Category: The Dish

The small man in search of a balcony, like all two-bit bullies, has the usual thuggish security detail. And he doesn’t like being forced to respond to allegations about his shady past:

“We’ve already explained it,” he said, walking past reporters after a town hall meeting. Giuliani, who is normally friendly to reporters, bristled past them, and campaign staffers were unusually physical in keeping the press away. Several campaign aides told campaign reporters to return to the press area, and some of his security detail manhandled reporters.

If his goons act like this on a minor issue in a primary campaign, can you imagine how he’d handle his police powers as president?

My Atlantic essay on the transformational potential of Obama can be read here.

Makes me love him all the more.

Read these two items, dropped into the blogosphere late on a Friday afternoon: Smith’s defense and Lopez’s editorial note. It’s somewhat shady that Smith does not provide links in his apology to his original disputed stories, doesn’t name or link to his critics, and appears, by his own account, to have reported events and facts that were actually relayed to him by anonymous sources as if he had seen them himself. Here’s a flavor of the kind of issue involved:

Did I physically see and count 200 men carrying weapons? No. If I mistakenly conveyed that impression to my readers, I apologize…

On another matter:

This is a case where I should have caveated the reporting by saying that I only witnessed a fraction of what happened (from a moving car) …

Hmmm.

I’ll leave the follow-up to others. I’m not an expert in the area, and have only read the two posts linked above. As Smith and Lopez assumed, I’m headed home now for the weekend. But let’s see if these reportorial exaggerations and alleged fictions get as much scrutiny in the right-wing blogosphere as the TNR Beauchamp contretemps. I’ll be especially curious to see what Howie Kurtz and Glenn Reynolds do with the story. How many posts did the Corner have on two minor factual issues – still unresolved – in a TNR Diarist? How much preening and posturing has Reynolds done with respect to Beauchamp? And this is on a blog by a reporter still employed by NRO, with a long history of writing for the publication. For those interested in examining Smith’s archive, it’s probably a good place to start some more fact-checking. What goes around … Or as Drudge would put it, developing …

NotCot raves about the art of Eric Feng, aka Feric:

His work is gorgeous – a mixture of real and imagined and of natural and mechanical. I love the fantastical, mechanical anatomies of his characters, and how you are given a peek at what is beneath through transparent layering.

The very cool online gallery is here.

By cell-phone, of course. Anyone else would make this seem horrifying. And it is, of course. But somehow he gets away with it. Which is why he’s the most formidable Christianist in the country right now, asking merely to lead a Christianist party:

The press is getting its act together. But why were we so negligent with Bush’s factual errors? Brendan Nyhan suggests:

(a) Rudy’s bluster invites more critical coverage — he _seems_ like more of a dissembler than the supposedly straight-talking Bush;
(b) Bush’s statistics were carefully parsed to be half-true, making them harder to debunk within the framework of supposedly "objective" journalism (this is the argument we make in ATPS), while Rudy’s are often just wrong;
(c) Reporters are becoming more skeptical about the use of statistics of the Bush administration;
(d) The political environment is pushing reporters toward more critical coverage of Republicans;
(e) All of the above.

The evidence is accumulating that she has tried to rig the Black and Brown event in Iowa tomorrow night – by packing the crowd with her supporters. This isn’t just unethical; it’s illegal.

From the annals of self-hatred:

"I cannot escape a simple conclusion: If men are going to be full human beings, we first have to stop being men."

You first, buddy. I’m still grieving for my foreskin.

Pat Robertson puts his weight behind the notion that a highway running through the US

"is the highway spoken of in Isaiah 35:8 – ‘And a highway will be there; it will be called the way of holiness.’"

They have begun purity sieges around the road. Their targets? Gay bars, among other places.