Conservative pundits certainly seem to think they are. And sometimes, to read right-wingers like InstaPundit Glenn Reynolds and Matt Drudge is to come away with the impression that their devoted readers must be absolutely stupid to consider these hacks credible.
Consider two of the latest pieces of right-wing spin to come out of the Republican National Committee and be dutifully echoed by the conservative press.
First, the "revealing" comments by Democratic candidate Wesley Clark that supposedly proved that he a) supported the Iraq war and b) believed President Bush's unsupported assertions about a Saddam/bin Laden connection.
Drudge broke this "world exclusive." Here it is predictably echoed in a Washington Times analysis:
Now there's a horsefly in Mr. Clark's soup: the Drudge Report yesterday put up a copy of his op-ed in the London Times of only eight months ago, and the transcript of Clark testimony to the U.S. House Armed Services Committee, given 18 months ago. The transcripts render his claim that he has "always" been against the war in Iraq a spectacular lie. Ah, the cruelty of the remorseless record, cruelty magnified by the Internet.
But as the Columbia Journalism Review points out:
Thursday afternoon, the Drudge Report chimed in with a grossly incorrect headline, "Wes Clark Made Case For Iraq War Before Congress; Transcript Revealed" atop an article designed to distort the General's position.
In excerpting Clark's testimony before the House Armed Services Committee on September 26, 2002, Drudge entirely misrepresents the candidate's remarks.
Drudge quotes Clark's testimony: "'There's no question that Saddam Hussein is a threat... Yes, he has chemical and biological weapons. He's had those for a long time. But the United States right now is on a very much different defensive posture than we were before September 11th of 2001... He is, as far as we know, actively pursuing nuclear capabilities, though he doesn't have nuclear warheads yet. If he were to acquire nuclear weapons, I think our friends in the region would face greatly increased risks as would we.'" [ellipses Drudge's]
Drudge is using the ellipse as a weapon, with malice aforethought. Clark's statement that "Saddam Hussein is a threat" came from his opening remarks to the committee. An ellipse then carries the reader more than 11,500 words later into the transcript to a second quotation. Finally, Drudge uses the next ellipse to jump way back to the beginning of Clark's testimony. The effect is to make Clark's testimony sound more frantic than it really is and to incorrectly suggest that Clark had endorsed the war.
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Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - Dirtgrain
I don't know about stupid: over-zealously insecure and confrontational, maybe. See Chicken Little Conservatives and a Failure of Reverence.
2 - michele
Glenn Reynolds is hardly a right winger on the level of Drudge. In fact, he's not a right winger at all.
But I guess that doesn't matter when the only purpose you have here is to say "Conservatives are Stupid!" in as many words as you can muster.
This piece would have been interesting if you didn't resort to calling people who don't agree with you "fucking stupid" or "idiots."
3 - Eric Olsen
Drudge is an irresponsible scandal monger. Despite your crusade to paint him otherwise, Glenn Reynolds is all over the map politically, clearly based upon his conscience, and he without a doubt ends up as a centrist overall. It is also rather damning that this wrongheaded campaign is directed at the blogger who happens to generate more traffic than any other.
The reason for the traffic? Many of his readers don't read any other blogs because they are comfortable relying on his judgment, relative impartiality, and polymath range of interest to let them know what is going on. This is not coincidental. All of this frenzied thrashing about will never make it otherwise.
4 - Matthew Stinson
Get with the program, Brian. Conservatives are evil. Liberals are stupid.
5 - Eric Olsen
good point
6 - michele
[insert evil laugh here]
7 - Brian Flemming
But I hate President Bush and I want to have Osama bin Laden's butt baby.
Doesn't that make me evil and stupid?
8 - bhw
I haven't read this Instapundit fellow, so I can't comment directly on his political leanings or the quality of his work, though I do know he's popular. That said, if he's taking Drudge at his word, then at the very least his judgment and relative impartiality are in question.
As for the poster's verbal thrashing of said blogger being damning because he is popular, I can't get on board with that. A blogger's prominence shouldn't keep others from taking him/her to task if he/she has made a gaffe such as using Drudge as a main source on which to draw an opinion about a presidential candidate.
No sacred blogger cows!
9 - Brian Flemming
Eric,
You wrote:
I love your InstaLogic!
Drudge Report has more traffic than InstaPundit by a factor of 10 or 20 or so.
Does that make Matt Drudge 10-20 times more impartial than Glenn Reynolds?
10 - Eric Olsen
Drudge isn't a blog - it's an online tabloid with links. Drudge had the fortune and foresight of getting in on the ground floor of the web and he became entrenched when no one else was doing such a thing.
Reynolds is read for his reasonableness and range of interests - Drudge for opposite reasons.
11 - John Mudd
Life is like a box of blog posts. You never know just how stupid it's going to get until you experience it in its entirety.
Great way to get traffic, though, pinging all your posts and using popular names. If you're writing for a liberal audience, it's bound to build a loyal audience for your blog or your website all while making conservatives bash you, which will only increase your liberal audience's loyalty.
