Wuzzadem (good riddance to bad rubbish) is making a big deal over a recent exchange between Bob Woodward and Bradford Berenson, a former associate counsel to the president.
Basically, Woodward calls Berenson on the Bush Administration’s notorious, creepy secrecy about its decision-making process. Berenson replies by saying that it’s no different from what the media does when it uses unnamed sources, also dropping Richard Armitage’s name for the zing-factor.
Then Wuzzadem goes, “BWAHAHA! Pwn3d!” Then one of Pasty’s dogsbodies goes, “Woodward got his nads kicked in!” And on and on.
Listen, morons. The difference is that you can turn off the evening news. You can’t turn off your taxes.
Tellingly, liberals would prefer to spread distortions about a so-called “destroyed” mosque that was merely firebombed and blown up, while “conveniently” ignoring that CBS. Has. Footage. Of. Dead. Iraqi. Soldiers. That. Also. Appears. In. An. Al-Qaeda. Video.
TBizzle points us to this fine interview transcript between Hugh Hewitt and Terry McAuliffe. Pope Hugh predictably asks Terry how he can be both a Catholic and pro-abortion rights:
HH: But I mean, you often cite Catholic doctrine in this book, and yet you support late term abortions, and judges who impose them on people. […] Is that teaching optional, Terry McAuliffe?
TM: Is what teaching optional?
HH: The Church’s teaching on the sanctity of life?
TM: Hey, listen, I have my views on my religious beliefs, Hugh, you’ve got yours.
Terry, being a cheesebag waffler, dodges the question somewhat. The simple answer to Hugh’s question is, “My religious beliefs in no way dictate what should and should not be illegal. I’m not a big fan of lying, committing adultery or disrespecting your parents, but I don’t think anyone should go to jail for those things. We don’t live in a theocracy, Hugh.”
Why oh why aren’t Democrats snappier with their talking points?
The Case for Outing Jamil?
I’m presenting working on what will likely be my last post on the Jamil Hussein/Hurriyah mosque attacks debacle.
No it won’t.
I’ve got some emails out to several sources and the AP itself attempting to tie up loose ends, and I won’t write a final draft until those addressed have a reasonable amount of time to respond.
I did, however, have one question I addressed to all of those I queried, that I’d like to ask my readers as well:
Should I “out” Jamil, revealing his real, full, and complete name?
Let’s see.
Pros:
Real, full, and complete name of controversial Iraqi police captain is interesting item of trivia
This might be a hard decision to make, but we’ll certainly help in any way we can.
I’m generally quite opposed to the concept of outing. Interestingly enough, this is the entennial of outing as practiced by the leftist press. It is typically used typically to attack politicians for their sexual preferences, but occasionally to hurt celebrities as well. According the Wikipedia entry on outing linked above:
Gabriel Rotello, once editor of OutWeek, called outing “equalizing”…
If outing is an acceptable method of equalizing the gay and the straight, can’t it also be applied to “equalize” claims made by the honest and dishonest?
In other words, he’s generally quite opposed to the concept of ‘outing’ unless an excuse can be conjured from an authoritative text such as Wikipedia.
Above: An example of Wikipedia’s rigorous sourcing policy
Jamilgate, that is. They get their wingnut welfare checks at the beginning of the month, and BLAMMO! it’s straight to the dealer on the corner for more.
Above: Confederate Yankee as he appears in ‘Faces of Jamilgate’*
He shoots! He scores! Great work, Bob. I excerpted and linked. That makes 45 posts in my Jamilgate series now.
Obsessed a little, Bill?
Anyway, 45 posts ain’t shit. Why, we know guys who have, like, hundreds of composition books completely filled with tiny, cramped writing on Jamil Hussein, all stashed in their creepy, “Seven”-inspired apartments.
Gavin adds: Remember those Mounds/Almond Joy commercials that were like, “Sometimes you feel like a nut; sometimes you don’t”? These guys have no such self-awareness.
Above: Seconds later the Cardinals jersey — symbol of all that is decent and just in baseball — burst into flames. Fashion/Moral advice for Dear Leader: A Mets jersey is more like what you’re looking for.
