The Dish

Larison and Poulos have come up with a great moniker for Huckers. Hard to beat Michael Brendan Dougherty’s one-liner about Huckabee’s view of the death penalty, though:

"Basically, he’d kill them but he’d cry about it afterwards."

Heh.

Greenwald rounds up all the bloviation and hysteria at NRO over Beauchamp, and notes of the NRO "apology":

Lopez just relies upon vague cliches that say nothing. She claims, for instance, that she reached these conclusions about Smith’s posts "after doing a thorough investigation of some of the points made in some of those posts," but she never identifies a single specific fact which this supposed "investigation" revealed or what "some of those points" were that need correction, nor does she identify a single step which this supposed "investigation" entailed.

Meanwhile, a right-wing blogger calls for Smith to be fired from NRO. As I’ve said, I don’t think Beauchamp has emerged as a reporter with credibility, and assigning his wife as his fact-checker was a terrible decision. But as an active duty soldier, controlled by his superiors, he was not as available as Smith is or was; the small factual assertions of incidents which are unremarkable among soldiers in wartime were nothing like as checkable as the idea that 5,000 Hezbollah soldiers were marching on Beirut; and TNR has now produced a 6,000 word, nostra culpa and explanation. Neither writer is at this point defensible, I’m afraid. But only one is still employed used as a blogger and described by his editor as "reliable".

He’s scheduling a December 6 speech, according to Halperin. A Romney adviser says it’s

"an opportunity for Gov. Romney to share his views on religious liberty, the grand tradition religious tolerance has played in the progress of our nation and how the governor’s own faith would inform his Presidency."

A rare weekend post rivets.

A reader writes:

I’m the source that took the Smith story to Edsall. I gave the story to him not to act on some partisan grudge but to correct the record and hopefully alert editors to how completely inaccurate Smith’s reporting and over-the-top his "behavior" (I actually doubt he did much of what he claimed in the piece). But I should note that after laughing at his blog’s melodrama, both myself and Chris from back to iraq.com alerted NRO that his reporting was loony.

They never responded or contacted either of us to see what the problem was, forcing me to try and find a reporter interested to bring out the problems. It’s really a self-inflicted crisis for them. They knew his work was crap more than 6 weeks ago.

More than six weeks ago? Malkin has blogged that

Kathryn Lopez, to her credit, immediately disclosed the controversy to readers.

My italics. I don’t know the timeline, but the email above is from Beirut photo-journalist, Mitchell Prothero. And Smith was writing for NRO all that time – and still is. Here’s K-Lo’s assessment of Smith as of Friday:

I thank Smith for his good, brave work. He’s a smart, reliable reporter with a great patriotic spirit and sense of service.

Reliable? K-Lo has some more ‘splaining to do.

It would appear that National Geographic has been busted.

And it’s a good question:

I do not need persuading that reading remains an absolutely essential skill, with typing, in one form or another, having become almost as valuable. But: what use now is handwriting? I do not ask this in a sneering, it’s-useless way, as a merely rhetorical question. Maybe handwriting really does still have crucially important uses. If the teaching of handwriting is every bit as valuable as it ever was, I would love to be told this, and told why, so that I can proceed with my own current teaching duties with renewed enthusiasm? But, is it?

I once had beautiful hand-writing. I wrote every paper before grad school in longhand with a fountain pen. I still have a Parker ink pen, but I hardly ever use it. And when I do, my scrawl is far worse than it once was.

A reader writes:

Note this. Almost exactly 24 hours after the K-Lo "editor’s note" about Smith. And how many posts were there on the Corner about Smith? Zero. And yet McCarthy saw fit to GLOAT about Beauchamp?

Also, note Malkin’s characterization of the Beauchamp articles: "bullcrap". Nowhere in Foer’s piece do I see any indication that there is any proof that the facts in Beauchamp’s articles are false, only questions about positive proof that they’re true (this has been the issue all along, of course). But in Thomas’s case, plenty of other people in the area (including ideological fellow travelers) have flat out said that Thomas is a liar.

I know it’s hard to believe that the Corner has a double standard, but…

Instapundit finally weighs in. I wonder who is going to accuse NRO of being traitors and who’s going to organize ad boycotts.

She blogged the NRO scandal at around the time I wrote this post and I missed it. Here she is:

The problem is that “more context” and “caveats” aren’t what was needed. Just the facts would have sufficed. Smith’s work in those posts was not “good” or “brave.” And “the nature of blogging” doesn’t excuse the phenomenal errors. Given Smith’s admissions, “reliable” is not a word that should attach to his Lebanon reporting.

We are all fallible. We all make mistakes. But these were not small mistakes. They were XXL ones.

Moreover, online journalists and bloggers can’t have it both ways: They can’t ask for mainstream media parity when their reporting is dead-on and ahead-of-the-curve–and at the same time hide behind the “well, I was just blogging” excuse if their reporting turns out to be as ill-sourced and wrong-headed as the legacy media’s. Also note: In one of the tainted posts, the headline isn’t “Blogging from Lebanon.” It’s “Reporting from Lebanon.”

One difference with TNR: Smith is still employed as a free-lancer by NRO, and wrote these untruths as a staff reporter regular blogger on NRO’s site.