Please don’t be lead down his rabbit hole. Drop all engagement with this alcoholic scumbag.

Let him go on prosecuting — until, of course, he switches to the other side.

It wasn’t my intent to imply that having a JD leads one to conservatism; sorry if I misled.

Nah, he’s a Texas guy who grew up playing golf, and then he goes and lives in the most fern-bar, conservative part of LA. Ordinarly I’d say he’s one of those people who’re smart enough on the mechanics but whoe can’t think past the tribal loyalties, but he’s also an infantile little dick, so he doesn’t deserve the credit of putting his problems off to nurture.

Hey now. I have a JD and I feel absolutely no such affinity. Believe me, there are plenty of lawyers out there who actually understand the importance of logic and context/relevance.

DRJ: Almost. I agree with 1 and 2. Three and 4 are kind of orthogonal to the point I think I’m trying to make. I’m more interested in what looks like a hasty conclusion, if not an outright error of logic, in Malkin’s work, and the “left” and “right” blogospheres talking at cross-purposes about it. But for the record, I do agree with 3, and share your uncertainty about the issue in square brackets. Point 4 and the ‘Jamil Hussein was a credible source because…’ is a too firm a conclusion for my liking, simply because I think that we would have to cover a lot more ground to get that far. I might venture ‘Jamil Hussein was not a non-credible source because…’, but what I mean by that needs elaboration.

First, if it’s not fresh in your mind, reread Malkin’s article. Recall that this is her response after her first charge, that Jamil is not credible because he doesn’t exist, had been refuted my the MOI. I think its fair to say that this article is a defence of her reputation.

Note two things in the article. First, that her article is titled “DESTROYED – NOT”, which implies that the issue of them being “not destroyed” is pretty important to her argument. This is supported by the content, where she (1) attributes that specific error to Hussein, and (2) interprets the fact that they are “still standing” with respect to his credibility. To quote her opening paragraph:

… at least one story [Jamil] told the AP just doesn’t check out: The Sunni mosques that as Hussein claimed and AP reported as “destroyed,” “torched” and “burned and [blown] up” are all still standing. So the credibility of every AP story relying on Jamil Hussein remains dubious.

Now, let’s try some hypotheticals, incrementally stripping back from the hypothetical that would best support Michelle’s position, and see what we could reasonably conclude at each level. Here I’m only interested in one question: is it fair to attribute “destroyed” to Jamil? It seems like a good place to start, considering it’s prominence in her article. Amongst these hypotheticals, you should be able to recognise the questions that I put to Patterico.

Let’s start with the best case for Michelle, that somewhere there’s an article that says “Jamil said the mosques were destroyed”. If that were the case, I would concede that Michelle has a very good point, congratulate her for being so observant as to pick up the error, even risking her own life going to Iraq to set the record straight.

Now let’s pretend that we find no such clear statement, but we do find instances where Jamil is quoted as a source in the same report that uses “destroyed” to describe the mosques. I would say that Michelle has good reason to attribute “destroyed” to Jamil, and that the AP has some explaining to do. I would again concede my error, and leave it at that.

Let’s go another step, and imagine that “destroyed” is not only not attributed to Jamil, but that the word appears in reports before Jamil was quoted as a source. As far as I can tell, this we where we stand now. Is it possible that Jamil was the source for “destroyed” in the first version, but wasn’t named? Well they named him later on, so that seems like an odd thing to do*. It seems more likely that “destroyed” came from some other, an earlier source*. On its own, this doesn’t seem like enough evidence linking Jamil and “destroyed” to make it the centrepiece of a NYP article. If this case didn’t have the history it did, I think I wouldn’t be the only one to say it was a strange thing for Michelle to jump on, especially without some other supporting evidence linking Jamil to “destroyed”.

We’ve got limited resources, but one piece of evidence that would support him being the source for “destroyed” is if AP continued using “destroyed” after talking to him. At the very least, it suggests that he didn’t dispute or clarify that description*. Then we would be back at one level above. However, if the opposite happened, if the word “destroyed” disappeared after he was sourced, wouldn’t that support the idea that Hussein was not the source for the word “destroyed”, and may have in fact corrected the record as later sources often do*? If that were the case, then Michelle would be on dubious ground. Given the WaPo follow-up, it’s not an unreasonable question.

Now I know you Yanks don’t like people that admit their uncertainties, as the leaders you choose for yourselves suggests :), but that’s not my style. So here’s some potential holes in my argument that I think deserve attention.

First, I arrived to this party pretty late in the game, and have spent nowhere near the time that you guys have. It’s entirely possible that the answers to the questions I put to Patterico are not only widely-known, but answer in a way that totally supports Michelle’s argument. Believe it or not, that’s exactly why I crossed the aisle to ask someone on the “right”. You have every incentive to reply “duh, stupid liberal” and show me where I got it wrong. And I want you to. I need that test, at the very least, before I feel comfortable even beginning to assert the kind of arguments that I have sketched above. So I eagerly await an answer to my questions.

Second, I’m not a journo, and my occupation is as far from opinion-writer as you can get. Consequently, I don’t know for certain how to interpret changes in the raw feed. The WaPo says that the feed “was updated several times as more information became available”, and that’s how I’ve interpreted it, but I’ve also indicated it where it comes in with a ‘*’ above.

