The Suddenly Incurious Citizen Journalists
By: John Cole December 1, 2007 at 10:12 am
If ever you were under the illusion that Greater Wingnuttia was anything other than a bunch of partisan goobers wholly uninterested in the truth and wedded only to the needs of the Republican party, surely the last week has shed you of that illusion. As I write this, only one fringe nutter has even mentioned the emerging Rudy Giuliani financial scandal. None of them has mentioned the fabulist at NRO. How can this be? Where are our brave truth detectors?
Let?s compare:
? When a 12 year old kid had the nerve to state that he benefited from a government program and thinks other kids should too, a massive orgy of ?Truth detecting? took place. Counters were examined. Houses were visited. Property records were scrutinized. Statements were parsed.
? When a private in the army wrote some tales with a few anecdotes about what he had experienced in the war in Iraq, and a few disagreed, no grain of sand was left unturned. Scale models of armored vehicles were built. Experts were called, emailed, and interrogated. Myspace accounts were looked up. Entire fields of Cray Supercomputers had to be brought online just to handle all the ?debunking? and commentary from the wingnuts.
But now, a Republican front-runner FOR THE OFFICE OF PRESIDENT has clearly played fast and loose with the public?s money to hide/finance his extramarital dalliances, and the truth detectors on the right are silent. When an NRO columnist admits straight-up to making shit up to radically overstate a military threat to a key ally, perhaps to agitate for American military involvement, our fact-checkers snooze. The sum total of the response can be summed up as a giant yawn.
Crickets. Not even a ?heh, indeed? can be found on these topics from our brave and intrepid citizen journalists. Hell, they are lagging FAR behind all the traditional media, who are cranking out tons of stories about Giuliani. Greater Wingnuttia should change their motto from ?We?ll fact check your ass? to ?We?ll fact check your ass, if you aren?t a Republican.? At least that would be honest.
*** Update ***
The Captain weighs in, only to downplay and all but dismiss the charges and then brushes off the brewing scandal as ?marital woes?:
While I believe this to be a minor issue for Giuliani in terms of ethics?it tells us nothing new about his relationship with Judith Nathan before their marriage that didn?t already make contemporaneous headlines?the Giuliani team has not handled it very well. They should acknowledge that they made mistakes in handling the billings in 2000 and 2001 and apologize for the errors. The longer they issue threadbare rationalizations, the longer this will stick to the campaign.
Allegedly misusing public funds to drive around your girlfriend and engage in all sort of accounting shell games to hide your behavior is, according to the Good Captain, no big deal. Can anyone imagine the stories if this was, say, Hillary Clinton instead of Giuliani? By now, they would be investigating all state and local laws to see if they could indict her for adultery. All together now- IOKIYAR.
After reading Captain Ed it is pretty obvious how the right wing blogosphere will handle the Giuliani business, as it will be Plame redux. The same group of folks who were able to scour fonts in the Dan Rather case, make the most intricate arguments about bullet casings in Baghdad with Beauchamp, examine every aspect of health insurance policies in Maryland for the Frost family, will all of a sudden become ?confused? by all the accounting numbers. The virtual certainty about all things divined from anonymous Free Republic investigators will be replaced with assertions of ?confusion? and ?trickiness? and complaints about ?complicated accounting.? It will be ?difficult? to come to a conclusion whether he has done anything wrong, and it will not be ?clear? if he violated any laws. Just take the phrase ?Was she really covert? and replace it with ?Did he really do anything wrong? and you have your blogospheric talking points from Greater Wingnuttia for the next two weeks.
The same folks who got degrees and a Nobel Peace Prize in neurosurgery during the Schiavo affair will, by the end of the week, be forced to pretend they can?t balance a checkbook. It should be pretty funny to watch. That is if they don?t just manage to ignore it altogether.
Filed under: Blogospheric Navel-Gazing, I Read These Morons So You Don't Have To
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