Letters to the Editor
-
O/T FISA
Marty Lederman (Balkinization} provides this link to a "comprehensive" FISA analysis
http://tinyurl.com/2l2gmm
I haven't waded through it yet, and I'm no Ondolette, et al, so no comment from me.
-
They have a stop order on reality checks.
I've been watching Republicans whine about the "Liberally biased" media for 37 years now; ever since Spiro Agnew's Des Moines speech; but one thing I've never heard is one Republican warn another that given the media's purported bias, taking a course of action is masochistically begging to be humiliated.
If Smith and Lopez actually believed the media was against them, they would have known that this report would be exposed and mercilessly be flogged to show that National Review Online was far more irresponsible than TNR and Beauchamp.
This is further proof, on top of the existing blizzard, that Conservative leaders are using the buzzwords, "Liberally biased media" as a stop order on reality checks. They know they're not victims, but they hope their followers will automatically shift their view of reality to favor Conservatives.
Even from a Conservative perspective, this is Trouble with a capital T. By getting everyone to believe Conservatives are doing better but the media isn't giving them due credit; they deprive themselves of the check on truly incompetent leaders. That is to say that if Conservatives truly knew the ins and outs of media criticism; they would have known that Bush was an incompetent long before the 2006 election.
-
Jay L does the same thing. He loses me
Glass everywhere
Glass houses with Glass journalism on both sides of the street.
C'mon, Glenn. You had me - and then you lost me. "The impressive transparency of TNR's Franklin Foer"? In an article about the very topic of partisan blindness? You do a great disservice to yourself.
Foer's 14-page pseudo-retraction can be summed up as "I hate to retract things. So here's what happened. You can see how, hypothetically, given that we didn't know anything for sure, it might have conceivably been difficult for us to definitively state that, for example, every word was 100% false, given the circumstances, and the extenuating, uh, situation of the thing, and, still, some of the words were either fairly innocuous, or pronouns, or things like that. So, I'm not gonna say the "R" word again, but, you know, it's hard to get in touch with the guy now, kinda like the college buddy I loaned some money to once, if you catch my drift. Oh, P.S., his shotgun wife did the fact-checking."
It's a shame that I have to slog through all the vitriol at right-wing sites, not even to get a "balanced" view (if there were such a thing), but just to get a few facts. And it's a shame that you've got the same blinders on here.
You spend too much time saying that the NRO scandal is worse than Beauchamp. I'm not convinced that it is, but more importantly, who freaking cares? It stinks to high hell, and as long as it's "worse" than K.Fed's parenting awards, it's news and bears reporting.
Trying to argue that our scandal is bigger than their scandal just sets you up for a cheap and easy straw-man dismissal. The debate is no longer about whether the NRO scandal should be discussed because it exists; now it's whether it should be discussed because there are "better" things to discuss. And that's a much easier excuse for the conservative sites to use. Why hand it to them?
-- Jay L
If your point is that Glenn should not have called the Beauchamp controversy a scandal, I agree. The problem is you not only do what you accuse Glenn of doing,
I was giving him the benefit of the doubt. If, in fact, he writes his own subheads, then I'm surprised. Why would he write:
The leading conservative journal is caught in a far more serious scandal than the TNR/Beauchamp controversy that it helped fuel.
as the entire description of his piece, and then say:
The point isn't whose scandal is bigger
Glenn's a razor-sharp precision kind of guy. While the latter doesn't completely contradict the former, it does make it an odd choice for a subhead.
You do the same thing you accuse Foer of doing (in the bolded passage above). Just what are you saying, Jay? At this point nobody is really sure.
-
@Jay L
Well, for one thing, I think a retraction that starts out talking about "For months, our magazine has been subject to accusations", goes on for 14 pages of "you can see how this sort of thing might happen to someone", and only in the last paragraph (which you can't even get to without reading up to page 11) reluctantly concludes that they can't be 100% sure that the article was 100% correct - I think such a retraction is, itself, less than transparent.
Less than wholehearted, perhaps. Less than sincerely apologetic, maybe. Less than transparent? By the end of the fourteen pages, you know what has been accused, who is doing the accusing, what was said by whom and in defense of what, and so on. Even someone unfamiliar with the controversy would understand how it played out.
In short, The New Republic's retraction was informative and transparent, in a way that The National Review's wasn't.
-
I have a question for you, Sherlock Holmes
If you cannot answer my simple question then you should perhaps reevaluate your acceptance of the government story as to the nature of the events that transpired on 9/11/2001.
Sometimes a lack of reaction is the most revealing reaction of all.
-- Aycharaych
Do you think the Secret Service whisked FDR to safety on 12/7/1941? Why Not?
Furthermore, finding a the tallest buildings in NYC, or the Pentagon, from the cockpit of a passenger jet in flight is a piece of cake. Try finding a tiny little school building in the middle of Florida from 10,000 feet.
-
Considering TNR's past "troubles"
Stephen Glass
Zengerle
http://stevegilliard.blogspot.com/2006/07/fake-e-mail-publisher-defended-in.html
Sprezzatura
http://www.thepoorman.net/2006/09/01/free-lee-siegel/
All more than controversies...
Beauchamp is a manufactured controversy by comparison and naturally TNR is overly defensive at this point.
Only a terminally stupid tool would say this:
Jay L... You spend too much time saying that the NRO scandal is worse than Beauchamp. I'm not convinced that it is, but more importantly, who freaking cares? It stinks to high hell, and as long as it's "worse" than K.Fed's parenting awards, it's news and bears reporting.