Still More on Circular Firing Squads
James Joyner drinks the anti-Palin Kool-Aid and eagerly accepts as fact the most outlandish claims of certain former McCain campaign operatives. Beldar goes to the opposite extreme of bashing not only the operatives themselves, for spewing that crap, or even Joyner, for believing it, but Carl Cameron of FoxNews for even reporting on it (Newsbusters does the same). That last bit is going a bit too far. Yes, liberals think FoxNews is a media arm of the Republican Party, for whom “fair and balanced” is just another political slogan on the level of “hope and change.” No, liberals aren’t right about that. The network truly is fair and balanced, and their job is to report the news, not to report all the news that helps one side of the political spectrum at the expense of the other. If the Republican Party or some conservative group really wants a right wing equivalent of MSNBC, let them go out and form one. FoxNews is not that network, nor should it aspire to become that. As their other slogan notes, their job is to report; ours is to decide. [Cameron may indeed be worthy of some criticism for reporting these dubious allegations in a manner that suggested he was personally vouching for them, rather than simply reporting the fact that these allegations were made. That's a fair critique, but attacking him for reporting the allegations at all is not.]
Other conservatives routinely attack Campbell Brown. Again, I’m not sure why. Attacking the media when they screw up is appropriate. Attacking them simply for being the media is not. In this case, Brown makes some cogent points:
To those top McCain advisers who leaked the little story about seeing Sarah Palin in a towel; to those who called her and her family “Wasilla hillbillies” while using her to stoke class warfare with red meat speeches and an anti-elitist message; to those who claim she didn’t know Africa was a continent; to those McCain aides who say she is the reason they lost this election: Can I please remind you of one thing? You picked her.
You are the ones who supposedly vetted her, and then told the American people she was qualified for the job. You are the ones who, after meeting her a couple of times, told us she was ready to be just one heartbeat away from the presidency.
If even half of what you say now is true, then boy, did you try to sell the American people a bill of goods. If Sarah Palin is the reason some voters chose Barack Obama, that is no one’s fault but your own.
Amen to that, but with a slight twist: even if the allegations are complete and utter crap, as I suspect they are, what matters is that the same McCain campaign operatives think what they’re saying is true, but nevertheless attempted to sell the American people what they perceived to be a bill of goods. Or maybe they don’t really believe their own allegations, in which case they’re lying sacks o’shit and traitors to the very individuals they were supposed to be loyally and tirelessly working for. Either way, they should be identified and barred from every working for anyone’s campaign again. So on that point, I agree with Beldar: McCain should openly condemn these leakers and make every effort to identify them and “make them famous.”
Lastly, to everyone involved, read Donna Brazile’s open letter to the McCain campaign, which could have been addressed to the right side of the blogosphere, as well. I can’t help but wonder how much acrimony the dextrosphere and the remnants of the McCain campaign alike may have been spared if we’d all read that essay first.
UPDATE: Joyner responds, noting that he doesn’t actually believe the outlandish notion that a college graduate and a governor of a state could not know that Africa is a continent rather than a country, he only believes the even more outlandish notion that a college graduate with a degree in journalism has never heard of the New York Times, the Washington Post or any other major national newspapers. Not sure how much this distinction matters, but take it for what it’s worth.
November 8th, 2008 at 9:31 pm
The leaks are the only currency the members of a defeated campaign have, they have no honor and no sense. Palin will be the front runner and there are no republicans who will forgive this disgrace.
November 8th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
The leaks are the only currency some of these guys have to give the media, so they disgrace themselves in one last attack. Non of thsi stuff will work
November 9th, 2008 at 9:30 am
[...] years are upset with me for buying into the “Sarah Palin was in over her head” meme. Xrlq accused me of drinking “the anti-Palin Kool-Aid” for buying into claims that Palin [...]
November 9th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
[...] there Hope for the Republican Party? Some, like Xrlq or Patterico have observed that there is a rift within the Republican party (put mildly). Some [...]
November 9th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Joyner has been assimilated, and his negativity toward Palin — voiced immediately after she was named as McCain’s choice — is only the latest symptom.
We will see an increasing antipathy among the Beltway wing of the GOP toward governors in general rather than specifically against Palin, and I don’t expect Joyner not to be a joiner.
November 9th, 2008 at 2:45 pm
You may be right, unfortunately. Perhaps he should change the name of his blog to Not Far Enough Outside the Beltway? I hear those Georgetown cocktails have a 20-mile range, at least.
November 9th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
Having taught at the college level, my regard for the communications/journalism degree is on par with that of the elementary education and criminal justice degrees. Smart people get them all the time but simply getting them is not evidence at all of being particularly smart.
Palin used her fine journalism credentials to be a sports reporter in Anchorage and for a tiny newspaper, so, again, not much evidence of any “knowledgability” on foreign policy or broader public policy issues.