Finally, I’m aware that at its extreme, my narrative implies that Michelle desperately stitched together a flimsy argument to defend herself from the humiliation of getting the Jamil story completely wrong. This is an inflammatory thing to say, and I’d want a lot of evidence before making a claim like that. Like the AP, I’m a little perplexed by why she fixated on this, which makes me all the more wary. On the other hand, if I’m right, then her own NYP article says something about “Imad al-Hasimi” that makes me very nervous. Given that this is even a possibility, I’d expect a much more conservative approach to her work than she seems to apply; certainly more than an insignificant microbe like me would use.

Just one thing worries me, though. Do you think he might do a Google and discover what my name means? Considering that I called him “Patty”, if he starts calling me “elf-nerd”, I fear that I will have no choice but to endure it.

I say this not to defend him or anyone else. I just think he behaves in something closer to advocate mode online than he may in real life, and is really not as stupid as he sometimes sounds. I’m not sure that makes any difference, especially considering his obsession with outing and clan-denial (classic crap from criminal attorneys that attack symptom and not cause), but at least he’s not dumb.

Deal lots of dope in Patterico’s jurisdiction. This guy couldn’t get a cup of coffee right.

p.s. Don’t get a suntan or a beard. It’s all gravy afterward.

MC Rhizome in the S,N! rhizouse!

Townhall quotes the report containing the word “destroyed”, and says that “There are no links because I got these off the raw AP wire”, implying that the report containing the word “destroyed” didn’t make it off the raw wire. This implication is incorrect, but given that the point of the Townhall article wasn’t focused on the issue of the word “destroyed”, let alone whether or not it made it off the raw wire, one assumes it was an accidental oversight.

Meanwhile Malkin Thing uses the misreport that the mosques were “destroyed” as an argument undermining Jamil Hussein’s credibility, saying “Hussein claimed and AP reported as destroyed, torched and burned and [blown] up are all still standing”. This issue with the word “destroyed” attributed Jamil also features in her blog posts on the matter. When provoked by Sadly No regarding the importance of the word “destroyed”, she directs them to the Townhall website.

Sadly No reads the Townhall website, and is told two things by it. First, that the word “destroyed” appeared in only the first raw wire report, and its removal coincided with Jamil’s report. This undermines Malkin Thing’s arguments above. Second, that the first report never made it off the raw wire into a proper article. Sadly No repeats this latter is an error in their response, but note that it is the first observation is the one that matters here, even if the second gives it that extra snicker-value.

Patty reads Sadly No, and the snickering provokes him to not-so-politely try to correct their error. However – and this part doesn’t make a lot of sense to me – rather than correcting their error by simply pointing to an article containing it on the web, thus demonstrating that it had in fact made it off the raw wire and to the general public, he takes a screen shot of the raw feed (?) in Lexis-Nexis, adding “The cited story is not on the Web…”.

Given that Patty hadn’t actually undermined Sadly No’s cause for snickering, but seemingly supported it, their response is as you’d expect.

Patty responds again, but this time he actually points to websites that have cut-and-paste the first raw story, correcting the error Sadly No was repeating from Townhall. Note however that this contradicts his earlier “the cited story is not on the web”, which is why the reasoning behind his responses don’t make much sense to me.

In response to Patty, Sadly No admits the error, but reminds readers out that the point of the argument — that the word “destroyed” is not attributable to Jamil and may in fact have been corrected by his report — remains. We now await Patty’s response with baited breath.

Although I’m enjoying this comedy of errors, I fear that the much-needed logic-checking of Malkin Thing’s argument is going to get lost in a morass of side-issues. Even if it finally gets concluded that the word “destroyed” was not sourced from Jamil, or better yet, that he had in fact corrected it, will Malkin Thing ever issue an apology? Will her readers ever see the record corrected? This reversal of the right-wing narrative against AP is the punchline of this black comedy. Hail Eris.

on this side, we just laugh at idiots while easily refuting their bullshit.

anyway, every second we allow human scum like malkin and patterico (and dude, i hope you try to prosecute me someday, hell it makes me want to commit a crime in his district just to fucking go up against the guy) to have any oxygen, we forget…

what. oh, that a family today in iraq lost its son, its daughter, its brother, the love of its life. that an american soldier lost a limb today, maybe two, and his life is fucked. i let my hate bleed out here at lamentable, no!, but i can’t help it–i so loathe these hateful picayune motherfuckers its hard not to want to leap through the computer and…(well, you’ve all played half life or halo, right? i’m thinking rocket launcher, though a good plasma weapon always works)

real human lives are destroyed EVERY GODDAMN day in Iraq. people i know. people i don’t. people i wish i knew. people i could love, people i could hate. and every day michelle malkin spews poison. i think unhappily, notsomuch needs to do a bit of a rethink. the snark has been spewed, and to be honest,

we’ve jumped the snark.

mikey

David E., you called him a “fucking liar”.

Not to mention a “low-life fascist shill “

You were trying to get banned, and you succeeded. Now you can tell others how mean Patterico was to you.

Let’s send Malkin back to make sure the ground is level. It’s safe to that assume not even she would say a crater makes the headline wrong, right?

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