Dear Leader knows that everyone else knows he’s stupid. Thus his self-deprecating humor, that old standby defense mechanism:
The Cardinals presented Bush with a team jersey reading “06 Bush.” When La Russa said the date was to remind the president when the team won, Bush asked if the name was so he would “remember who I am.”
Not that it’s all like that. Self-deprecation rapidly transforms to self-aggrandizement and back again:
He turned to World Series MVP David Eckstein and noted that commentators had “said he can’t hit, said he can’t throw.”
“Listen, David, I’ve made a career out of people underestimating me,” Bush said.
Then it’s time to get serious:
Bush added that he had dinner with La Russa in August, during a tough stretch for the team, and afterward remarked to an aide that the Cardinals were going to win the championship because their manager believed they would.
No doubt just like Team Bush is gonna ‘win’ the Irak Championship! ‘Cause the Manager believes! What? Their third-baseman’s been traded, the bullpen’s overworked, the bleachers are empty, the trophy can only be had by playing and winning at another sport, the franchise has been contracted, the stadium’s falling apart? None of it matters! The Manager believes!
With the recent chatter about that long-time bigot, Marty Peretz, many people are belatedly coming to understand that bone-marrow-deep hatred is not confined to Muslim extremists. Welcome to the brave new world of batshit tribalism where Western Fundie Jews hate Middle-Eastern Fundie Muslims and vice-versa, the clock perpetually stopped at sometime in the Middle Ages, each side convinced of the other’s innate wickedness and subhumanity.
Above: According to Wingnuts, only Muslims consider this a potential vehicle of Satan.
But my point is not to go through all that again; rather, I just want to say that Peretz is not unique. Peretz-level bigotry has been the editorial stance at Commentary since the late sixties. And since the eighties, it’s been everywhere in Greater Winguttia — National Review, David Horowitz’s various publications, Weekly Standard, The New York Sun, The New York Post, etc. Patient Zero of the ‘Peretz Affliction’ is not Marty Peretz but Norman Podhoretz; the vector through which the ‘Peretz Affliction’ is spread is not Republicanism or Judaism but neo-conservatism. The ‘Peretz Affliction’ is a pandemic on the Right; close your eyes, point within a crowd of wingnuts and odds are you’ll hit a carrier.
In the wake of my January 25 26 letter to the Board of Directors of the Associated Press concerning the news organization’s inaccurate reporting of the November 24 Hurriyah assault by Shia militias on Sunni mosques–a letter in which I provided to the Board of Directors the real name of AP source “Jamil Hussein”–the official Associated Press web site containing all of AP’s official responses regarding Hurriyah has curiously withdrawn the January 4 article by AP reporter Steven R. Hurst claiming that Jamil Hussein is Jamil Hussein.
A screen capture of the AP web page from January 8 containing the Hurst article is captured here.
A screen capture of the AP Web page, minus the Hurst article, as captured this morning, is online here.
Is the Associated Press beginning a walkback of it’s Hurriyah coverage? If so, quietly attempting to scrub their reporting to date is perhaps not the best way to do so.
Perhaps they should start with a formal retraction acknowledging their comedy of errors.
As I have stated from the very beginning of this debacle, what we are witnessing in action via the Hurriyah scandal and the 39 of 40 AP stories attributed to Jamil Hussein that cannot be corroborated by a rudimentary search of other English-language news organizations of the same events, what we are witnessing is a flawed methodology for gathering the news that places far too much credibility in the words of questionable sources and local stringers with dubious allegiances, and no readily apparent internal mechanism for fact-checking the reports provided.
The advice I issued on December 18 is looking better all the time.
Update: Curt at Flopping Aces notes (via email) that while the AP has scrubbed the one file linked above where AP has been consolidating their Hurriyah reporting, they still have the Hurst claim posted here. Don’t worry… if they attempt to scrub that, I have a screen capture of that page, as well.
Update: By the way… notice anything funny about the image used by AP in their “Freedom of Information” section? It appears to be a photo of terrorist detainees at Guantanemo Bay.
Does the Associated Press consider capturing terrorists a violation of AP’s freedom of information?
It certainly does not apply to Jamil Gulaim XXXXX XX-XXXXXXX, who is presently back at work as an Iraqi police officer.
Update: Confirmed. The picture was of detainees arriving at Camp X-Ray in 2002.