I began the process skeptical of her simply because she is green by historical standards but presuming that, given all the buzz surrounding her, that she was a promising up-and-comer. I saw no evidence of that, aside from a superb job delivering a convention speech someone else wrote.
Let’s turn this around: What evidence, during the time since she got the VP nod, did she provide that left you confident that she had given serious thought to the broad range of public policy issues that the president of the United States is called upon to deal with on a daily basis?
James Joyner´s last blog post..Obama’s Landslide in Perspective
November 9th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
I’m not a big fan of journalism degrees, either, but I find it implausible that anyone could make it through college in any discipline, let alone journalism, without knowing enough names of major newspapers to have been able to at least fake an answer to Couric, had she been so inclined. Thus, it strikes me as a huge non sequitur to argue that she couldn’t name a single major newspaper simply because she didn’t. Maybe she was put on the spot and just froze. Maybe she was pissed at Couric for asking an insulting question and this was her passive-aggressive way of getting back at her. Or maybe she saw a childish “pop quiz” question for what it was, figured that if she named any paper Couric’s next question would be “OK, so what do you think about the lead story on page A-13 of?” Or maybe something else. But whatever that admittedly bad answer meant, it sure as Hades didn’t mean Palin had never heard of the New York Times or the Washington Post (or, for that matter, the Washington Times or the New York Post).
I’m not saying she was all that well-schooled in the broad range of public policy issues the President is called upon to deal with on a daily basis. Until 9 weeks ago, she had no particular reason to be. OTOH, I didn’t see any huge deficits that can’t be made up in a year or two, let alone four. Had she been at the top of the Republican ticket, I’d have conceded that she was almost as unqualified for the position as Obama. But that’s the thing; she wasn’t at the top of the ticket. From where I sit, both Palin and Obama currently have about the minimum qualifications I’d expect of a Vice President, and neither has the qualifications I’d expect of a President (yet). The difference is that one ran at the top of the ticket and the other at the bottom.
Also, I can name at least one of the Vice Presidential duties (and let’s face it, that’s the position she was running for) which Palin is familiar with but Biden is not: the Presidency of the Senate. Come to think of it, that’s the only constitutional duty of a Vice President. Yet Palin got reamed (even by alleged conservatives like George Will) for accurately pointing that out in the debate, while Biden got a pass for getting it spectacularly wrong.
November 9th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
I’m sure she’s heard of the major papers. Less sure that she reads them.
Eighteen months as governor is pretty thin qualification for the job, especially when a 72-year-old, high mileage president with a series of health troubles could go at any moment. (Although, obviously, he could still be in excellent health eight years from now and I hope he is.)
Obama’s resume is no better, to be sure, I one of the reasons I didn’t vote for him — aside from never having voted for a Democrat for president — is that he’s too green. His four years in the Senate is probably about comparable to Palin’s time as governor in the grand scheme of things; neither’s qualified for the top job on paper. Obama convinced the majority that he was, though, after two years on the campaign trail.
Palin was technically right on the VP question although practically wrong. The VP seldom presides over the Senate, serving only ceremonially in that capacity unless there’s a tie. Regardless of what the Constitution says, the VP is basically the backup president handles whatever special projects the president hands off to him.
James Joyner´s last blog post..Obama’s Landslide in Perspective
November 9th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
Palin’s answer was correct on every level. She rightly noted that the Constitution puts the Vice President in charge of the Senate, only to have Biden arrogantly reply that “Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States, that’s the Executive Branch.” Article I doesn’t say jack about the Executive Branch, while Article II, which does, assigns no roles to that position. But never mind that, somehow it all proves that Biden is up to the job and Palin isn’t, because … um … well, just because. Or maybe because he was a Senator for so long, and union rules dictate that the guy who has been on the job longer is always more qualified, even if he has spent his entire career being wrong about practically everything.
That Vice Presidents traditionally act as backup Presidents rather than as Senate heads is not in dispute. But Palin’s comment clearly addressed the powers the Vice President holds under the Constitution as written, not the powers they have generally exercised in practice, at least in recent years. The only reason Vice Presidents can credibly claim to be part of the Executive Branch is that they also serve in the Cabinet, a body which, from a constitutional perspective, does not exist.
November 9th, 2008 at 6:05 pm
Sure. But Palin wasn’t answering as a constitutional scholar but based, presumably, on something she’d read somewhere. Do you really think Biden, who has been in the Senate going on 40 years, doesn’t know what the VP does or the relationship between the legislative and executive branches?
For all practical purposes, the VP is an executive officer with ceremonial duties in the legislature.
James Joyner´s last blog post..Obama’s Landslide in Perspective
November 9th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
Of course she was answering based on a (correct) constitutional analysis. Who cares whether she independently reached that conclusion or got it from some treatise those gun totin’, intellectual-hatin’, Palin-lovin’ Republicans aren’t supposed to be reading anyway? Both candidates discussed the issue in expressly constitutional terms. On that level – and that’s the only relevant one for this portion of the debate – she was right and he was wrong.
