The fair and balanced outfit gets busted yet again: has its innards exposed Megan thinks scrutinizing them is a good good thing. UPDATE: There is, it turns out, a much more innocent explanation for this, as a reader explains:
I am a former intern in Fox News’ web department, and I can tell you with certainty that “Doomsday” and “Monster” are internal code names used to describe the dimensions of images that appear on the FoxNews.com home page.
A “Doomsday Top” describes a wide oversized image, like the one of Obama’s War Council in this example. When FoxNews.com goes into “Doomsday Mode,” a single story will appear above the fold with one large photograph, such as this one.
Likewise, “Monster” corresponds to another image size: Big, but not quite as big as Doomsday. You will notice that the two images with the Monster title are the same size.
The fact that nobody bothered to rename these images something less ominous certainly constitutes laziness or carelessness on somebody’s part, but probably nothing more.
That sounds perfectly reasonable to me, and “busted” is therefore inaccurate. Apologies. But the phrase “Doomsday Top” will not easily slip my consciousness.
Tom Ricks reviews David Kilcullen's speech from earlier in the week:
[Kilcullen's] bottom line is that there are two real options in Afghanistan: Either tell the Kabul government we are pulling out, or put in enough troops to actually break the cycle of corruption, which he said would be a minimum of about 40,000. “We either put in enough to control, or we get out.” The worst thing we could do, he added, is put in enough troops to get more people killed but not enough to do anything to break change the behavior of corrupt officials. Also, he said, it is more about what you do than the actual number of troops — “If you do it wrong, you could put it a million troops and it wouldn’t make any difference.”
I just don't believe this is doable without a flawless decades-long occupation. And the odds of that are tiny and the cost beyond any rational measurement of costs and benefits. I believe Obama knows this because he is not crazy, but he also knows that withdrawal would be used by the GOP to flay him alive for a war they botched but they insist he must now somehow save.
"I meet with the gays here and there. They were in my house two weeks ago. I don’t mind gays. But I don’t want ‘em stuffing it down my throat all the time," – Utah Senator Chris Buttars, explaining his opposition to allowing same-sex couples to adopt children.
I predict that Palin will come to Arizona next summer to campaign for McCain, will make an impassioned case for him, and will help him win. She will thereby repay McCain for his confidence in picking her last year, help keep McCain as a crucial voice in the Senate for a strong foreign policy, and get credit for being a different kind of populist conservative—a Reaganite, not a Buchananite, populist—than the immigration-obsessed, voter-alienating (he was ousted in 2006 in a Republican district) Hayworth.
Predict? This is obviously a way to prevent the McCain-Palin camps' civil war from escalating so that the full details of the chaotic 2008 campaign remain under wraps.
A key part of Sarah Palin's work of magical realism is her victimization at the hands of the evil librul media. So this part of "Going Rogue" is par for the course. Peter Hamby:
"In one early press conference we noticed that our local reporters were flanked by a couple of reporters from the Lower 48 who'd been hanging out around Juneau in search of material for their own Sarah Palin book," Palin writes. "We never shut our doors to anyone, so people of all kinds attended these press availabilities. But glancing along the side wall, I recognized these particular folks as the same ones who had cornered Piper on her walk home from Harborview Elementary School and talked to her for who knows how long about who knows what."… According to Palin, Piper returned home [after a press conference] and told her mother: "Mom, remember those reporters who came on the campaign plane with us? You know, the ones Nicolle [Wallace] said didn't like us very much? They just interviewed me on the sidewalk." Palin adds after the incident, Piper was no longer allowed to walk to or from school by herself.
Both the reporters (one of whom worked for Fox News in the campaign) and Wallace deny the story outright.
Conroy and Walshe said in a statement Tuesday that in the course of
reporting for their book, they conducted 190 interviews, including sit-downs with Palin's parents and her husband Todd.
"We did not, however, interview Piper Palin, nor did we corner her on her way home from school," Conroy and Walshe told CNN in a statement. "Contrary to Governor Palin's recollection of having seen us both at a press conference, Scott has never attended a press conference in Alaska."
Wallace, who advised Palin on media strategy during the campaign but fell out favor with the candidate, also rejected Palin's version of the story. She said it would have been impossible for Piper to have used her by name in a discussion about the campaign reporters in question, because Wallace never spoke to Piper about them.
"I have never met Shushannah and Scott and had never seen Shushannah until I saw her on TV yesterday," Wallace said in an e-mail to CNN. "Couldn't have picked either of them out of a line up and never heard their names or had any idea who they were until after the campaign ended."
I put this in the odd lies category because the fact that Scott Conroy never attended any press conferences in Alaska is an empirical fact that makes Palin's story, like so many others she has told, empirically untrue. From Conroy's and Walshe's account, Piper liked them and bumped into them once in Juneau and told them how excited she was to be back in Alaska. For some reason, Palin is extremely defensive about even pleasant interactions of her kids with anyone in the press outside her control. She burst into Bristol's lone TV interview by herself halfway through.
In one part of her work of magical realism, Palin goes off on the press's alleged recklessness and bias in wondering whether her extraordinary stories about her fifth pregnancy were, er, accurate. Here's the passage from Going Rogue:
Formerly reputable outlets like the Atlantic ran with the loony conspiracy theory that I was not Trig's mother – perhaps it was Bristol or Willow, they suggested. Even the Anchorage Daily News reporters, who knew better, couldn't get enough of the story.
I'm not going to go over all this again, but suffice it to say that Palin is right that I certainly thought that the stories in the public record were fantastic and merited probing further and asked the campaign itself to issue some medical records to nip the crazy – but not quite impossible – rumor in the bud. They reacted with outrage that the question was even askable. Alas, the only objective evidence we ever got in the end was a one-page, general statement from her doctor, issued a few hours before polling opened last November. So I'm guilty for treating this as a genuine factual question – rather than as a self-evident absurdity to be dismissed. I'll take my lumps for that (and have). But I haven't "run with" any alternative to the most likely fact that Trig is indeed Sarah's biological child. I just refuse to lie about my own skepticism of everything Palin says without proof. As for Willow being Trig's mother, I have to say that has never occurred to me for an instant and the Dish has no such reference. Maybe Palin is thinking of some other outlet.
But the attack on the Anchorage Daily News is much more unfair.
The ADN's editor, Pat Dougherty, did not run a single story on this in the campaign. It was only after the campaign that the ADN attempted to do a follow-up to destroy for ever what editor Pat Dougherty believed was a nutty but weirdly resilient rumor. The ADN did not "know better," in other words, or else they wouldn't have tried to do a story (which never ran) at all. All they wanted was to dispel the rumors – long after the campaign was over – as a matter of house-keeping. But instead of Palin offering an easily found medical record or birth certificate or some such, she went off the wall with an email exchange with the editor that remains a high point of Palin drama and defensiveness:
[I]s your paper really still pursuing the sensational lie that I am not Trig's mother? Is it true you have a reporter still bothering my state office, my very busy doctor (who's already set the record straight for you), and the school district, in pursuit of your ridiculous conspiracy?
Read the whole email exchange between Palin and Dougherty and make your own mind up.
The Dish 