Update: Linda Wagner, Associated Press Director of Media Relations and Public Affairs, states that the disappearance of the Hurst article is “purely a technical issue.” It has since been restored to the AP web site.
Does anybody here with an IT background want to explain precisely how AP’s “technical issue” would delete just the one post on the page, and not all of the posts on that page? I assume it could be a technical glitch, but my experience tells me that human involvement is a far more likely culprit.
…Because here’s another thing, while we’re on the subject.
We knew that Brian Preston was going to do this at some point, but we didn’t expect that it would A) be so immediate and so redolent of bedside Jergens lotion, and B) that it would occur in the midst of a post in which (on this of all occasions) he’d start jumping up and down racka-fracking about that bunch of flip-flapping hack-a-frag sack-jabbers at Sadly, No!.
Above: Bryan can’t see that we do it out of love.
Still fresh from his four-day trip to Iraq with Michelle Malkin, Preston makes an early bid for the 2007 Dorothy Parker ‘And That’s When I Shot Myself’ Award for the most dreadedly-anticipated statement in English and related languages (including Grogan). He leans into it by dismissing this Andrew Sullivan post on “a disturbing video showing U.S soldiers watching as their Iraqi Army colleagues — Shia — brutally beat Sunni civilians to near-death, as U.S. soldiers hoop and holler in support”:*
He evidently doesn’t understand that war, including the very war he cheered for so loudly a few years ago, can get ugly at times. People break a nail now and then. They get out of line. They have a bad hair day. They smack a guy around when they probably ought not (though how you scare insurgents straight without physically impressing upon them the error of their ways eludes me at the moment).
True enough. Petty, annoying stuff is just a fact of life. Like sometimes the printer runs out of ink or you beat the crap out of some guys in handcuffs.
But like a steam train down the track, here it comes! Preston continues:
I’m not one to deploy the chickenhawk argument, but there really is something to the notion that unless you’ve seen a thing with your own eyes you may have a hard time understanding it. If you’re writing about a thing as often as Sullivan writes about the war, especially if you spend the bulk of your writings denouncing that thing, it’s irresponsible to stay as far away from that thing as possible. You have to, at some point, examine it for yourself.
To which we can only say: Prost! [shots of vodka downed in unison, simultaneous crossings-off from lists of the item, ‘Bryan Preston, solon of Persia, dispenses weary advice to the home-fronters.’]
Did Preston’s plane even touch down on the tarmac before he started trying to dine out on his epic four-day junket to Iraq? Sully doesn’t know what goes down in the ‘Raq, man, he doesn’t understand war. He doesn’t know! But Bryan was there, man. He was there!
We promised not to make fun of Malkin as a kitchen-table Clausewitz anymore if she actually went on patrol in Iraq. Word is bond, and that goes for Presto too. But dear God, man, don’t test us like this!
Meanwhile, Bradrocket has dealt with Malkin’s ‘debunking’ of our debunking of her ‘debunking’ of all things Jamil Hussein. As for Preston’s ‘rebuttal’ of our rebuttal (etc. etc.)… Fuck, do I really have to? [sighs] Oh, alright then.
See, Bryan, the mistakes that you and Michelle made in your investigation of the AP burning-mosques story were common mistakes. I think the easiest way for me to illustrate this is to reconstruct the process that led so snowballingly to Michelle’s declaration to the AP (and to the world), “hehe we’re in yr base killing yr jameel hoosaynz!!!!1!” — a declaration which portends much discomfort to herself and to yourself before at last God’s trumpet sounds calling all souls to judgement, and also thereupon and subsequently.
D’Souza on da mic: “Why is everybody always pickin’ on me? ‘Cause I’m from America, but got the-ocracy like Kho-mei-ni?”
Geez, what’s the fuss? All I’m arguing is ‘Jihad vs. McWorld‘ except for that part where, cleverly, I’ve changed the definition of ‘McWorld’ to only mean ‘Western social liberalism,’ neener neener.
Had Iraq clearly been on the path of becoming a free, peace, non-theocratic representative republic, the GOP would have been in the majority today (in my opinion), missteps by Republicans in Congress notwithstanding. The fault for the embarrassing loss last November can be squarely laid at the feet of George W. Bush.