While the post, itself, seems stupid, the traffic-generating strategy is very smart, even if it does violate the Blogger's Code of Conduct/Code of Ethics that I posted not too long ago.
Cheers.
12 - scott h.
The Columbia Journalism Review claims Drudge did it deceptively, but offers little to back up its claim. "...but time is on our side in the near term and we should use it."? That's it? You would think that if Clark was anti-war, you could find more and better examples in 22,000+ words of testimony.
Instead, Clark emphasizes Saddam's threat in his opening statement to members of Congress. "But it was a signal warning about Saddam Hussein: he is not only malevolent and violent, but also unpredictable. He retains his chemical and biological warfare capabilities and is actively pursuing nuclear capabilities." "...Iraq is not a problem that can be indefinitely postponed." He did not use any of the anti-war arguments: that he wasn't an imminent threat, or that Saddam could be contained. His arguments are right out of the pro-war playbook.
The best that could be said is that he felt the matter should have been handled through the UN. Two problems. One: he urged Congress, in his opening statement, to support use of force if the UN failed to act. "The United States diplomacy in the United Nations will be further strengthened if the Congress can adopt a resolution expressing US determination to act if the United Nations will not. The use of force must remain a US option under active consideration." (Emphasis mine).
Two, it's hard to say he was critical of Bush's diplomatic efforts when you read his London Times op-ed. "As for the diplomacy, the best that can be said is that strong convictions often carry a high price. Despite the virtually tireless energy of their Foreign Offices, Britain and the US have probably never been so isolated in recent times." That's pretty mild stuff. And it certainly implies he agreed with their convictions, especially when he later says "...President Bush and Tony Blair should be proud of their resolve in the face of so much doubt." (Yes, I am aware of Philosoraptor's rather lame defense of this. Resolve is "a virtue even when one has undertaken an enterprise in error"? He could just have soon praised the resolve of Chirac, or Schroeder, or taking it to an absurd degree, he could have praised Saddam's resolve.) Then there's this statement: "Their opponents, those who questioned the necessity or wisdom of the operation, are temporarily silent, but probably unconvinced." Clark's siding with the pro-war camp there. After all was said and done, the fact that the situation was not solved through the UN didn't seem to bother Clark much.
13 - Brian Flemming
Actually, John, I did it to frustrate a certain Blogcritic who habitually pings my Glenn Reynolds posts with an old post of his. I never thought about any traffic considerations. (And all those posts are here at Blogcritics, btw, not my own blog.)
But, more to the point, you wrote a Bloggers Code of Ethics that addresses pinging? You, the blogger who somehow registers every one of his Blogcritics posts as an independent blog, thus screwing up the Technorati stats for every single Blogcritic, making it look like real-estate is a prime subject of every Blogcritics' personal blog?
That's some balls, dude.
(For those who don't know, Technorati is a site that is supposed to show you which bloggers are referring to your site in their posts. It specifically ignores the permanent blogrolls on blogs and only focusses on specific posts, so you know when someone is specifically talking about your blog rather than just linking to it in a blogroll. Er, that's how it's supposed to work. But if you're a Blogcritic, every time John Mudd makes a move on the Internet, it is listed as an event related to your personal site.)
John, currently at Technorati, your Blogcritics posts are listed as referring to my personal blog (they don't) at numbers 3, 4, 9, 11, 16, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 30, 32, 33...oh, well, the list goes on. If someone were to Technorati my site, it looks for all the world like real estate is a major focus of my blog, and John Mudd talks about me all the time.
Somehow, no other Blogcritics' posts have this distorting, counter-productive effect on Technorati. Only yours. Only John Mudd's. Out of hundreds of posts here, only yours do this.
Hey, look! Blogcritic Marty Dodge talks about real estate 20% of the time on his own blog!
And look at Blogcritic bookofjoe's personal site. All he apparently blogs about is real estate!
How do you do this, John? You've refused to say in the past. How about coming clean now that you have brought up the subject of pinging ethics?
I don't know how you execute this misrepresentation, or particularly care that you do do it. It's just a minor annoyance to me. It's the mystery of it that frustrates me more than anything else.
But a Blogger's Code of Ethics?
Wow.
14 - Glenn Reynolds
Actually, Brian, you missed my post on Drudge, which notes the context issue. It's here. You might also have linked this post, which suggests that rather a lot of people across the political spectrum are having trouble pinning down Clark.
15 - Brian Flemming
Glenn,
I updated the post with a link to your comments on Drudge.
And, yeah, Glenn, Clark is hard to pin down if your viewpoint is that anyone who disagrees with the President's approach to the Iraq problem is, as you so memorably put it, "objectively pro-Saddam."
If there are only two kinds of people in the world, the pro-warriors and the granola-chomping pacifist hippies, boy, that General Clark sure doesn't know who he is! How confusing!