I suppose we’ll have to agree to disagree on whether the Constitution counts as a practical purpose. I think it does. It’s only a matter of time before some VP decides to take it upon himself to assert the powers the Senate Majority Leader (another constitutionally nonexistent position) had long assumed were his. Or, for that matter, until some President and VP have a falling out, and the VP learns the hard way that his only executive duties are as a Cabinet member who serves at the pleasure of the President.
November 9th, 2008 at 7:34 pm
But whatever that admittedly bad answer meant, it sure as Hades didn’t mean Palin had never heard of the New York Times or the Washington Post (or, for that matter, the Washington Times or the New York Post).
First she can’t name a single paper, then a couple of days later she said she regularly reads The Economist (yeah, right…)
November 9th, 2008 at 8:18 pm
But Palin wasn’t answering as a constitutional scholar but based, presumably, on something she’d read somewhere.
Read somewhere … like in the Constitution?
Anwyn´s last blog post..Dear Mark Steyn
November 9th, 2008 at 9:42 pm
Read somewhere … like in the Constitution?
Look, I’m as strict constructionist as the next guy but I don’t pretend that we govern precisely as envisioned by the Framers in 1787. And, if Sarah Palin sits around reading and thinking about the Constitution, I’ll eat my proverbial hat.
November 9th, 2008 at 9:49 pm
Yet you are arguing by what she actually said and what Joe Biden actually said–i.e. she said what the Constitution says and he said what it *doesn’t*–that he still knows more than she does about it. She evidently at least read it or, as Xrlq pointed out, read a treatise containing the main point that she did. Whereas Biden pulled some article number out of … the Fun House that lives in his brain? It wasn’t like he said “Yeah, the Constitution may say that but the office actually functions more like…” no. He went on about articles and specifics that were wrong.
November 9th, 2008 at 11:51 pm
Thanks for the ping, but you misstate my position. My complaint against Cameron and Fox News is not the reporting of the backstabbing comments. It’s the granting of confidentiality to those who made the comments. Journalistic ethics, applied properly (which is strictly) don’t permit journalists to grant confidentiality just to prevent someone from being embarrassed, or even from being fired, particularly when they ought to be embarrassed or fired. There needs to be a compelling public interest which is furthered by permitting the confidentiality; the default value is supposed to be “reporting on the record.”
Of course, it’s not just Fox or Cameron who’ve ignored that principle until it’s virtually a dead letter. Others do this far more consistently. It sucks — it’s a major cause of death for professional journalism in America, which I believe is now no more than a rotting corpse.
November 10th, 2008 at 12:01 am
Re-reading my paragraph about Cameron:
I see where you were misled. By “reporting this garbage at all,” I meant “reporting this garbage at all” based on confidential sources, i.e., I intended for the first (topic) sentence to qualify the entire paragraph. To be clear: If the sources had been willing to go on the record, I would not have had any complaint with Cameron or Fox News reporting their comments.
Of course, they wouldn’t have made the comments without guarantees of anonymity, so that they could perform their cowardly hatchet jobs and then slink away to their next job as someone else’s campaign aide.
November 10th, 2008 at 7:11 am
I’m not aware of a journalistic canon prohibiting journalists from granting confidentiality as a means to obtain news they otherwise wouldn’t get. Nor do I see any reason why I, as a citizen who’d rather have more information than less, should want them to operate according to any such principle. At most, I’d say they should highlight the confidentiality issue in their story, so all readers/listeners are reminded to take the story with an appropriately sized grain of salt.
To cite a self-serving example, before the Washington Times quoted me on the issue of the Obama campaign’s bully tactics, they asked me if I agreed to be quoted by my real name which, to the surprise of my readers, is not really Xrlq. I agreed, but if I hadn’t, would that have been a reason not to quote me at all?
November 17th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
Well, the obvious answer is “no,” but there is qualitative difference between the two quotes.
In the instance of your quote, all the reader (or, preferably, the reporter) has to do is look up the text of the case that you cite to determine whether you are telling the truth. IOWs, even if it turns out that Xrlq is a cad, bounder, and worthless layabout, the reading public does not have to take his word for the argument. The truth of the information can be independently verified and, if false, everyone learns that Xrlq is a lying weasel.
In the instance of assertions about Palin, the reader is utterly unable to do so because the news organization has actively concealed the information necessary to determine the truth of the quote. In such a case, I think that Beldar is right. When the only way to evaluate the truth of the quote is to assess the credibility of the speaker, then I think the journalist in question should either provide that information or just hold on to the story until he finds another way to verify the story.
Hey, maybe he could have called up James Joyner to confirm the story. He seems to think that he has the ability to read Sarah Palin’s mind.