I’m with ya so far, Chuck.
Because of his substandard performance on Iraq for the past three-plus years, I became a Dissatisfied. What’s more, after considering the cumulative effects of all of his other un-conservative actions, I’m at a point where I’ve pretty much lost confidence in Bush as even a semi-competent commander-in-chief.
You’re about six years too late, but OK.
This isn’t an easy conclusion to come to because I’ve carried Bush’s water on a whole range of issues over most of his six years in office.
You don’t say.
Now here comes the comedy:
But despite my skepticism of the president, I do support Bush on the Petraeus plan to turn Iraq around, but under one condition: that al-Maliki be reasonably committed to it.
In other words, “Bush has made me look like a complete bloody fool for the past six years, but I think he really means it when he says he’ll start treating me better this time.
Tellingly, the pathetic, attempted debunker fails to link to either my post at mm.com or my full report at the NYPost, which give the full details and nuance (plus more photos) of what we found versus what the AP reported (and didn’t report). There is now an all-too-predictable attempt to distort our reports. Read. Them. In. Their. Entirety. For. Yourselves.
Deal.
Gavin adds: Criminy, it’s that certain tone of voice which has by now become so familiar. I want to pop in here for a moment to respond to a charge levied by Bryan over at Hot Air:
I see that our friends at Sadly, No! can’t distinguish between a mosque having a hole in an onion-shaped thing on top and that mosque being destroyed, as the AP reported on Nov 24. That failure to distinguish between such widely varying descriptions should guide you if you read anything else published there.
Above: A mosque being destroyed hole in an onion-shaped thing.
WELL, the Iraqi Ministry of Interior says disputed Associated Press source Jamil Hussein does exist. But at least one story he 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.
So Michelle’s main claim here is that these mosques were not “burned” or “torched” or “blown up” (incidentally, I couldn’t find any version of the AP report where it specifically said the mosques were “destroyed.” If anyone can find one, please leave a linky to it in the comments). Just keep that in mind when you read this later in her piece:
One of the mosques identified by the AP, the Nidaa Alah mosque, had been abandoned and vacant at the time it was hit with small-arms fire, say Iraqi and U.S. Army officials. Two of its inside rooms were burned out by a lobbed firebomb, according to an Army report.
Three other mosques in the area - the al Muhaymin, al Mushahiba and Ahbab Mustafa mosques - sustained small-arms fire damage to their exteriors; the Mustafa mosque also had two rooms burned out by a firebomb.
So other than the small-arms fire damage and the rooms burned out by firebombs, I guess the mosques were in just dandy shape!
It’s official, folks. Joe Lieberman is now a bigger loon than Sam Brownback. Check out their debate this morning on the Senate resoultion condemning Bush’s troop surge:
LIEBERMAN: I fear that while this resolution is non-binding and, therefore, will not affect the implementation of the plan, it will do two things that can be harmful, which is that it will discourage our troops, who we’re asking to carry out this new plan, and it will encourage the enemy, because as General Petraeus said to our committee, war is a test of wills, and you don’t want your enemy to be given any hope.
[snip]
BROWNBACK: I don’t — I don’t see this enemy as needing any more emboldening or getting it from any resolution. They’re emboldened now. I was there two weeks ago in Iraq. I was in Baghdad. I was in northern Iraq. This is a very aggressive situation. You have sectarian violence of Sunni and Shia. I was in the Kurdish area. They were talking about we have to get the Sunni and Shia together. I talked with the head of the Kurdish group. He said he wouldn’t vote for more troops because you have to first force the Sunni and Shia to sit down and talk about a political accommodation and that’s not happening.
I can’t tell if this little exchange has given me newfound respect for Mr. Brownback, or if it has simply flushed my opinion of Mr. Loserman further down the toilet.
Above: Teh GOP drops Lieberman off at the pool
Since my hatred of Joe really can’t get any worse (that’d put him into George W. Bush/George Steinbrenner territory… I don’t hate no one more than those two), I guess this means I have more respect for Mr. Brownback than I did yesterday. Also, I’ve heard he’s done some nice work on the Darfur crisis, so that’s a feather in his cap as well.
Gavin adds: Sam Brownback nickname contest: Sam “Teh Wichita Steamer” Brownback….
