By being scattershot and offensive, they...create a level of confusing noise that makes the passive public stop trying to understand.
Speaking of that defense, sometimes I think nothing prepared me better to be a blogger who pays attention to the politcal scene than the years I spent getting into flamewars with genre fan trolls on Usenet. Seriously.
For one thing, it taught me to be sensitive to a little trick called "answering charges nobody made." This came up a lot when debating Joss Whedonites who were sure with a firey passion that "the lesbians" had said this or made that demand or ultimatum, but couldn't actually point to any examples.
Here's David Neiwert on the completely unrelated Republican response to The Plame Affair.
Rep. Peter King, who's been selected as the House point man for defending Karl Rove...was on MSNBC's Joe Scarborough show the other night and, according to the MSNBC transcript, had this to say:
And Joe Wilson has no right to complain. And I think people like Tim Russert and the others, who gave this guy such a free ride and all the media, they're the ones to be shot, not Karl Rove.
Just wondering: Have any Democrats in Congress -- or Joe Wilson, for that matter -- suggested that Karl Rove be shot?
Then, Digby remembers one or two things Michael Isikoff and other members of the press corps would rather you forgot:
I woke up this morning thinking about Michael Isikoff, which isn't my favorite thing to think about first thing in the morning. Last night he told Jon Stewart that Pat Fitzgerald had better have something really, really strong to justify this investigation taking the turns its taken. It had better be about something really important --- it had better be about national security. He was quite fierce about it.
The idea that Michael Isikoff, of all people, is laying down the gauntlet --- warning Fitzgerald that if he's thinking of prosecuting someone for perjury, say, or obstuction of justice, he will lead the chorus denouncing him as an overzealous prosecutor --- is stunning. I don't know what is in the Chardonnay in DC but it's causing a lot of people to have severe problems remembering things --- and seeing themselves in the mirror.
Michael Isikoff was practically Ken Starr's right hand man in the media. He performed at only a slightly less partisan level than Drudge or Steno Sue Schmidt. He admits in his book that he became convinced that the president treated women badly and therefore needed to be exposed. He didn't seem to think that throwing a duly elected president from office for lying about a private matter was overzealous in the least. He was on that bandwagon from the very beginning and one of the guys who drove it.
Broadening our scope a bit, John A. at AmericaBlog has a rundown of some of the sloppier reporting (imagine that) going on about the story, and a reminder of the facts of the issue.
Rove claims he learned about Plame being CIA from other journalists and not from government sources. Even were that true, it's irrelevant to a senior government official leaking the name of a CIA agent - it doesn't matter how he found out. He knows better, and he flagrantly risked national security for petty revenge.
Getting back to my "Everything I Need To Know About Politics I Leaned In Usenet Flame Wars" thesis, among other things, they taught me just how many people have a great deal of trouble distinguishing the difference between "facts," "lies," "opinons" and "things they desperately want to be true".
For some reason, knowing people tend to do that comes in handy in viewing the political world.
Here Josh Marshall keeps his eye on the ball.
And nothing was done amiss? If Rove et al. didn't do anything wrong, why have they spent two years lying about what they did? No law was broken? Then what is Fitzgerald looking at? Why is a grand jury investigating Rove? A prosecutor like Fitzgerald, a Republican appointee, wouldn't be throwing journalists in jail unless he thought he was investigating a serious crime.
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