As Josh Marshall put it:
Me either. I'm so confused!
Must be the General's fault.
16 - Mac Diva
Pshaw! Glenn Reynolds is just another Southern conservative who calls himself a libertarian.
His refusal to admit his error in regard to this episode is very similar to his refusal to admit John Lott, the Right Wing gun issues 'expert', whom he supported, is a fraud. Come on, say it, Glenn: "John Lott lied."
One of my favorite Reynolds' entries, which Atrios turned me on to, discusses having his Nigerian sister-in-law to be to dinner at Tara (wink). Apparently, she was allowed to enter through the front door, even. Reynolds goes on as if he is discussing a dog talking or a pig doing higher mathematics, not a human being. And, the whole time, typical of a Southern conservative, he believes he is flattering the woman. MEGO!
17 - Jim Carruthers
I realize this may be somewhat off-topic of US right wing vs. right winger politics and disinfo, but when people blather about how can there be global warming when it's so cold, think about this:
What makes the inside of your refrigerator cold? That's right, heat energy. Put in more heat, and the inside gets colder. The same thing with the planetary climate, retain more heat energy, and the climate doesn't get uniformly warmer, it gets more extreme.
18 - Mac Diva
Bhw, in my opinion, brown-nosing of popular bloggers is probably the most destructive aspect of the blogosphere. Right behind untalented bloggers attacking talented bloggers because they're resentful. That can harm the talented bloggers' traffic while building traffic for the know-nothings, but it can't give them ability. So, people end up linking to and citing the least able bloggers out of cowardice and stupidity. The impact of both problems is to make this little corner of the world very unreliable. Content from blogs usually can't be trusted.
Brian, I addressed the piggy-backing issue in regard to Sam Vaknin, a Blogcritic who does not even have a blog. What he does have is a site where he pretends to be a doctor dispensing medical advice. From it, Amazon and a few other online-only sites, he sells a self-published booklet and pamphlets about Narcissistic personality disorder, which he may have. He posts the same material scores of times all over the Internet to keep his site high in search engines. Here at Blogcritics, he was second only to Eric in number of posts last month. (I predict he will become the leading poster if allowed to. He appears to do nothing but repost material all day every day.) Those posts consists of recycled material, with a paragraph changed here or a headline there, that have been published all over the 'Net for years. This is what happens when people focus more on number of pings and/or visitors than worth of content. Obviously, I don't have any clout here, but, if I did, the behavior of a Vaknin is were I would draw the line. Going along with a fraud cheapens the site.
19 - Brian Flemming
Tell me about it.
20 - scott h.
Now, Clark's position is that it was "the wrong war at the wrong time". Maybe it would have been helpful to mention that to Congress instead of urging them to authorize use of force if the UN failed to act. It's one thing to change your mind, another to claim you've been consistent.
21 - Glenn Reynolds
Gee, Mac Diva, I guess it's hard for you to imagine that I might genuinely respect her and be in awe of her abilities.
But keep it up guys. This kind of criticism doesn't hurt -- it just demonstrates the nature of the critics.
22 - John Mudd
"It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly...who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who have never known neither victory nor defeat."-Teddy Roosevelt
23 - Mac Diva
John, it seems to me, most of us are in the arena. By which I mean blogging, with the exception of people who are just using the blogosphere to build traffic at non-blog sites, like Vaknin.
Glenn, you don't show appreciation for a person by patronizing her. Using the Nigerian woman as an opportunity to sneer at affirmative action (which as an immigrant she does not qualify for) was also shameless. Since you haven't figured it out for yourself, a good rule of thumb is not to pat a woman or a minority on the head for anything you would not do the same for if she were a white man. For example, if bhw wins a Pulitzer, by all means congratulate her. But, don't act flabbergasted because she can think, for heaven's sake. We recently had a discussion at Blogcritics about Condi Rice that I think you would find it beneficial to look at. Dawn posted the entry.
24 - John Mudd
MD, you can view my blog here.
I am a business blogger. I have never pretended to be someone or something I'm not (ask anyone in the media who have interviewed me because of the business blogs I have created). The fact that I am a business blogger does not put me outside the arena of blogging, as you seemed to infer. However, even though I am a business blogger, I also blog about other things not relating to my business from time to time, when I am both able and willing.
Cheers.
25 - Eric Olsen
Hey, Jim's right about global warming - it doesn't get uniformly warmer, but more extreme, which certainly bears out here in Ohio with 65 degrees one week and 5 degrees a week later.
Beyond that, "best" is about as subjective and amorphous as it gets when it comes to blogs, but in general I see the better sites rising to the top. There are all kinds of criteria by which to judge, but quality of writing, quality of thinking, uniqueness, originality, personality, reliability and on and on are all matters that bear on quality and traffic, and in the long run the BETTER (not necessarily the BEST, whatever that means) sites generally rise to the top.
I also think everyone should be careful in jumping to conclusions about the motivations and intent of others: if you look for the worst you will find it.