamp, frozen strawberries.

Or scatter rugs: In any given year, my mother would acquire enough scatter rugs to cover every inch of the playing field at Fenway Park, including the bullpens. I, on the other hand, had much more important things to do — such as go on the radio to share my concerns about the depth of the Patriots’ special teams, or take Dan Duquette to task over his stated belief that Jose Offerman was going to replace Mo Vaughn’s on-base capabilities.

I like the way he buried his lede: it's a coming out column. And I know this sounds parochial or ethnic in a way I don't usually feel very much, but it has surprised me in a way how friendly Irish-Catholic communities have often turned out to be for gays over the past couple of decades. Obviously there are exceptions, but the polling bears it out as well: Catholics are fine with the homos. And the powerful beacon of gay equality in New England reflects that.

Why? We're so used to asking why the Vatican cannot grapple with this question coherently we forget to ask why Catholics are in fact so pro-gay. My own view is that it's a human thing. The Catholicism I grew up in and love was all about human dignity and compassion. Once a Catholic, even a dyed-in-the-wool type, wraps her mind around the human life of an actual gay person, the prejudice and fear dissipates. Dignitas kicks in. Even more striking: for many straight Catholics, especially those with gay family members, this is a wake-up call to social action and conscience. The idea that gays should continue to be marginalized, ostracized or even euphemized away … well, it's fading fast.

Or to put it another way: when Irish mothers on the hunt for scatter-rug bargains have joined your team, the game is pretty much over.

What's striking to me is the continued low rankings of the GOP. This is a party that has dominated a great deal of political debate in the US this past decade and yet has routinely been much less popular than either of its rival identities. I mean: at no point has the GOP sustained a real lead over the Dems in twenty years.

Vicious.