Media Criticism

Still Crazy After All These Years

Or at least after one year. And maybe it isn’t crazy–just, mentally challenged. Mary Mapes still doesn’t get it:

Within a few minutes, I was online visiting Web sites I had never heard of before: Free Republic, Little Green Footballs, Power Line.

This is the first hint of her cluelessness. The fact that she’d never heard of these sites before shows how insulated she was. Free Republic has been around for many years now, and was instrumental in bringing out many of the Clinton scandals. It’s one thing to say (as I’d expect a hard-core Democrat to) that they have no credibility, but to claim ignorance of their very existence?

They were hard-core, politically angry, hyperconservative sites loaded with vitriol about Dan Rather and CBS.

Contemplate the possibility, Mary, at least for a moment, that said vitriol was justified and prompted by your vicious partisan hit pieces and shoddy journalism.

Our work was being compared to that of Jayson Blair, the discredited New York Times reporter who had fabricated and plagiarized stories.

Hey, this isn’t fair. At least Jayson Blair didn’t fabricate actual evidence. And of course, given that they’re “hard-core, politically angry, hyperconservatives,” there’s no need to pay any attention to what they say, right, even if they are smart lawyers, and that in the case of Charles Johnson, proprieter of Little Green Footballs and web site designer, he has forgotten more about typography than Mary is ever likely to learn or (on the available evidence) be able to comprehend?

All these Web sites had extensive write-ups on the documents: on typeface, font style, and peripheral spacing,

“Peripheral spacing”? I think that she means proportional spacing. This demonstrates again, just how little she has learned from this experience, when she doesn’t even seem to possess the reasoning skills to understand the arguments against her.

…material that seemed to spring up overnight. It was phenomenal. It had taken our analysts hours of careful work to make comparisons. It seemed that these analysts or commentators—or whatever they were—were coming up with long treatises in minutes. They were all linking to one another, creating an echo chamber of outraged agreement.

Maybe because they had facts and logic on their side?

I was told that the first posting claiming the documents were fakes had gone up on Free Republic before our broadcast was even off the air! How had the Web site even gotten copies of the documents? We hadn

War Commentary

They’re Not Against War

They’re just on the other side. Christopher Hitchens, who knows these creatures as well as anyone who’s no longer one of them, explains:

To be against war and militarism, in the tradition of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, is one thing. But to have a record of consistent support for war and militarism, from the Red Army in Eastern Europe to the Serbian ethnic cleansers and the Taliban, is quite another. It is really a disgrace that the liberal press refers to such enemies of liberalism as “antiwar” when in reality they are straight-out pro-war, but on the other side. Was there a single placard saying, “No to Jihad”? Of course not. Or a single placard saying, “Yes to Kurdish self-determination” or “We support Afghan women’s struggle”? Don’t make me laugh. And this in a week when Afghans went back to the polls, and when Iraqis were preparing to do so, under a hail of fire from those who blow up mosques and U.N. buildings, behead aid workers and journalists, proclaim fatwahs against the wrong kind of Muslim, and utter hysterical diatribes against Jews and Hindus.

Some of the leading figures in this “movement,” such as George Galloway and Michael Moore, are obnoxious enough to come right out and say that they support the Baathist-jihadist alliance. Others prefer to declare their sympathy in more surreptitious fashion. The easy way to tell what’s going on is this: Just listen until they start to criticize such gangsters even a little, and then wait a few seconds before the speaker says that, bad as these people are, they were invented or created by the United States. That bad, huh? (You might think that such an accusation

War Commentary

They’re Not Against War

They’re just on the other side. Christopher Hitchens, who knows these creatures as well as anyone who’s no longer one of them, explains:

To be against war and militarism, in the tradition of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, is one thing. But to have a record of consistent support for war and militarism, from the Red Army in Eastern Europe to the Serbian ethnic cleansers and the Taliban, is quite another. It is really a disgrace that the liberal press refers to such enemies of liberalism as “antiwar” when in reality they are straight-out pro-war, but on the other side. Was there a single placard saying, “No to Jihad”? Of course not. Or a single placard saying, “Yes to Kurdish self-determination” or “We support Afghan women’s struggle”? Don’t make me laugh. And this in a week when Afghans went back to the polls, and when Iraqis were preparing to do so, under a hail of fire from those who blow up mosques and U.N. buildings, behead aid workers and journalists, proclaim fatwahs against the wrong kind of Muslim, and utter hysterical diatribes against Jews and Hindus.

Some of the leading figures in this “movement,” such as George Galloway and Michael Moore, are obnoxious enough to come right out and say that they support the Baathist-jihadist alliance. Others prefer to declare their sympathy in more surreptitious fashion. The easy way to tell what’s going on is this: Just listen until they start to criticize such gangsters even a little, and then wait a few seconds before the speaker says that, bad as these people are, they were invented or created by the United States. That bad, huh? (You might think that such an accusation

War Commentary

They’re Not Against War

They’re just on the other side. Christopher Hitchens, who knows these creatures as well as anyone who’s no longer one of them, explains:

To be against war and militarism, in the tradition of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, is one thing. But to have a record of consistent support for war and militarism, from the Red Army in Eastern Europe to the Serbian ethnic cleansers and the Taliban, is quite another. It is really a disgrace that the liberal press refers to such enemies of liberalism as “antiwar” when in reality they are straight-out pro-war, but on the other side. Was there a single placard saying, “No to Jihad”? Of course not. Or a single placard saying, “Yes to Kurdish self-determination” or “We support Afghan women’s struggle”? Don’t make me laugh. And this in a week when Afghans went back to the polls, and when Iraqis were preparing to do so, under a hail of fire from those who blow up mosques and U.N. buildings, behead aid workers and journalists, proclaim fatwahs against the wrong kind of Muslim, and utter hysterical diatribes against Jews and Hindus.

Some of the leading figures in this “movement,” such as George Galloway and Michael Moore, are obnoxious enough to come right out and say that they support the Baathist-jihadist alliance. Others prefer to declare their sympathy in more surreptitious fashion. The easy way to tell what’s going on is this: Just listen until they start to criticize such gangsters even a little, and then wait a few seconds before the speaker says that, bad as these people are, they were invented or created by the United States. That bad, huh? (You might think that such an accusation

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!